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How CEOs Can Build and Maintain a Strong Company Culture

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StrategyDriven Corporate Cultures Article | How CEOs Can Build and Maintain a Strong Company CultureSixty-six percent (66%) of job seekers consider a company’s culture and values an essential factor in choosing a career opportunity. The CEO is in a position to ensure that a company’s culture is strong, healthy, and nurturing. The right culture will attract the best employees and lead to better results for the company.

Make Your Values a Priority

Getting your deals right will help you build a strong company culture that supports the growth of your business. A strong company culture can attract and retain top talent, increase productivity, and create a positive workplace environment. On the other hand, a bad culture can drive employees to leave a company and even result in damaging news headlines. The CEO at TapestryHealth, Mark Hirschhorn, is often the face of an organization and is responsible for setting the tone of its culture. However, it’s also important to remember that your values aren’t just a reflection of yourself; they’re shared across the entire company. Therefore, you must prioritize your leadership values and communicate them regularly throughout your organization. This will ensure that everyone knows your preferences and buys into them.

Define Your Values

If you want to build and maintain a strong company culture, your values should be central to everything you do. They give your team a purpose and can help them align with your organization’s goals. To define your values, you should bring in a group of employees to discuss what matters most to them. These discussions should be open, honest, and meaningful. The exercise should also allow you to get a lot of feedback. This helps you make changes and updates in a way that makes sense for your business and your people. To make your values stick, you must communicate them to your employees regularly. This is especially true for your executive leadership team.

Communicate Your Values

Company culture is a complex combination of stated values and behaviors that influences tasks and initiatives, how they are done, and how people are recognized and rewarded. Strong company cultures create a shared purpose that drives a team to solve problems and achieve long-term outcomes. Employees are more likely to enjoy their work and stay for the long term when they understand what’s expected of them, their peers, and management. CEOs can build and maintain a strong company culture by communicating their values to employees at all levels. They should also practice these values by showing how they apply in real-world situations and lead by example.


Invest in Your People

Whether your company is a small business or a large corporation, investing in your people is crucial to its success. This can result in top talent attraction and retention, productivity boosts, and improved business performance. One of the most overlooked ways to invest in your people is through training and development opportunities. These can help employees feel empowered and increase their overall job satisfaction. CEOs must also be willing to engage with their leadership team and take the time to listen to them. This is an opportunity to learn more about their concerns, successes, and dreams.

Nurture Your People

If you’re a CEO, you know that company culture is crucial to your business’s success. You can only build a company that succeeds with it. So, how do you develop and maintain a strong company culture? Fortunately, there are several expert strategies that you can use. One of them is to nurture your people.

Regarding company culture, a strong team is essential for long-term success. Successful company cultures encourage lively interactions between teammates and build friendships outside work. It’s essential to take time to understand the lives of your people and care about their families, dreams, and goals. When your employees feel like they’re real people rather than just a number on your books, they will be more committed to your vision and want to work with you to achieve it.

Organizing the Perfect Company Retreat

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Company Retreat|Organizing the Perfect Company RetreatA company retreat is an excellent way for your employees to bond, learn some new skills and get out of the office. They can range from a simple day out or a more extended weekend-style retreat but are worth considering to strengthen the bonds between your employees. A company activity outside the office can also be an opportunity for you and the rest of your company to take a break and come back to work rejuvenated.

What are Company Retreats?

A company retreat is an opportunity for you and your employees to spend some together outside of the office. This is a great way to get to know your colleagues in a more social setting and take a break from work. A company retreat could also involve different activities designed to increase productivity and trust within your team.

What are the Benefits of a Company Retreat?

There are many benefits to organizing a company retreat. It can be an excellent way for your employees to learn new skills and adopt new attitudes that may increase their productivity inside the office. By encouraging bonding and trust between your employees, you may also see an increased level of efficient teamwork.

