Running a successful company means attending to a multitude of different responsibilities. Products need to be delivered on time. Customer service must be attended to. Suppliers and partners must be dealt with professionally.
However, how it all melds together also matters. This is where company culture comes into play. A strong company culture can pay dividends in regards to a company that runs like a well oiled machine. A toxic company culture, on the other hand, can have exactly the opposite effect and cause problems across the entire organization.
One thing company culture can have a huge impact on is worker productivity. Below are some of the ways how that you should keep in mind if you want to create a more efficient workplace.
People Seek Recognition
One of the results of poor company culture tends to be that employees feel like their contributions to the company don’t matter at all. If there is no effort made to make employees feel like they are appreciated, employees of course will have little reason to put in the strongest effort every day. Instead, they may start slacking off at work. They may spend most of the time they are supposed to be working surfing the net, checking social media updates or anything else non-work related to pass the time. Unmotivated employees cost companies $300 billion a year.
You can’t really blame the employees for this scenario. If it does not matter how much effort they put in regardless, they will naturally take the easiest path. Instead, you have to make effort matter in the workplace. This requires direct feedback on how well an employee is doing. It includes praising employees when they do make the best effort so they feel their contributions matter. It means giving employees goals to strive towards. Research shows that 39 percent of employees don’t feel appreciated at work.
Toxic Culture Can Destroy Morale
If company culture somehow degenerates to the point it becomes toxic, it can have a devastating effect on the morale of your workforce. There are many different ways toxic culture can develop. This can include animosity between different departments. It can mean the employees sensing unfair favoritism in regards to management preferring certain staff members. It can include harassment or bias being tolerated in the workplace. It can include employees who are allowed to grow resentful towards each other until the conflict affects all others around them.
There are many different ways that a company culture can become toxic. When that negativity pervades throughout the culture, you can expect bad things to happen. Employees will go to work only to look at the clock until they go home. Employees will grow antagonistic against the company, customers and managers. You will have high turnover. You may even get him with lawsuits from disgruntled employees. Such a lawsuit could cost your company up to $250,000 on average.
Overall, it’s always a good idea to get a handle on your company culture to prevent problems before they become bigger organization-wide issues.
Employees Need Direction
Another problem with company culture occurs when employees feel they don’t have strong direction from upper management regarding what is expected of them. Instead, the company’s mission statement should make it clear exactly what the end purpose of the company is. This should be reinforced by managers who help direct employees towards efforts to meet goals in line with that mission statement. From time to time, some strategy clarification may be required. Overall, employees need to know what goals they are working towards.
Lack of productivity in the workplace is an extremely serious problem that costs the business world billions of dollars a year. There are many contributing factors to this serious problem, but one of the biggest regards issues with company culture. Make sure you have a positive company culture that helps to give employees direction and make them feel like their effort matters.
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