Changing your company culture for the better isn’t always easy. It doesn’t happen overnight, and some aspects require more planning than others. Still, there are many ways you can tweak and improve your workplace culture for the better.
In this guide, we’ll touch on what a positive company culture means. Then take you through some of our best advice on how to transform yours from average to noteworthy and build a team of thriving, engaged employees.
Company culture isn’t table tennis and beers on a Friday night. It’s every action, value, behavior, and decision you make that might impact the people you call coworkers.
Your company culture has an impact on almost everything, including:
With it touching so many different areas of your business, it’s crucial that you get your company culture right. A culture that’s not aligned with the values and goals of the people that work there can quickly lead to micromanaging, disengaged employees, and resignations. That’s why it’s so important to proactively work on your company culture to create the best possible experience.
Every company has a culture that develops organically over time. But sometimes we might want to help shape it in a certain direction or improve our culture to attract and retain talented people.
Let’s explore some real, actionable tactics to shape a strong company culture—with insights and examples from companies that have gone through the process and achieved positive results.
You can’t take any meaningful steps forward without first evaluating where you are now. Before changing your culture, take a closer look at what it looks and feels like now—both to you and your team.
To make this step count, get the entire organization involved, including new hires. Create safe spaces where people can share their honest feedback about your culture and what working for you is like. Employee engagement surveys, workshops, and 1:1 meetings are all valuable ways to poll your team members about company culture.
As you explore people’s thoughts, ask questions like:
Some of these questions might surface some hard truths. You might also find it challenging to engage your employees. Encourage people to take part and engage in your surveys and workshops by offering a digital reward—like a Hoppier card.
Understanding where you stand now gives you some powerful insights on how to move forward. Not only do you know what needs fixing or what works well, but you can use this starting point as a reference to monitor progress as your project unfolds.
Culture change happens right across your organization. It’s not mandated from the top down. This means it’s essential that you bring everyone along with you for the journey, right from the start.
Getting your team members involved in the process means they’ll feel more invested, engaged, and involved in making the outcome a reality. A strong corporate culture has a huge impact on the way people feel about work, so it’s in their interests to stay curious and involved.
Use your culture project as the perfect opportunity to create more employee engagement. Get feedback, welcome ideas, and collaborate across teams to show employees you care.
Here are some more ways to involve your team members in the process:
While you need to strike a balance between inviting suggestions and making progress, bringing your employees along for the journey is one of the best ways to create a positive culture shift. It empowers them, involves them, and gives you the ultimate opportunity to make the best impact.
It’s difficult to make a real culture shift without actually spending money and time on your plans. If you’re serious about shifting your company culture for the better, create a realistic budget to invest in tools, experiences, and products that reflect your company’s priorities.
If you’re heavily focused on promoting wellness, you might spend more on health plans and fitness memberships. If you lean into professional development, you might need a substantial learning budget.
Here are a handful of ideas for items to include in your culture budget, along with a suggested investment:
You can spend as much or as little as you want on company culture, and make savings where you need to. For example, you might not need a dedicated role to oversee culture and could start small by funding a % of someone’s role to focus on this.
Having a dedicated budget is key. Without one, you may spend the money on other things, even with the best intentions. A clear, defined organizational culture budget makes it easier to invest in initiatives and signals you’re serious about investing in your culture.
Research shows that 87% of people want their organizations to be transparent with them. It’s one of the top requests from people these days, and it’s easy to see why. People want to feel trusted, empowered, and in control—and that’s not possible without transparency.
Transparency and open communication has to be embraced by all but needs to start at the top. Encourage your leadership team to use their influence to open the doors and signal that you’re happy to have honest, transparent conversations in the open.
It’s easy to say that transparency is the way forward, but how do you make that happen? Here are some powerful ways you can encourage and demonstrate transparency in the work environment:
Transparency and honest communication are more than the actions you take, but these tips can help move your company to a place where transparency isn’t just a goal, but a lived experience.
HubSpot is known for being a major player in the marketing tech space, but they’re also a great example of how you can use transparency to shape, reinforce, and talk about your company culture.
Inspired by what was originally an internal document, HubSpot published its Culture Code online for everyone to see. It’s a huge slide deck filled with detail, but the main takeaway is that you get a real sense of who they are and what they stand for by reading it.
This is transparency in practice, and a powerful way to not only show that you live your values but attract future talent and partners too. You don’t have to create a 100+ page slide deck, but you can take inspiration from their openness to share what makes their culture amazing.
