The purpose of your company culture is not entirely about having happy employees; it’s also about strategy, and happy employees is often a positive by-product. Company culture should be focused on getting the most revenue, not on making sure all the employees love their jobs. Again, happy employees often helps to optimize revenues, but the culture should not be focused on creating happy workers, but instead on building revenue quickly and steadily. So as a leader or entrepreneur, think about making sure employees are productive first.
Productivity Isn’t Just the Culture
Building a company that maximizes productivity means that many aspects should be considered. In dealing with employees, some of those would include compensation, career path, perks of the job, and the company culture. The strategy you put in place in dealing with the people in your organization is equally as important as the strategy you put in place for the service or product you provide.
Strategy for both people and products needs to be well planned and not only should it focus on all that can and should be done, but also on what should not be done, as well as what markets not to chase. The most successful strategies are tightly focused on who they want to reach, what they want to offer, and how to best present that. Equally true, it should be just as precise in dealing with staff and leaders within the company.
Things to Consider
Professional firms such as PR agencies, law firms, and doctor’s offices don’t usually have a “fun” or “happy” office culture. Instead if you start work at a PR firm, you will quickly understand that the hours are long and often the work-life balance is skewed heavily to the work side of that equation. However, the same types of working environments also tend to promote faster or workers shift from one company to another more frequently to climb the ladder. Also, at some firms where creativity or technology are core to what the company does, employees may work long hours, but other perks are there – allowing employees to bring their pets to the office, work from home frequently, and “play” rooms in so that when workers need to take a break, they don’t have to travel far, and can get back to work faster.
For customer service-based companies, employees are often under a great deal of stress and there is no ability to just shut down and let off steam during the work day. As a company, the employees they want are ones who are driven to perform at their highest levels and enjoy working under pressure.
Tech companies that are innovative in what they do and the products they create, tend to function better when employees have many chances to “play.” Setting up workstations that allow employees to walk on a treadmill, or scooters and skateboards to use as they move around an open and large work space may be great ideas. Lots of bright colors and “thinking” toys everywhere, as well as open work stations allowing for free flow of conversation and exchange of ideas also may be integrated into the company culture to improve productivity.
Be Aware of Changes
Culture should be established to promote productivity and sometimes the nature of an industry or individual organization may change who they serve and what they offer. In those cases, the culture should be reviewed to make necessary changes to support the new goals for productivity.
How has company culture been strategized for your organization?