A company retreat is a great way to improve your company culture, like flexible working schedules, benefits, and opportunities to give positive feedback. A company retreat could be a way to demonstrate to your employees how much you value them and reward their hard work with some fun activities. Even a small out-of-office activity, like a day out or an organized dinner, can help you and your colleagues approach your work with renewed vigor.

Choosing the Right Retreat for your Business?

Firstly you’ll need to consider the external factors like when everyone is free, the budget for the retreat, and time constraints. If you don’t have the money or time for a multiple-day retreat, something more simple may suit you and your team better.

A classic retreat is to take your team outdoors and learn survival and camping skills, as well as spending some quality time in nature. If that sounds like the perfect idea, you’ll need to ensure that everyone is safe at all times. You may want to consider a wilderness first aid course in case of any unexpected danger. The first aid course could be a chance for your employees to bond and learn in of itself.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, you can even hire an external company to organize the retreat for you to make sure that whatever skills you think your company can benefit from are being taught by professionals.

A simple company outing to go out for dinner, bowling, or a group trip to see a film can be a good way for your employees to get to know each other outside of work. However, a more intense company retreat could be even better to do workshops together, to build or learn certain assets. Either way, you’ll find that your team has become closer and can come back to work refreshed and energetic.

Running An Awards Ceremony For Your Promising Business

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Awards Ceremony for Business|Running An Awards Ceremony For Your Promising BusinessThere are many ways to define and design a healthy and blossoming company culture. Of course, to start with, we must make sure that everyone is afforded the respect they deserve. This often means curating policies with absolutely zero tolerance for workplace bullying, harassment or mistreatment of any kind. Our HR department should also be there to prevent that from happening, and help those who may have been victimized.

After all, no company culture can thrive without getting the essentials right, and as unfortunate as it is that this needs to be addressed, every company can benefit from laying those principles as its fundamental grounding point.

But while it’s important to tackle the difficulties and misfortunes of running a team, it’s also a good idea to invest in the positive aspects of working at your firm. This can help a healthy company culture thrive. While this is worth doing for its own sake, being defined as a great employer and gaining many healthy employee reviews can only help you attract better talent to your firm, and market your positions with renewed confidence.

One of the best annual efforts geared towards this outcome is of running an awards show. This can be humble or offer great production value.

In this guide, we’ll discuss a few means for setting up and maintaining such an event:

Select A Venue

An awards ceremony with its own sense of place is more than worthwhile. Renting space in a venue, such as this best place for a corporate retreat, can make all the difference. This adds a sense of fun to your award ceremony, as well as giving staff the means to let their hair down and attend with a drink in hand, enjoying a celebration of the year just gone.

With a speaking podium, arranged tables to sit at, and a bar or food to enjoy, you can make sure that everyone together can socialize and feel like they’re a welcome part of your family. They are, after all.

On top of this, selecting the venue based on its table arrangement, safety precautions such as fire exits, and the means by which you can enjoy a private affair without being bothered by other hotel or venue guests is worthwhile. You may also be able to get something of a discount if you book a good number of rooms for such a retreat, so it’s always worth asking.

Allocating Awards

It’s good to think of a number of different categories you can use to define these awards. There are many services out there that will engrave and print names or titles on small awards, be that a nice little trophy, a badge, or a certificate.

Perhaps categories could involve a ‘best employee per department,’ or ‘shining customer support’ or an employee that has ‘gone above and beyond.’ It might be that ‘best new hire’ could be allocated to someone who joined in the last twelve months, or ‘best traveling agent’ could be applied to someone who has gone abroad to help your business connections.

You may also decide to throw a few fun ones in there to help the team laugh. If a staff member has been bringing in their oatmeal, fruit and stretching at their desk during lunchtimes, you may allocate a ‘most health-conscious employee’ award just for them. Of course, the benefit of an awards ceremony is that not everyone gets them, so don’t go overboard.

You can put the award categories up to an anonymous vote in your business, and then use actual metrics of performance and potential to decide on the winner. Larger businesses will potentially offer more awards, while small businesses may offer two or three.

