‍If there was one word to describe your organizational culture what would it be? Connected? Motivating? Progressive? Innovative? Or is it more Siloed? Toxic? Outdated? And Stressful?

Building a strong organizational culture can be a difficult task for small-medium sized businesses (SMBs) – whether you are experiencing growth or facing challenging times. Building a culture that fits your business model and will help you compete in the digital age is extremely important in providing a memorable customer experience.

Strong Culture

A strong organizational culture can be a competitive advantage for your organization.

It can result in less turnover and a strong sense of pride to work for the organization. Strong culture empowers employees to want to see the organization succeed and put more time and effort into seeing that it does. Strong culture helps your organization to build its brand and makes it easier to find strong talent when looking to fill new roles and grow your business.

Poor Culture

A poor organizational culture can do just the opposite for your organization.

An organization that is siloed, outdated and may have a toxic atmosphere can lead to a high turnover and make it harder to recruit new talent. This can result in a lack of growth for your organization. A poor organizational culture can lead to high stress and is considered the number one health and safety hazard facing workers.

Today, COVID-19 has changed the way many workplaces are operating, requiring many to work from home or risk their safety by continuing to work in essential roles. This contributes to increased stress levels for employees and further emphasizes the importance of ensuring a strong workplace culture.

Where to Start

Building a strong organizational culture starts with creating a strong vision for the company. Creating a clear vision and direction for where the company is and where it wants to go is essential in building a culture that others can get behind. Setting this vision will help your organization to develop a clear business and talent strategy.

Understanding where you want your business to go is essential in defining the type of talent you want to attract. The process of developing and defining your organizations vision should be used as an opportunity to engage with all employees in the organization. Including employees in various job functions in different levels of your organization can ensure that the values developed are wide ranging and are ideas that every area of your organization can believe in.

“Culture is what motivates and retains talented employees.” — Betty Thompson

Attracting and Retaining Talent

Once you have defined the vision and strategy that will drive the organization, you must implement processes to attract and retain talent. Creating standards and guidelines for your hiring practice is essential in hiring the right talent that is a fit for the culture and vision that you have defined.

Finding candidates that are qualified for the role you are filling is great, but how do they add to the culture you are building at your organization?

- Do the candidates prefer to work in teams or on individual projects?
 
- Does that fit with the culture you are trying to build, or does it go against what your organization is doing and how it operates?

- Will this candidate get along with the existing employees in your organization?

These are all questions and considerations that you must make in your hiring decisions. It may result in a longer hiring schedule, but a more diligent, standardized hiring practice can save you time and effort in the future.

Onboarding

Once you have hired the right candidate for your organization, giving them the tools to thrive in your organization’s culture is just as important. Having standard onboarding procedures and an orientation process is important to set standards for employees as they start. Enlisting them in the culture, communicating the vision and showing them how it is executed are vital at this stage. You want your employees to be more than a “fit” for your organization, you want them to be a “value add”.

“Be passionate about the culture and the business, and remain positive because it inspires others.” — Barry Liber

Sustainable Changes

Your organization has implemented these changes and standards, what next? How do you continue to ensure that the organizational culture is following the vision that was laid out?

Using tools such as reward and recognition programs or including cultural measures in performance management programs are key components of this. For example, if a core tenant of your organization’s value system is teamwork, bonuses should be structured around team performance and not individual performance.

Building these tools into your organization's business processes will help to develop a company with a strong culture. Ensuring that reward programs are aligned to the vision of the organization are essential in ensuring the culture is met. Finally, leveraging digital tools to help communicate and engage employees is important. Employees should always be engaged in the development of your organizations culture and feel that they are part of it.

How is your organizational culture? What is your organization's transformation strategy? Is your organization ready to embrace new digital transformation initiatives?

BluePrint provides talent strategies to life science, food processing and many other SMBs in Windsor-Essex, Chatham-Kent, Sarnia, London, Toronto and Montreal. If you want to learn more, set up a Freebie Chat with a strategy consultants today and find out how your business can accelerate its growth.

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