If you’ve ever been to the Intelligent Ink office, or had a meeting with a couple of people from the team, you’ll have likely cottoned on to the fact that our workplace culture is very important to us. We support one another. We create an environment that keeps us invigorated. We celebrate our success and that of our clients.

It’s how we do things.

So if someone was to ask you about your workplace culture, what would you say? If they were to pry you about your vision, your values, your typical recruit – what would be your response? Can you articulate what it is you are committed to being and becoming, beyond the strategic side of the business?

Employees can certainly engage with strategy to some extent – but for those in the cubicles, on the shop floor, it’s not something that they are necessarily actively exposed to, at least not on a regular basis. One team strategy planning day a year is hardly enough to keep an entire workforce engaged in your direction – but a company culture that allows them to deeply appreciate the business as a whole is a key factor in keeping everyone on track.

Values

Earlier this year, we blogged about ‘The value of values’ – and we mentioned just how important established values are to creating and maintaining company culture. It’s a key part of the process of day-to-day business – but it’s also vital when it comes to hiring new talent.

If you don’t already have values laid out, there’s no time like the present to change that. Check out the aforementioned post for tips. Print them out. Hang them up in the lunchroom, in the bathroom, in the boardroom – anywhere that you see fit. And keep them in mind when interviewing potential new hires, so that you can mentally tick off values that they have mentioned without prompting.

If someone is on the same wavelength as you and your employees from the get-go, the onboarding process will inevitably go a whole lot more smoothly. You want people who will live and breathe your organisation – at least between nine and five – and feel like they belong, that they feel a sense of alignment to the company as a whole and with the individuals within it.

Team connectivity

There’s no one way to run a team. Different industries favour different set-ups, and different companies within different industries may do something entirely different from what’s expected anyway. For a large company, the specifics of team culture may vary from department to department – so it’s always worth keeping in mind that there’s not necessarily a single directive to be spread company-wide.

But for each particular group of employees, it’s important to figure out what gets the people within it fired up. Are they independent workers who prefer to stick to their own guns and work through a project by themselves? Or are they all-hands-on-deck types who thrive in a deeply interconnected team environment?

And beyond the way people behave in the office, is there a particular direction you want to propose for employees when the clock hits 5? Do people tend to stick around until their work is done, or head for the door as soon as it’s an acceptable time to do so? Are staff encouraged to hang out socially outside of the workplace, or do people tend to stick to their own circles? Again, there’s no one way to work, but having a collective understanding about the way things tend to work means that people will be less likely to leap into a role… and then feel like a square peg in a round hole.

The beauty in variety

Conveying a company culture doesn’t mean creating a cookie cutter team of people who all parrot off the same opinions and express themselves in the same way. But it’s a way to create an environment in which people can thrive. Uniformity isn’t the goal – satisfaction is. A team that combines different personality types in a way that sparks fresh thinking and innovation is going to be one that makes magic happen. No company should be stagnant – so create an environment in which your employers can react positively with one another and the result should be something unique to your business.

Putting it into practise

So you’ve established your values, interpreted your culture, create a team that’s aligned to your collective direction. How do you collectively live and breathe that culture?

There are many ways to let your culture seep into your decision-making processes. It’s as easy as adding one little question to every strategy session: does this align with our values? If there are some values that people adapt to more easily than others, share the focus aroun by picking a value of the month, or week. Talk about that value at meetings – articulate why it’s so integral to your workplace. Put up posters. Start discussions across the whole body of staff.

If your workplace culture doesn’t seem to be organically presenting itself, it may be worth appointing someone who is specifically tasked with developing workplace culture. This may mean that they do some further groundwork, having some in-depth conversations with people across the company to get a better feel for the temperature of your organisation. From there, changes – even if they’re just minor tweaks – can be put in place to start developing an underlying current of connection.

There’s a whole lot of literature out there on the topic of company culture – why it’s important, how it can transform your workplace, all that jazz. If you feel like your company culture could do with a kickstart, the time to make a change is now. And of course, if you’re struggling to communicate your company culture, you can always talk to the Intelligent Ink team – and we’ll see what we can do to help.