The ROI of Exceptional Workplace Culture
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When you have great workplace culture, you reap the benefits.
Prioritizing employee experience pays massive dividends.
If you’re workplace culture is not good, then it’s a safe bet that turnover and burnout are high, while engagement and morale are low. Pretty hard to have a successful organization when those things are in play.
Here are eight ways you get your ROI on exceptional culture when you treat it as a priority, and not just a buzzword. Let’s jump straight to it:
1. Retention is higher
This is super important right now, and always.
People want to stay at companies that treat them well, and at a place where they can say that their coworkers and boss are kind, accountable, and pull their weight. People don’t want to leave when it feels good to go to work.
Retention is expensive. Training new employees takes time and effort and when an employee leaves, they often take valuable knowledge of how to do their jobs, how the company works, and the goodwill and relationships they have formed inside the organization that make things run smoother across the board. A brand new employee is way less efficient and productive, plus it costs a lot of money and time to recruit, hire, and onboard someone.
When it comes to retaining employees and keeping them happy and productive, most answers tie back to one common thread — culture. Culture matters. Great culture = higher retention. Enough said.
2. Morale is better
Happy employees are productive employees.
When folks are happy, they are more productive and invested in their work. Morale is improved when culture is great, and when leaders walk the talk. What are your ground rules of engagement? How does your team show up for each other and engage together? It’s a bummer to go to work if you’re not treated well and your coworkers behave and perform poorly.
Low morale leads to burnout, disengagement, more mistakes, and poor customer service. All things that have great cost to the success of any business.
3. Waste less time
Having shitty culture is like lighting wads of cash on fire over and over again.
When you have poor culture, leaders spend a lot more time than putting out fires and dealing with issues — such as personality conflicts, problems with customers, HR issues, etc.
You are wasting money by paying your high-salaried leaders to spending a majority of their time mitigating problems caused by bad or dysfunctional culture. When you have an exceptional culture, leaders have way more time to focus on higher, better projects and goals and do what they’re being paid to do.
4. Social capital and reputation
Consumers want to do business with organizations that treat their employees well. Culture matters externally, just like it matters internally to the folks that work for you. Your reputation with employees matters in your community. Whether you’re a mom and pop store or a Fortune 500, the things your employees say about their experience at your company have a big impact on your social capital.
Great culture, better reputation which directly translates to more customers wanting to do business and buy from you.
5. Better services, better product
When you have a great culture and folks are productive, there are less mistakes made. People generally care about their work more when they are happy, and they deliver a better product and service to your customers. Employees are more willing to problem solve when they’re engaged, and they take more pride in their work.
Awesome culture means less mistakes and better service all around. Key to creating better customer experiences and outcomes.
6. Stand out and attract better talent
These days, culture is a top priority for candidates seeking a new job. It’s so important to be able to articulate what your culture is and how it feels to work at your company when talking to candidates. Gone are the days where an obvious list of corporate values counts as company culture — job applicants want to be confident that what they’re signing up for will be an excellent experience at a company that actually cares about them.
The ability to hire and keep better people is a huge advantage in business. Having higher performing staff greatly impacts company success.
7. Strong culture = higher change agility
In toxic workplace cultures, it’s commonplace that people are not just reluctant to change, but they actively pushback and attempt to sabotage it.
However, when employees love the company and their leader, they are more open and accepting of change. Having a strong culture builds trust over time so that employees are more open and receptive to innovation and new ideas/directions proposed by leadership. Exceptional culture means people more willing to row in the right direction when change comes.
8. Promote internally more
When you have great culture, people stick around longer so you’re able to promote people from within more often. Promoting from within has many benefits, a major one being that when you hire leadership internally, you receive a leader who is more invested in the company and is more understanding and aligned with the organization’s culture right off the bat.
Another benefit is that employees who are growing and advancing are more grateful and loyal which means they stay longer and reduce turnover.
One last comment to wrap this up…
Why wouldn’t you want to have great culture?
Bad culture makes everything at work feel terrible and creates so many problems across the board. I think the greatest, highest purpose of leaders and leadership teams is to create an environment where people want to come to work, they try hard, and they love their job.
Leaders, it’s up to you to initiate and model exceptional culture to create a kick-ass place to work where people thrive.
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This article was created by Galen Emanuele for the #culturedrop. Free leadership and team culture content in less than 5 minutes a week. Check out the rest of this month's content and subscribe to the Culture Drop at https://bit.ly/culturedrop