A great way to get everyone on board with your company culture and change it for the better is to share and demonstrate your company mission statement and values. This is about not just having a rulebook for how you operate, but actually acting on that in practice.
The first step is to establish some core company values that feel right. If you’re a fresh company, your values probably stack up nicely against what you want them to be. More established companies might need some tweaking.
You might decide that it’s time to revamp your company values completely. If that’s the case, take a good look at what matters to you, get your employees involved, and kick off your culture change by making sure your company values match.
Once you’re happy with your values, it’s all about sharing them with everyone and making sure they guide the decisions you make. It’s easy to have amazing core values, but making them a reality feels more difficult.
Let’s take a look at some common company values and how you can express them in reality:
With some practical activities to tie your company values to, it’s easier to see how you can live and breathe them in everything that you do. If this feels like a change from your old culture, find ways to encourage more buy-in across teams. Openly celebrate people that embody your core values, and treat them to a reward like a Hoppier card to say thank you.
Diversity and inclusion (D&I) should always be on our minds, but simply thinking about it isn’t enough.
Research by McKinsey found that feelings around leadership action on diversity and inclusion were 56% negative, which means there’s room for growth. This culture shift has to happen from the top, with executives and the leadership team paving the way for a more inclusive place to work.
To make a real impact with diversity and inclusion, there has to be action alongside the sentiment. Look for areas, systems, and processes in your business that are inflexible or aren’t inclusive. Consider your hiring practices, what your virtual events look like, and what day-to-day life is like working with you. Often there are always ways we can be more inclusive and encourage diversity.
Here are some useful ways you can bring more diversity and inclusion to the workplace:
Some of these are major culture or process changes, but others can be introduced more quickly. Review your diversity and inclusion policy and overall strategy, ask your team members what a good company culture with D&I looks like to them, then make plans to bring some of these tactics and ideas to life.
Diversity and inclusion practices are often hidden away internally, but Accenture’s inclusion and diversity commitment is public and a wonderful example of what to strive for.
It covers what steps they take to be more inclusive and promote diversity across different key areas, and talks about what they’ve achieved—like 100% pay equity for women. Take inspiration from this to help guide your D&I practices and also encourage you to talk about this publicly.
You may think you know best when it comes to corporate culture and pay and benefits, but it's important to get validation from the people it’ll impact the most: your employees.
In any thriving workplace culture, there’s an appreciation of and focus on delivering an experience that matches what your employees expect, want, and need.
You could introduce unlimited paid time off but discover that it negatively impacts take-up because people are worried about what it means. Or you may offer a paid gym membership, but your team members would prefer a subscription to Headspace.
Knowing what your team members actually want can help you make the right decisions, and avoid costly mistakes heading in the wrong direction.
Here are some ways to understand what your employee's value, want, or need:
Empowering employees to share their thoughts means they’re more likely to buy into the change and overall journey. It also guides your strategic direction as a company, if you decide to embrace projects that align with your goals and introduce benefits that appeal to a new talent group.
Collecting this data can also help you build more personal experiences for your team members too. You can tailor someone’s individual experience with you based on their goals, needs, and values. Offer someone a scholarship so they can study leadership, or support a change to someone’s working pattern so they can care for a loved one.
Think of it as an opportunity to create a better overall culture overall and delight individual team members.
Most of us want to build stronger relationships with the people we work with every day. Research shows that 91% of people want to feel closer to their team members. Make this happen by actively introducing more ways for people to connect, get to know each other, and form friendships.
There’s an endless amount of virtual events and team-building activities you could try. Here are some of our favorites:
Whichever type of event or activity you try, look for tools that can enhance that experience. Use Hoppier to send virtual cards your team can spend on food, drink, and experiences. Think: coffee from Tim Hortons or the latest book club read from Amazon.
Consider using a virtual event platform for your major events to create a more engaging, immersive experience.
A lack of opportunity for growth presents a real problem for both turnover rates and work culture. 58% of employees said that their companies didn’t have enough growth to sustain them long-term, which means they’ll head elsewhere in search of what they need. Boost your employee retention rates and design a culture that celebrates growth and learning by making a real commitment to it.
Growth and development don’t have to be one linear path. Here are some great ways you can invest in your employees’ career growth:
The actions you prioritize will depend on your company and culture goals. What’s most important is to recognize that career and growth opportunities have a major impact on culture and retention, and to find engaging ways to not just prevent departures but create an environment where people can thrive.
