How Do I Promote Healthy Organizational Culture?

Healthy organizational culture is desirable to nearly any kind of business or group. Fostering a productive and pleasant atmosphere can be key to success in both good times and bad. In order to promote healthy organizational culture, it is important to devise an open and fair communication strategy, stay fully committed to core values, and create a review and adjustment plan that helps the organization remain agile.

Communication is key to a healthy organizational culture. Employees tend to have higher morale when they feel like collaborators in an entity, rather than slaves to a corporation. By encouraging open communication between all levels of employees, an organization can not only improve morale, but open itself to as many good suggestions and ideas as possible. Holding casual monthly meetings or social events, allowing employees of any level to speak to management or company offers, and creating brainstorming sessions or suggestion boxes can all help improve communication.

Most organizations have a set of core values, developed when the company was first devised. It is the job of every employee, led by management, to ensure that these values are living principles applied to every aspect of company procedure. If owners set out to create a place where integrity is valued, management and staff cannot permit behavior that conflicts with this value at any level of the business. If a company states that employees should be given many opportunities for promotion and increased responsibility, the hiring and promotion practices must reflect this. By integrating core values into the daily operations of every department and each employee, the values can become more than words on a piece of paper tacked to the owner's wall; instead, the core values can promote healthy organizational culture by serving as a daily motivator and reminder of purpose to every worker.

With the best intentions in the world, healthy organizational culture can fall by the wayside if it is not in the process of continual review. Using brainstorming sessions, inter-departmental committees, or even outside efficiency experts, it is important for company members to keep up an ongoing dialogue about problems and how to solve them. Everything from employee break room clean-up to customer service complaints may be better and more efficiently addressed if review and repair is part of everyday behavior. By creating a strong review process and imbuing it with enough power to enact solutions, serious problems can be addressed while employees may also gain a sense of security in knowing that the company is committed to improving the atmosphere.