Enhancing Your Startup Culture: 10 Proven Ways for Success and Growth

Every organization has its own working conditions and methodologies that they created within and followed by everyone. It is an intrinsic part of building an organization and making it stand out from others. Therefore, it is up to you how you want to shape your startup and sustain it for the long run.

Mon May 16, 2022

"Company culture is the foundation for success and an accelerator for growth." — Tony Hsieh

Before discovering the methods to improve your startup work culture, let’s find the meaning of work culture.

What is a Work Culture in an Organization?

“Work culture represents the behavior and attitude of managers subordinates and workers working in an organization”. It creates a connection between company culture and employee engagement with high productivity.

Overall, it shows the environment and personality of a company.

Good company culture helps people to identify you and apply to your startup as well as promotes existing employees to learn and grow through their experience. It eliminates the chances of a high turnover rate.

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Why Improving Work Culture is Important?

Well, if you care about the success of your startup, you need to care about its work culture. There are a few reasons that would help you to understand the importance of improving work culture in a company:

It helps you to capture new talent
It keeps the talent you have
Happy people make happy customers
You need to evolve with your employees as different employees could bring different ideas to an organization you need to change along with them for the betterment of your company
It improves the overall performance of the company in terms of financial as well

Positive company culture is an important aspect of keeping your best employee satisfied and increasing productivity.

How to Improve Your Startup’s Work Culture?

1. Build strong company values

This is the foremost step that needs to be created in a startup once you start hiring talents. Develop positive values among the leaders and employees and make them reflect too.

Positive values like trust creativity passion honesty integrity clarity need to be established. Negative values like bureaucracy, status-seeking, blaming, and greed must be avoided.

Your company values should be like that the employees are not too focused on self-worth or survival as it leads to power and greed.

2. Pay attention to employee’s feedback and implement it

Feedback is important in a company that wants to improve its performance. An employee’s feedback is needed if you want to change the working environment.

Feedback is a free education to excellence. Seek it with sincerity and receive it with grace.

There are two important methods that good help in getting feedback from the employees.

Idea/ Suggestion board

There should be a board or a box displayed in a company where any employee could write their new ideas or suggestions that need to be taken. Leaders must check that have a discussion based on that and ask for other employees’ opinions.

Involve your employees in a decision-making process

Through this method, employees would feel valued and they will start sharing your vision. A group could be formed where they can express their point of view.

3. Hire growth mindset people to your workplace

A growth mindset in a startup is essential for generating new ideas and being eager to take risks. Fixed mindset people are not creative and close-minded. They don’t support flexibility and oppose any other employee’s working approach. They show less efficiency and demotivate others too.

So, it’s important to hire people who are open to new ideas and highly energetic toward modern working style.

A startup must know what kind of people they are willing to take: Performer who gives their best result and meanwhile encourage others also or Parasite ones who don’t show any progress and discourage others too.

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4. Ensure proper treatment of employees

As ahead of a company, you must look after your employee’s needs and issues. Sometimes, a small problem could become huge and difficult to solve. So, there are a few points mentioned below that will guide you in ensuring that your employees are being treated well.

Promote mental health

A part-time counselor must be there in your organization and they should meet your employees regularly. They should be able to understand their anxiety and work pressure and provide a valid solution.

Proper welcome to new hire

There should be a small ceremony for the new hires to create a positive image of your startup. Few goodies or welcome kits could be given and everyone should provide guidance and support them in settling down in your work culture

Build employee engagement through organizing office parties and games

It is a fun activity where on weekends or during the second half employees could participate together in various games and relieve their stress. Office parties should be regularly held for the employees.

5. Create work-life balance

There must be a proper work-life balance in your company to reduce the stressful environment and leave personal space for the employees.

We could take the example of a company which is situated in Germany. According to the policy of that company, every employee must go on a vacation after every six months of their work.

They have made this rule compulsory as they believe that after working continuously for some period, fatigue, stress and many other negative factors occur and slow the performance of the employees.

However, after taking some breaks employees may return with high energy and work efficiently to achieve their goals.

Compulsory vacation
Sick leave
Incentives

These benefits must be provided to the employees to create a balance between their personal and professional life otherwise they could bring their problems to the office or may stress out their family members for some office work and this will create turbulence.

6. Professional development

From time to time, employees should undergo some professional development in their work. Training must be provided to keep them up to date. Various methods are offered in a company to improve their employee’s knowledge and expertise.

Mentors
Hands-on project
Online course

Mentors will provide guidance whenever they will face any difficulty in understanding any project and a hands-on project is the most effective one for developing the capabilities of the workers.Read More: How to create a business website?

7. Portray exemplary leadership

Strong leadership is required in a startup as workers tend to follow their leaders. They mimic their leader’s attitude and approach and similarly guide their juniors.Leaders build culture by implementing various strategies and gaining success for the startup.

Leaders can influence others to make them work at their greatest ability. They are the central point that could either build the work culture positively or negatively.

8. Create a review management system

Ask employees to review their experiences and thoughts on various job portals to attract new talents. It helps to evaluate your company’s current work culture and directs towards the mission of the company.

This could be done through various Reputation Management Software that enables the collection of testimonials, reviews, or negative feedback. This system will help in measuring the effectiveness of any organization.

9. Build trust and transparency

There is a saying that goes, “Trust happens when you are transparent”. This is one of the most intrinsic parts of any company as it builds respect among workers and leaders. When leaders are honest and share their opinions openly, other team members will also follow the same which creates a ripple effect.

Diversity

Promote diversity in your organizational culture because diverse minds would display diversity in thoughts too which could the company in a positive way.

Open Communication

This should be highly encouraged as it will help in avoiding bad blood among employees. There should be no bad talk behind the back, it promotes an unhealthy working environment and nobody would want to work in a place like this.

10. Flexible work culture

These days businesses run in a dynamic environment. Nothing is constant so the business policy in any company needs to change as well otherwise they will lag. To match up with this ever-changing work culture, flexibility is needed.

It is nothing but being flexible in work timings, work location, and the amount of work done for the mutual benefit of a company. We could take the example of this recent pandemic situation. Organizations that incorporated “work from home” survived and flourished during these hard times.

Conclusion

Success is building a company that people want to work for. Work culture is an important aspect of any business so it needs to be followed effectively.

Organizational transformation begins with the personal transformation of the leaders working in a startup. Organizations don’t transform, people do. Therefore, the work culture of an organization is a reflection of leadership characteristics and the stage of psychological development that the leader has reached.

Develop positive work culture with the help of these 10 ways mentioned above and increase the survival and performance of your startup.

Change is constant. Embrace it

Dr. Anu Khanchandani
With over two decades of experience in the software technology arena, having worked in multinational and SME companies in India, USA and Singapore in the capacity of programmer to CTO - I felt now was a good time to give back to the world what I have learnt in this journey. Even if it ends up benefitting a few of my readers by giving them insight or solving a technical issue, I think I will have achieved my mission!