Attach Awards To Prizes

Of course, an award does meaning something without a given prize, but it can be nice to offer rewards that actually mean something along with the gesture of winning something. For instance, the employee of the year award might be linked to a paid vacation at the expense of your company, including flights and lodgings for a week.

For others, it might be that you offer gift vouchers. For joke prizes that are tongue-in-cheek, such as the associated health prize mentioned above, you might offer a gift card for a yoga studio. This kind of approach can help the awards ceremony actually mean something more than a team-building event, incentivizing staff year-round to give their all and work on potentially being in with a shot.

Use The Event For An Annual Debrief

Of course, awards are fun, and the ceremony can be a real event that takes place, but it can also be worthwhile to tie an important message to that. For instance, this might be a good place to announce a new product or service you plan to launch, or the opening of a new office, or to perhaps just give your thanks for working so hard during the pandemic.

In some cases, it might be that running an awards ceremony after the end of a training retreat can help you cap off this hardworking effort with real potential. The more you can do this, often, the better off you’ll be.

Get Staff Feedback

Of course, running an event like this can be a complex affair, no matter how simple the actual process of awarding prizes and trophies may be. Getting staff feedback can help you make the next year’s affair that much better. It might be that this time, the awards ceremony lasted too long, or perhaps it would have been better to get a more skilled speaker on stage despite the best efforts of one of your managers.

This way, the yearly awards event can be a fun part of your corporate culture, not just a one-off that you do once and forget about for five years afterwards.

With this approach, we believe your awards ceremony is sure to be an utter success. Perhaps you could give yourself a little award for pulling it off so well.

Turn That Frown Upside Down: Top Tips For Happier Employees

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Employees Article | Turn That Frown Upside Down: Top Tips For Happier Employees

While there are many different ways you can set out to future-proof your business, maintaining employee satisfaction is one of them. This is because employees serve as the ‘face’ of your company, interacting with your clients day in, day out. This means that they are responsible for how others perceive your brand. Furthemore, studies suggest that when we are happier – we are often more productive. This means that by focusing on employee wellbeing, you can also improve your workplace efficiency – which is another step towards success.

That being said, employee satisfaction can be difficult to monitor from an employer’s perspective. This is because while employees may voice their dissatisfaction with their peers – they are likely to do so directly to their boss through fear of being reprimanded. However, this does not mean that their happiness should not be a priority – especially if you are relying on them to help kickstart your entrepreneurial ambitions.

With that in mind, here are some top tips that you can use to guarantee employee happiness in the workplace.

  • Delegate work fairly. One of the biggest complaints that many employees have within the workplace is being overworked and under-compensated. As a result, you should strive to ensure that the amount of work they are tasked with each week is fair and reasonable. You can do this by making the most of the services available to you and your company that can take some of the responsibility off your shoulders. For example, if your company does a lot of deliveries – looking into additional trucking services means that your drivers only have to make one stop instead of 5-6, lightening their workload significantly.
  • Put together a workplace wellbeing program. There are many different reasons why your employees may be unhappy at work – some of which even relate to their personal lives. This is due to the fact that it is sometimes impossible to stop your mood from impacting your work. However, you can combat these issues by placing a real emphasis on wellbeing in the workplace. For example, you could offer support to your staff by providing them with free access to therapy or counselling services. Alternatively, you can promote good workplace wellbeing by encouraging them to reach out for support as and when they need it – whether they want to reduce their hours or take time off.
  • Be responsive to complaints. If you want to create a better workplace for your employees, you need to figure out what you are doing wrong in the first place. The easiest way to do this is to ask. However, as mentioned previously, they might feel reluctant to speak up directly to you. Thankfully, there are various ways in which you can combat this. For example, you could set up an anonymous feedback submission box. Alternatively, you could ask them to elect a member of staff to take on their complaints and discuss them with you privately and anonymously. However, while taking these steps show your employees that you truly care about them – listening is not enough. You then need to make actionable change that shows you have taken on their feedback,