5 Crucial Elements of Corporate Culture

by | Jul 1, 2020

corporate culture

Are you living your culture? Is your company’s mission, values, and purpose visible in your leader’s behavior or is there a disconnect between your actions and words? Even in a work from home or remote working arrangement, corporate culture, and how it’s lived and breathed, influences everything. 

Statistics from Gallup reveal that:

  • only 41% of employees strongly agree that they know what their company stands for and what makes it different from competitors 
  • 48% chance that people with low engagement will leave your company

Even if employers have thoughtfully crafted their cultural statement, employees aren’t feeling the impact. 

How about your employees? A healthy corporate culture consists of five elements of well being – Career, Social, Financial, Community, and Physical. How employees rate these five elements directly affects your business outcomes. 

Building on these five crucial elements of corporate culture will improve employee engagement and overall wellbeing. 

Help people use their strengths every day. 

People who report being able to use their strengths every day are 6x as likely to be engaged in their jobs and more than 3x as likely to report having an excellent quality of life. Investing in strengths yields strong returns!

Provide opportunities in corporate culture for people to connect with one another. 

People who report having a best friend at work are 7x as likely to be engaged in their jobs, are better at engaging customers, produce higher quality work, have higher well being, and are less likely to get injured on the job. Therefore, friendship matters!

Support your employees’ financial needs.

 While a fair wage matters, the perception a person has about having more than enough money to do what they want to do has 3x the impact of income alone on overall wellbeing. Help employees feel their value!

Create community engagement opportunities as part of corporate culture. 

In a survey of nearly 23,000 people, nearly 9 in 10 reported “getting an emotional boost” from doing kind things for other people. Providing paid community service days for people to use their own strengths and passion boosts community and career wellbeing!   

Encourage your employees to care for their health.

 75% of medical costs are due to largely preventable conditions (stress, tobacco use, physical inactivity, and poor food choices). Create an environment rich with opportunities to eat well, move more, reduce stress, and catch some sleep!

Once these five elements of corporate culture are in place, it’s time to make sure you have the right people leading your teams. Who you hire to lead your teams has a direct impact on how your employees experience corporate culture. 

In their book, It’s the Manager, Jim Clifton and Jim Harter identify one primary contributor to the success of any organization – the managers. The quality of managers and team leaders is the single biggest contributor to employee engagement. Great managers coach their teams to do what they do best every day. Engaged and invested employees report better well being in work and life.

Corporate culture is more important than ever. Assess how your company is doing and make adjustments to assure greater health and happiness of your most important resource – your people.

Interested in learning more about how we can help your employee population improve their steps and sleep while reducing burnout?

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