In business, the culture that entrepreneurs create for their employees is a determinate of long term success. The benefits of a productive culture include easier employee recruitment, worker loyalty, and harder working employees. A culture where there are no regulations and slackers are not discouraged will lead to an unserious environment that results in low production. In contrast, a culture where the employees are restricted greatly discourages dialogue between management and the lower-rank workers. This causes an increase in low-quality work because the employees are dissatisfied. The following sections will help you develop a productive culture in your own business.
Assign Competent and Charismatic Management
A business only grows as much as its leadership allows. Thus, it is crucial to find both competent and charismatic management. Companies with a majority of highly skilled, yet introverted management will have troubles with inner-company dialogue and lower-level employee inclusion. While this may not be the intention, introverted executives discourage company-wide transparency. A lack of transparency is a businesses worst nightmare as posses are formed, the quality of production steadily decreases, and feedback is no longer civil. Ideal management will also have a clear vision for their company’s future. A strong vision that is the basis for everything the employees work for gives a company-wide sense of job security. This will incentivize loyalty to even the most skilled workers within a company as they will have the opportunity to be apart of a dedicated, future-oriented business.
Don’t Overreact To Failure
In every company in the existence of time, there are always ups and downs financially. What good does it do to terminate the contract of a salesperson who couldn’t sell your most expensive product to a large corporation? Instead of firing the salesperson, review his mistakes along the way and, address them through training and practice. Unless failure becomes a repeated occurrence due to one worker’s lack of effort or competency, failure is what makes or breaks even the biggest companies. Those companies who constantly fire under-performing employees have an uneasy culture that does not promote loyalty due to low job security. Those who embrace failure, learn from their mistakes, and actively attempt to fix the issue will recover from even the most catastrophic mishap. Building this growth environment allows for companies to progress as a group and develop great leaders.
Incentivize Success
Whether through stock in the company or performance-based bonuses, employees must be interested in the growth of the company. Employees who do not acquire any money from company success will become disinterested in growing the company. Instead, the unrewarded employee will put forth low effort in their work and will worry only about retaining their position. Bonuses and stock also encourage loyalty because the workers are a) earning more money and b) losing out on earned money if they leave before receiving their equity or bonus check. This newly found loyalty and improved work ethic will help tie together the company through hard work and the company will likely grow (assuming they are offering a valuable product).
Ultimately, a company needs to start with a good founder and management that are willing to run their company more like a democracy than autocracy. If all opinions are valued, everyone will feel as though they are apart of their company’s journey. Slowly, valuable relationships will start to develop throughout the company, and employees will treat the company as a second family. If this is combined with celebrated successes and failures that provided a great lesson, then the company will quickly develop a culture that employees are willing to work hard for. To put it succinctly, a company with growth values experience massive growth.
