Creating a Positive Culture in Your Workplace

As business owners, we must maintain a positive work environment for our employees and create a unique culture. The culture of your workplace and the teams functioning within it are your business's internal and external identity. When your team culture is positive, the people who make up that team are more likely to reflect your business's core values in their work and will want to show up brilliantly to work each day. But how do you foster a positive work environment and build a strong team culture? It is a question that every business asks themselves, particularly as they expand and grow larger and more successful. We have a few tips you can use to create a great workplace culture as you work through this year.

Ask your employees what they value.

Once you know how your employees feel in their environment, you can support them in your workplace. To do this, you should perform a culture audit, which will give you this information and allow your staff to feel seen, heard, and valued. Employees who feel good about their workplace will be more productive and ultimately exhibit the positive behaviors you want them to have.

Prioritize respect.

Everyone wants to feel respected in the workplace as a professional and a human being. Part of being respectful in a 21st-century workplace includes celebrating diversity. Therefore, it's important to promote inclusive language and create initiatives that prioritize diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. When your employees feel respect, regardless of what level they are working at in the corporate hierarchy, they will want to work to their highest potential each day.

Create a safe space.

There are many ways to create a safe space for your employees beyond making them feel physically safe. They also need to feel psychologically safe to produce the best work possible. Nearly twenty years ago, Google spent two years and enormous amounts of resources studying over 180 teams to determine the answer to the question, "What makes teams successful?" The foundational component that arose from their research was psychological safety. Psychological safety is believing you won't be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. At work, it's a shared expectation held by team members that teammates will not embarrass, reject, or punish you for sharing ideas, taking risks, or soliciting feedback.

To build psychological safety, you want to ensure you offer comprehensive onboarding so that your employees feel confident in what they are being asked to do. All employees should also understand how their team members work and show appreciation for each other's successes. Setting up a recognition system is one way to ensure you are celebrating your employees and modeling how they can best honor their coworkers.

Foster trusting relationships with open communication, feedback, and transparency.

Ensuring that there is trust between your employees and leadership is paramount when it comes to building a positive culture and healthy work environment. As we all know, trust is something that is earned. From our human experience with relationships, we know the highest performing, most enduring, and fulfilling relationships have a foundation of deep trust. The system thrives when we feel safe in a relationship, team, and company to bring our whole selves, strengths, and vulnerabilities and demonstrate the desire and results of our efforts. From the foundation of trust, anything is possible. Trust is built through open communication, continual feedback, and a high level of transparency. Teams function better when there is a high level of trust because communication and feedback can be honest without any team member taking offense. Having open lines of communication with HR is extremely important for employees to feel safe and harkens back to a positive culture stemming from a safe work environment.

Reflect on your leadership.

Culture is built from the top down, so if you struggle with maintaining a positive work environment, you may need to turn inward and reflect on how you are modeling the culture you want to permeate throughout your organization. The way you lead, the values you hold, and the way you show up to work each day will influence your employees, so you want to ensure you represent the best version of yourself every day. Sometimes there needs to be a level of anonymity when you are soliciting feedback about your leadership to help inform the changes you need to make to better the culture you foster in your workplace. Eventually, there should be a high level of trust and transparency so that you can solicit honest feedback from your staff without them needing to be anonymous.

Use your resources.

One classic team book that is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year is The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. Trust is the foundational component in his pyramid of the building blocks to achieve interdependence. While much has changed since that book was written, that model has and will continue to stand the test of time. Consider looking at this resource, among others published on team building and creating a positive workplace culture.

Building a great culture in your workplace is a long game made on day-to-day actions, yet worth the time and energy for you and your team to produce high-yielding results. If you need advice about creating a positive culture and safe work environment for your employees, contact us today!