5 Strategies to a Healthy Organizational Culture

Is your company culture healthy?  Employee health is not just about the physical body and employers should take a look at their company culture to see if it aligns with their health and wellness focus.  Let’s look at five strategies for promoting a healthy organizational culture.

1. Eliminate Culture Killers: Start with the Sacred Cows and Bullies.  These can be the untouchables in your company that get away with treating others poorly because of their sales record or their relationship to the owner.  Keeping someone on the team that doesn’t treat their coworkers with dignity and respect just because they have great sales numbers doesn’t breed a healthy culture.  Once that negative influence on the team is removed, other employees will feel relieved and will demonstrate less signs of workplace stress.
2. Promote WIFM: What’s In It For Me? Give your team reasons to be engaged and committed to your organization.  Provide career development opportunities by outlining a career path and training plan to support it.  Sponsor a mentoring program for seasoned employees to mentor others and share their knowledge.  Get creative with out-of-the-box benefits such as on-site yoga, on-site daycare, student loan repayment incentives, etc.  Identify someone on the team that has a creative passion that they’d like to share with others and allow them to use your space to demonstrate or teach that craft as a team building activity.
3. Be Flexible: Workplace flexibility is fast becoming more important to job seekers than a company that offers the highest starting pay.  Consider flexible scheduling, job sharing, remote working, giving more time off instead of cash incentives, or flex the dress code.  There are lots of creative ways to be flexible and still run your business and service your customers.  Ask your employees what flexibility means to them and pull together a team to create flexible options for your consideration.
4. Seek Feedback and Foster Inclusion: Culture is driven by employee engagement and engagement is fueled by employees feeling like their voice is heard and included in decision making.  Start with the newest employees and solicit their feedback during the crucial 30, 60- and 180-day checkpoints.  Follow up annually with all-staff engagement surveys, then do something with the results!  Give employees opportunities to be part of work teams and committees that are meaningful and allow them to feel valued in their contributions to the organization.  Consistent and regular communication from leadership to the team is essential in fostering a healthy organizational culture as well.  Employ new methods of employee communication such as texting or quick video clips.  Texts have a 98% open rate to a mere 20% email open rate.
5. Be Fast: Are your internal processes up-to-date?  Is it time to bring your recruitment/hiring/onboarding process into this era?  Employees get frustrated with outdated technology and inefficient processes.  Frustration deteriorates culture.  An unhealthy culture leads to employee stress and increased turnover.  In our fast-paced society the expectation is that things should move fast at work too.   Are your meetings effective or do employees dread them?  Contemplate making meetings virtual or stand-up and stick to an agenda with time boundaries.  Eliminating frustrating processes and constraints will improve the morale and satisfaction of the employees and positively impact the organizational culture.

These five strategies for promoting a healthy organizational culture along with your initiatives to promote their physical health will further your employee engagement and overall employee satisfaction.  Healthy employees and healthy cultures result in healthy companies!