If you’re paying attention to workplace trends, you’ve undoubtedly heard the phrase ‘company culture’ thrown around a lot. However, it takes work to make sure that it’s not just a buzzword in your organization.

How can you establish and maintain a positive organizational culture? What does that look like, in both theory and practice? What role will assessments play in that culture? Let’s find out.

Why is Creating a Positive Organizational Culture Important?

Workplace culture impacts every aspect of an organization, including employee performance, engagement, productivity, and retention. It’s more than your team's daily moods; it’s your values, the way employee development and feedback are handled, and the communication choices made by your leadership.

Research shows that more than half of the surveyed employees were willing to go to a competing firm in search of a better culture. 48% said they would even consider working a 60-hour week in exchange for a better culture.

Why are so many employees still looking for a positive work culture? It simply means that many organizations are missing the mark. They’re either ignoring culture in favor of extending resources into profit, rather than people, or they’re not understanding exactly how to create a positive team culture.

Company culture affects everything about the employee experience and can make or break the levels of stress workers feel. Research shows that stress and anxiety affect workers’ productivity and coworker relations more than anything else, and 83% of US workers suffered from work-related stress in 2019. Clearly, something isn’t working.

How is Positive Organizational Culture Created?

The benefits are clear, but what exactly does building a positive team culture look like? You can’t just throw flashy perks like unlimited PTO or remote work options at your team and call it good company culture (especially since many teams now fully embrace remote work as the norm, not the exception to the rule). 

Here are a few of the elements you need to nail down:

Create a Strong Work/Life Balance

Increasingly, we’re seeing the attitude around work culture changing. Many people, especially members of Gen Z who are entering the workforce in multitudes, work to live instead of living to work. They want to pursue side gigs, creative projects, and their social lives, and leave work at the office.

It’s unrealistic for an organization to expect its employees to drop everything to work overtime and during non-traditional hours unless this is specified in their job roles and compensated accordingly. 

Provide Excellent Benefits

If you’re not taking care of your team, you won’t get full engagement. It’s as simple as that. How can someone push themselves to innovate when they’re worried about providing for sick family members? Will they be able to communicate well when they’re ill, but afraid to call out?

Organizations need to understand that the modern worker needs solid health care, paid time off, and family leave as a starting place for benefits.

Develop Transparent Communication

Your organization needs to build trust if you want to really create a positive organizational culture. This can be done through frequent and honest communication between leaders, direct reports, and teammates.

Try to meet regularly as an entire organization and share the larger vision of the company. Establish honesty as a company value (more on that in a moment!) and encourage truthful feedback about leadership from entry-level employees.

Ensure managers have established a cadence for one-on-ones and conversations with their direct reports and offer the possibility of ‘skip levels’, which are meetings between a direct report and their boss’s boss.

Focus on Employee Development

It’s not enough for a business to hire and pay a worker. Top talent wants their organizations to invest back in them, in exchange for their time and expertise.

70% of employees would be at least somewhat likely to leave their current organizations and take a job with one known for investing in employee development and learning. Focusing on employee development helps retain your current team while attracting top talent at the same time. 

One way to focus on employee development is to create a coaching program based on scientific behavioral research and skills enhancement. By fully understanding an individual’s behavioral style and motivation, you can tailor a development plan to match their goals and preferences. Use assessments to understand where they excel and where they have opportunities to grow, and create their development plan accordingly.  

Live Out Your Values

When was the last time you thought about your company values? How are those values communicated to your employees? If your answer is through a poster on the wall, you’re not on the right track.

Your values should be something known and enforced through the daily behavior of your leaders, which will lead to the same behavior in employees. Is your company focused on giving back to the community? What does your brand value? What does your organization fight for? Answering those questions and thinking about how to reflect that with behavior goes a long way in creating a positive work environment.

Knowing how to create a positive organizational culture is key for organizations that want to thrive. By providing employees with the things they need, like benefits, development, assessment tools, and an emphasis on organizational values, you will be in a great position to create the kind of organizational culture that gets people excited and engaged. 

If you want to use assessments in your organization’s employee development, TTI can help.