Why Retaining Employees Starts With Your Company Culture
February 20, 2022 Company culture has become a bigger deal of late. Simply defined, company culture is a company’s values, attitudes, practices, and expectations. It includes a company’s ethics, goals, and mission. You would be wrong if you think it doesn’t play a role in your employees’ happiness and satisfaction at your workplace. It matters.
Consider these stats from Builtin.com:
- 46% of job seekers cite company culture as very important when choosing to apply for a company.
- 47% of active job seekers cite company culture as their driving reason for looking for work.
We all know attracting and retaining workers is both a challenge and a necessity in our industry and others right now. With everyone competing for the same limited resources, the above stats would indicate that for employers, creating a positive company culture shouldn’t be an afterthought. And employees shouldn’t be exempt either from contributing to a positive workplace.
The pandemic has changed the dynamics of the workplace environment and exposed the many ways company culture succeeds or fails at binding a workplace team together into a cohesive whole. Virtual environments are not always conducive to working as a productive team and feeling connected in the workplace. At the very least, they force one to work harder to achieve the same results. Some workers thrive in remote environments; others aren’t as productive. Some need a hybrid approach, while others perform better when anchored to the office. When more often than not the only link to your co-workers is tethered to a screen, it’s easy to feel like you are on a virtual island and lose sight of the fact that you are part of something bigger than yourself. I certainly don’t envy employers who now find themselves in the position of redefining their company cultures to fit with new ways of working.
There are myriad suggestions out there for improving workplace culture. I think developing a feedback-driven culture is one of the most important. A feedback culture encourages healthy and honest feedback employee to employee, at the employee and manager level, and on up the organizational chain. We need more honest feedback in the workplace.
My mother used to tell me that if there was something I wanted to say or something in particular I wanted to happen, I better say it because she wasn’t a mind reader. We see this so often in the workplace. Whether from shyness, fear of repercussion, apathy, or fill in the blank, we don’t speak up. We don’t express our needs. We don’t admit we have a problem. We don’t clarify what we want. Yet, we still expect results.
I’ll be the first to admit I’m more of a “keep your head down and don’t make waves type of person.” But I have just as much of an obligation to contribute to a feedback-driven culture as my company does to create one. We all do. It’s not easy to display your vulnerabilities in the workplace on your sleeve. It can be hard to overcome the fear that keeps you from speaking up. It’s certainly difficult to overcome apathy. However, I believe we all care about working in a place where we feel happy and satisfied, where we can be productive and contribute in meaningful ways. In that sense, finding the courage to give honest, constructive feedback and having the grace to accept it when it is aimed at us can make all the difference.
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