How To Influence Company Culture Through Leadership

Building a strong organizational culture is essential for increasing employee satisfaction and driving your bottom line. While many aspects of company culture are influenced by policy and general work environment, a lot of it goes back to your overall leadership strategy and its effectiveness.

The Value of Positive Company Culture

Having a positive organizational culture can help you build a stronger business in many ways. Some benefits include:

  • More engaged employees — Employees like to know they are valued by their leadership. Making efforts to build relationships with your team members and understand their needs can help drive numerous other positive effects.
  • A healthier workforce — Understanding your workforce also gives you the tools you need to create a more balanced work environment for them. Supporting employees to have a healthy relationship with work can help them feel better mentally, improve productivity, and encourage them not to miss work.
  • Higher retention rates — Learning to adapt to the needs of your workforce helps them feel noticed, appreciated, and needed. This is a rarity in most work environments, which encourages team members to stick with an employer who actually cares.
  • Better productivity — The above-mentioned benefits help improve workplace productivity in a lot of ways. Higher engagement keeps team members motivated, while having a healthy work/life balance gives them the clarity of mind to get more done in less time.
  • More profit — While having a positive company culture does a lot to help employees, ultimately it benefits your bottom line as well. Better productivity can help drive more profit. Higher retention rates also mean you need to invest less in recruiting and training new employees. Better customer service can lead to more sales and higher loyalty. All of this results in more profits for your business.

How To Influence Organizational Culture Through Leadership

Your style of leadership has a big impact on employee work performance and the overall culture of your organization. In a positive company culture, employees feel appreciated. As a leader, you need to invest in employee success by making efforts to show appreciation. Examples include rewarding team members for work achievements, career milestones, and more.

Leaders should also encourage a healthy sense of community in the workplace. Build a community that positions coworkers as peers working together towards work goals. Help employees create strong support systems by hosting activities and events that aren’t necessarily geared towards work tasks.

As a leader, you can encourage employees to adopt organizational values by helping them set goals, offering opportunities for growth, and recognizing achievements. Meanwhile, leaders who set vision and value statements then leave it up to middle management to instill them rarely succeed in building the organizational culture they want.

Taking an active role in helping people grow and develop makes success much easier. Take the time to have one-on-one sessions with your team members and leave your door (virtual and physical) open for more discussions and feedback between you and them. Maintaining a healthy dialogue with employees can help you better understand their needs as well as give you numerous opportunities to reinforce organizational values to them.

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