5 Key Tips to Maintain a Strong Corporate Culture

Maining a strong corporate culture can be difficult at the best of times. As businesses have changing staff, growing client bases, increased business growth and changes in management, companies need to find ways to maintain staff happiness and maximize their work experience.

Often, business growth can be a double-edged sword. Despite growth being the goal, it can impact the harmony of an office, for better or worse.

This can happen in any number of ways. From more clients, greater sales, increased pressure, more products traded and more employees. However, there are ways to combat this potential spanner-in-the-works of office harmony. Ways that could make a huge impact on corporate culture.

Increased growth means business goals are being met. But it is important for managers to remember the current internal office culture and how growth affects it.

Small teams are often tight units. Where everyone is comfortable and understanding of each other and their roles. Yet, as organisations scale up, the warmth, openness, and cohesiveness can disappear as more pressure mounts.

So keeping the team harmonious while scaling is important. Particularly as it is common for employees to feel less relevant and fading into the background as more employees arrive or job changes.

Before this happens, it’s always useful for business leaders to hire sensibly. Taking the company and corporate culture into consideration before moving for new talent. Meaning, it’s key that employees continue to experience job satisfaction and recognition for their work.

In this post, we’re going to go over five ways to maintain a strong corporate culture while your business grows.

Send team members on ‘dates’

This is going to sound strange, but understand this is non-romantic with the end goal of a tighter-knit team.

This strategy involves sending two or three people from your team out of the office once or twice a month. Usually, for lunch or a half-hour coffee break, this enables a form of cross-pollination that helps abate cliques, creates personal bonds, and lets team members know one another beyond the day-to-day business setting.

People who like those they work with have a higher propensity of loving their job. So when new hires become a regular thing, integrating a date scenario enables more of your team to get to know each other, what music they listen to, activities they enjoy and to ultimately better understand each other. Making for a more cohesive team with bonds beyond work.

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Clarify and communicate

Clear communication is key to effective management. So there is no surprise that Clear communication is key to effective management. So there is no surprise that good management then leads to a positive corporate culture.

The culture of your business reflects what your organization stands for, in its values, attitudes and beliefs. Therefore, as the voice of your business, your employees are vital to ensuring that it succeeds in effectively communicating the values, attitudes and beliefs and therefore creating the culture.

This means the first step is to clarify what your culture is and then make sure that your employees are on board.

Begin by defining your company values, beliefs, purpose, mission, attitudes and standards. Then continually communicate these through your spoken and written words, and actions. In marketing and advertising, there is a rule that suggests, for a consumer to understand your message, they need to hear it at least seven times.

This can be used for communicating your corporate culture message, too.

Although this is not set in stone, it highlights that culture does not happen overnight or over one conversation. Instead, it’s an ongoing process where it’s discussed and built over time.

Recognize good work

It’s unsurprising that through effective communication, employees provide a higher quality of work. But for those who do excellent work, it’s important to communicate and give recognition as it can elevate performances even further.

By openly acknowledging achievements and high quality of work, you’re empowering employees. Through this, the value employees bring to the business is recognized, encouraging similar work in the future by the whole team.

To the team who witness such recognition, they see not only is great work recognized, but it incentivizes them to level up their work too.

By doing this, you hold up company values and show that quality work is valued highly. For employees, this is an important factor in their work-life, contributing to work satisfaction and the culture of the team.

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Live by example

Leading by example is essential to building and maintaining a strong culture. Leading by example is essential for employees to follow suit.

In this top-down management style, managers and organizational higher-ups need to be on the same page and communicate a consistent message to their teams. This means having a management plan.

The best way to execute this is to set a standard of behaviour and work quality. All the while, showing the times in the office that is for having fun and the times for doing work. Because knowing the times of work and times of play and the balance it strikes in a workforce is important, particularly when new employees come on board.

In short, you need to understand the values and pillars of the company, acting accordingly and living by example.

Invest in new and good leaders

As a business expands and grows, new leadership structures will need to take place. As it can be difficult for one person to manage a whole team, organizational responsibilities, evolving tasks and further business growth by themselves, improving the leadership structure can be a great way to go.

In doing this, a business manager should look to build teams below them with one clear leader who can report to the manager (you).

There are two ways of doing this, either hire externally or promote high-performing employees to leadership positions or across projects or departments. This will take some pressure off of current management leaders. However, it also means departments will be better supported by new management as more visibility goes into existing departments and teams.

In Summary

Before you begin to maintain a strong corporate culture, you need to set parameters of what your corporate culture will look like. So by setting up the structure of your business around the values, attitudes and beliefs, your business will be in the best position to steady the ship, when achieving business growth.

These values, attitudes and beliefs go a long way. Impacting the employees you hire and the actions you and your team make. By implementing the above corporate culture tips, you’ll position yourself to grow in a way, that the harmony of your team is not disrupted. Instead, compounded onto, to make a great culture your business needs.

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