How to Create a Culture Your Employees Love (from Someone Who Has)

A culture of trust, collaboration and support is not only good for your employees, but it can also have an impact on your bottom line.

I've been fortunate enough to work for some amazing organizations over the years. One of the things that I've noticed is that many of these companies have had very different cultures — some were great, while others were not so great. But regardless of whether they were good or bad, every successful company has one thing in common: They hire amazing people who care about each other and their customers.

The best companies don't just focus on hiring great people; they also make sure that everyone feels like family — from top leadership down to front-line employees.

Creating a healthy and productive environment isn't easy. Knowing how to measure and improve workplace culture isn't easy either. But it's worth your effort. And I believe that when you do the work to create a healthy environment and focus on hiring great people, your business will thrive.

So, how did I create a culture that people love? The truth is, I didn't do it alone, and neither can you. It took a lot of hard work, trial and error, and help from my colleagues. I also had to learn how to measure the effectiveness of our culture and make adjustments as needed. So I'll share how we did it — and how you can do it too.

We embraced our own product which is a Culture Intelligence? suite. After all, if we are going to offer it as a product and service to others then it should at least be able to work for us first. Sending compliments is where we started as this created an environment of positivity and recognition. We found that anonymous compliments had a far greater effect on people than when it was clear who the compliment was from. The feeling of having to thank someone, or return the compliment was removed which created a healthier way to send recognition to colleagues.

Once the teams were embracing recognition we introduced our Engage product which enables people to connect via a video chat within the Listen Léon mobile application. Think facetime on steriods!

The point of the video meetings is to find out more about the people you work with. This is achieved by question cards on the screen during the connection. The questions can go deep and are designed to get people interacting. We usually set a five minute timer on meet ups and when the timer ends, so does the meet up. The results were astounding! People were getting to know each other on a much deeper level which created a camaraderie like I have never seen before in more than 20 years of work.

What I realized is that people want to connect with one another! They want to feel like they are not alone in their struggles and find out more about who they work with. The question cards are designed to get people talking, laughing and sharing stories of their lives. It’s amazing what can come out of a simple conversation.

Once we rolled out our strengths module in-house things really moved on to the next level. We had a complete understanding of the strengths of our organization. What makes people tick, what the key strengths were of the people that had the greatest positivity on our workplace culture. As part of the strengths module, we have an e-learning library which is designed to develop the strengths of those that need it. We have since become much more aligned to one another and a team that has evolved and developed together. It's truly wonderful when you see it in motion!

Our company culture has become a lot more positive, and we have had a lot less conflict. Our people are more engaged and we have a team that is working together to achieve the same goals. It's an ecosystem of positivity that we never could have imagined before using our platform.

I could go on as we have since added more features that benefit our people but I think it best for you to experience them for yourself. The first step for you to take on your culture journey is to book a demo with me today. No obligation, just a chat about where you are now and where you would like to get to.