Your workplace culture affects everyone within it, as well as everyone who interacts with it. This makes having a good, healthy, and non-toxic culture so important!  

Workplace culture is made up of the values, attitudes, and behaviours of employees and leaders within your organization.  So, what is the difference between good and bad workplace culture? Let’s take a look at what negative aspects contribute to a toxic workplace culture, and what positive aspects can create a healthy workplace culture.

Big problems arise with poor workplace culture

Studies show that organizations that have a poor workplace culture have big problems.  High employee turnover and low employee engagement with high rates of absenteeism (and presenteeism) are the top consequences.  When you have all of these issues, your team’s productivity will be very low.

How can you recognize whether you have an excellent or poor/toxic workplace culture? Check out the table below to see a side-by-side comparison:

 

Improving the culture within your workplace

What are some steps you can take to improve your workplace culture?

Now that you have a good idea of the differences between an excellent workplace culture and a toxic workplace culture, let’s talk about steps you can take to improve your workplace culture. Here are six things you can do to make positive strides in your workplace.

  1. Perform a culture assessment

    This tool will help identify the gap between your real culture and your ideal culture.  You can then create a plan to work towards the ideal culture. 

  2. Review your organizational values

    Does your staff know what your organizational values are?  How do you make sure they are interpreted correctly?  To achieve this, you will need to make sure you connect the values to specific behaviours.  For example, if one of your values is always acting with integrity, what behaviours would you expect someone to display?  Mutual respect, accountability, keeping one’s promises and commitments, and doing the right thing are all examples of integrity.  These behaviours put values into practice and make it easy to teach others, model the behaviour, and give feedback.

  3. Review your performance management system

    Integrate your values into your performance evaluations.  Assess all staff on both their task performance as well as their contributions to workplace culture in order to avoid rewarding counterproductive behaviour.

  4. Eliminate factors that can contribute towards a toxic culture

    Make sure to provide the appropriate and essential resources to get work done, make sure your leaders are effective, and deal with toxic behaviours immediately.  Toxic people can only thrive in a toxic environment, and the damage they do is immense. 

  5. Be sure to prioritize your organizational values in recruitment efforts

    Include your organizational values in your job postings and ask interview questions that can uncover how aligned your candidates are to your values. 

  6. Perform exit interviews

    Exit interviews provide employers with valuable insight into workplace culture and employee morale.  The employees may be able to provide constructive feedback about their experience which you can use make improvements that could help retain employees in the future.

 

 

Changing your workplace culture is possible!

Changing your workplace culture may seem like a daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be.  Once you perform your cultural assessment and discover what needs to be done to get to your goal, you can break the plan into manageable pieces.  Focus on actions that are easier to implement with high impact first.

 If you need some assistance with improving your workplace culture, consider Legacy Bowes!  We have all of the tools to help you. Whether you’re an organization that does not have in-house Human Resource personnel or you just need additional expertise regarding specific matters, contact us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..