How to Improve Company Culture: 5 Company Culture Deal Breakers to Avoid

By Ron Stewart

Every successful business needs to have a strong company culture that accurately reflects its brand and values. You can read a million articles which tell you how to improve company culture: work towards an overall vision, engage employees, build trust among team members, and offer opportunities for further training.

However, if your company processes undermine your employees' confidence, you will destroy your company culture—and, in the end, this could mean the difference between whether employees stay or move on.

Here are five common company culture deal breakers to avoid.

How to improve company culture—what to avoid

1. Micromanagement

Let’s be honest, no one likes that feeling of someone leaning over their shoulder to check what they’re doing. That’s not because they are doing something wrong or not working as productively as they could be, but because they feel they're not being trusted to work independently. There’s nothing like having someone else’s nose in your work to kill creativity.

What are the alternatives? Marcus Erb, senior consultant at the Great Place to Work Institute, recommends making employees accountable to one another, being clear about expectations, and giving employees the power to make decisions, as some of the ways to stamp out micromanagement.

2. Opaqueness

Companies who want to show they value and care for their staff should be striving for transparency. If your employees are only privy to their own small area of work and feel shut out from the bigger company picture, there are going to be negative feelings as a result.

This is because we assume that things are only being hidden, such as the company not doing too well, and more often than not this is a fair assumption. A good company won’t have anything to hide from their employees, so why not be open? Buffer is one example of a company that practices transparency, so much so that it is even transparent about employee salaries because it believes it boosts workplace trust.

3. Disengagement

Suspect an employee might be sitting on YouTube watching cat videos? If you suspect one, then there are probably more. Disengagement can spread through a workplace like wildfire, killing productivity and company culture.

In fact, Gallup's "State of the Global Workplace" reports that a massive 87% of employees are not engaged in their work. However, making an example of an employee who is disengaged is only likely to make them even less interested in the company. To improve company culture, employers need a different approach. Take steps towards reengagement by designing a productive work environment, cultivating workplace collaboration, and praising employees for good work.

More articles from AllBusiness.com:

• How to Engage Remote Employees in 5 Simple Steps
• The Cost of Not Caring: The Business Benefits of Putting Employee Well-Being First
• Customer Service Is Not a Department, It’s a Culture
• Business Expenses to Reevaluate During an Economic Downturn
• The Three Worst Workplace Incentives and How to Fix Them

4. No perks

People love perks, am I right? Even if your company has a good reputation and your employees have a decent salary, work can get mundane. Heading into the same office for the same 9-to-5 slog which doesn’t have all that much variety is kind of, well, disengaging.

The point is, it’s just not all that exciting. Perks at work doesn’t mean giving everyone a new car and a Netflix subscription (though people love those). It can be as simple as ordering in some coffees on a Tuesday morning, casual dress codes on certain days, giving employees time to work on a side project, or even offering flexible or remote working hours.

5. Job security

With the rise of short-term and zero-hour contracts, employees are increasingly worried about their job security. Knowing that your job isn’t a sure thing nagging in the back of your mind will only result in increased stress and lower productivity.

If your employee’s job security is under threat then this is definitely going to chip away at their confidence. Using review meetings and key performance indicators to evaluate how successful their work is and seeing what the company can do to improve their work rate is likely to have a much better effect.

Eliminating deal breakers can improve company culture

Want to improve your company culture and ensure your company culture is ace? Eliminate these five company culture deal breakers. You should see a spike in staff morale, productivity, and workplace atmosphere, leading to continued business success.

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