Hearing negative feedback isn’t always fun, but feedback remains an essential part of the workplace. Plus, it’s something that people actively seek out—65% of people want more feedback. Give people what they want, and take steps towards a more supportive and transparent culture, by embracing feedback in all its forms.
When employees think of feedback, it’s often as something formal, like part of an annual review or post-project evaluation. Feedback happens in different ways, like sharing a thumbs up on a Slack message, leaving a comment on a Google Doc, or expressing thanks at a virtual town hall meeting.
Here are some tools and tactics to promote feedback within your company culture:
Encourage people to offer and receive employee feedback openly and generously. Welcome honest comments, and find new ways to shout out about people’s successes. The goal is to recognize challenges and address them and also to celebrate where people have done something amazing.
People want to feel like they’re doing meaningful work, that they make a difference, and that they have control and ownership over what they do. If your culture doesn’t already promote empowerment and ownership, now is the time to consider introducing it as a theme.
Giving your employees autonomy over their daily workload and the projects they work on helps create a sense of belonging, confidence, and trust. When you empower your team members to make decisions and take ownership, they’re more excited and motivated to create success.
Here’s how to empower your team members and give them greater ownership:
Build a great company culture where your team members have a comfortable level of autonomy and ownership. Let people make decisions based on their needs and expertise, and trust in their knowledge. Not only does this help create a better employee experience, but it also removes some of the pressure on your senior team, giving them more time to focus on leadership.
Your coworkers want to feel valued and appreciated, especially if they’ve done a great job or made a fantastic contribution to a project. One of the best ways to do this consistently is to embrace employee appreciation as a core theme within your company culture.
Showing your team members that you appreciate their hard work creates a happy employee moment, but it’s also great for business—79% of workers say that recognition makes them work harder.
Here are some fun ways you can embrace employee appreciation in the workplace:
Employee appreciation can happen in lots of different ways. Take inspiration from this list to create a shortlist, and share it with your team to see which ideas and employee appreciation gifts they’d be most excited to add to your culture. Once you have your final list, use Hoppier as an easy way to send rewards and virtual gifts to your team members.
With COVID-19 making it impossible to gather for an in-person retreat, ADP found a creative way to reward employees.
We worked with ADP to add a selection of event-based experiences as rewards that their employees could choose from. People could watch live broadway shows and virtual concerts from home, with their friends and family. This is a great example of how you can use Hoppier as part of an entire, employee-focused reward experience.
One of the easiest and most impactful ways to change your company culture for the better is to prioritize employee appreciation. It’s a powerful way to make people feel welcome, appreciated, and motivated to continue doing amazing work.
We know how important employee appreciation is. That’s why we built Hoppier—a platform that makes it easy for you to send virtual gifts and create engaging hybrid experiences, by sending virtual credit cards to your team members.
Wherever your employees are in the world, you can use Hoppier to send them a virtual card as an employee appreciation gift, virtual reward, or credit to spend on catering for a virtual event or experience.
Surprise your team members with a $50 balance to spend on a cozy night in, with Netflix, Spotify, and local restaurants as featured vendors. Set up a program to send a card to your team members every month with $25 that they can spend on wellness services like Calm, Headspace, and Better Help.
There are so many creative ways you can use Hoppier to deliver a more engaging company culture experience for the people you work with. Get inspired by some of the ideas above, ask your coworkers for their suggestions, and put together a package of events, experiences, and gifts that you’re excited about.
An organization’s culture is often made up of those small moments that happen without us noticing. A thoughtful feedback note from a manager, a thank you gift from the CEO, or a recognition for an incredible idea for a project.
Help make it easier to recognize and celebrate those moments with tools like Hoppier. Our platform gives you a simple way to send employee appreciation gifts and create more engaging virtual or hybrid experiences. See how Hoppier can support your employee rewards program today.
Ready to 2x your global engagement at your next event, with Ox stress?
Make Hoppier your unfair advantage today, schedule a demo
Ready to 2x your global engagement at your next event, with Ox stress?
Make Hoppier your unfair advantage today, schedule a demo
Ready to 2x your global engagement at your next event, with Ox stress?
Make Hoppier your unfair advantage today, schedule a demo
Ready to 2x your global engagement at your next event, with Ox stress?
Make Hoppier your unfair advantage today, schedule a demo
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