If you’re familiar with us at Insightpath, you know that listening is an important part of what we do. Listening can tell you a lot, it can give you insights about your customers and ways to grow your organization. However, listening shouldn’t end with your customers. Listening to your employees will allow you to grow your business internally and help you create and maintain a successful company culture.
What is Company Culture?
Company culture is the values, behaviors, and shared vision of your organization. A company’s culture is more than just the benefits employees receive, but rather the common vision that everyone at a company works toward. To have a successful company culture, your company values must play out in your employees’ daily behavior.
Everyone in an organization is responsible for the company culture. It begins with the board of directors or management team who defines the desired culture, it is upheld by middle management, and is played out by all employees who align their attitudes with the culture and provide feedback.
Why is Company Culture Important?
Employee happiness and satisfaction is not optional for companies. In order for organizations to attract top talent and retain them, you need a company culture in place that supports employees and motivates them to perform their best. An engaging company culture allows employees to work toward a company’s shared goals, keeping everyone aligned with the organization’s mission.
What Do Your Employees Want?
If you’re unsure what your employees want when building or maintaining a company culture, all you have to do is ask. Listening to and acting on employee feedback is the best way to build a company culture that your employees like. Ask employees what they want their working environment to be like and weave that into your culture plan. Active listening from the top down will give you insight into employee engagement and overall satisfaction.
Collecting employee feedback is something we’re familiar with. We have had great success in building company culture by having annual one on ones with the leadership team and all employees. This gave us a chance to connect with all employees, especially the people that we did not work directly with on a day-to-day basis.
In these meetings, we asked employees how they felt about the company and if there was anything they thought could be done differently. These one on ones were extremely valuable and gave us a chance to form a deeper connection with all employees and strengthened our company culture.
Another way to collect employee feedback is through surveys. While surveys allow you to understand satisfaction across the company, they are not as great for forming strong relationships. By asking more open-ended questions you can dive deeper into how they feel and build trust.
Remember that no matter how you collect your feedback, acting on it is key. If you uncover conflict or unhappiness, it is best to address it and make changes. If you act on employee feedback, you earn their trust and they will be more likely to give you feedback again in the future.
At Insightpath, we know that listening to employees and to customers is important for business growth. When you ask for feedback and listen, you often find new answers and perspectives about how to grow. To get started on building better relationships with your employees, contact us at Insightpath to begin your free trial today.
