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Developing your Company Culture - Fleximize

Developing your Company Culture

What should you watch out for when fostering company culture?

By Emma Meakin

When you set up a new business or are trying to grow you current one, it is key to have a vision of your company culture in mind. This can be anything from casual Fridays to an open-door policy, but when creating your culture you need to ensure you promote the positives and stop the negatives before they become entrenched.

Backbone of a business

Teamwork is the backbone of a successful company, so be wary of employees putting their personal goals above the smooth functioning of their team, this can affect the business’ overall cohesion. You need to ensure that your culture reflects a positive teamwork model where team-orientated goals are put before personal goals. When someone is putting their own goals before those of the company, it can not only generate friction but also affect the functioning of the company.

Encourage responsibility

While having a clear management structure is essential, a culture of dependency is a barrier to development. When employees constantly pass responsibility up to the layer above them, the result is an erosion of innovation and accountability. Some attitudes and behaviours have a toxic effect on a company, so it is important to spot these before they become problematic if you are trying to foster company culture.

Caring culture

Finally, employees need to genuinely care about their work for a company to be successful. ‘Clock-watching’ is a real problem as it can damage productivity and dampen innovation. It’s healthy for employees to maintain a work-life balance, but if you feel productivity is low and many employees are not committed to their work, you might have to do some digging to find out the cause for this.