What Are the 5 Behaviors That Build a Company's Culture

While your company's slogan, mission statement and office perks may reflect your company culture, it's the daily practices and behaviors affecting your employees that truly define it. Here are the five most important behaviors that build and shape your company culture and help create some workers never want to leave.

1. Strive for the Development of Workers

Employee development is essential for the growth of a company, but how you go about it is also a key facet of company culture. Positively shape the office culture by rewarding veteran workers for coaching other employees, ensuring workers are assigned varied tasks that provide a learning experience. Offer ample opportunities for workers to learn new hard and soft skills through free classes and seminars. Place a focus on the long-term careers of employees rather than only providing development opportunities to satisfy the company's current needs to show employees that they are a valuable part of the organization.

2. Emphasize Promotions

Granting a promotion is a great way to reward an individual employee for good work and to put his skills to better use, but every promotion also serves as an example for the rest of the workforce. When you promote employees, you are endorsing their values and practices in the workplace. Monitor employees closely, ensuring promotions throughout the workforce are frequent and deserved to help shape the company culture.

3. Hire the Right Employees

The employees an organization hires inevitably shape and reflect its company culture. While hiring ideal candidates that precisely match your company values is a great practice, it's not always feasible. You may need to make compromises to ensure your organization is fully staffed, and the types of compromises you make when hiring employees also plays an important role in building an office culture.

4. Communicate Goals and Expectations

Another way to shape company culture is to ensure management is communicating goals clearly and on a consistent basis. This gives employees a solid view of both short-term and long-term objectives and helps to set workplace expectations. The types of goals a company pursues are also important. For example, are your organization's goals flexible and flowing, or are they consistent and steadfast?

5. Deal With Contribution Differences

The fact that some employees outperform others is inevitable. Although you want to communicate that all employees matter, you also have to deal with this reality, and how you do this has a strong impact on company culture. For instance, define a set of processes for determining pay and promotion based on performance, and communicate these processes clearly to employees.

The essence of your company culture comes from the behaviors that shape the workplace. The right practices can mean the difference between dealing with a high turnover rate and building a team of loyal employees.

Photo courtesy of rbero at Flickr.com