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8 Ways Company Culture Drives Performance

8 Ways Company Culture Drives Performance
by William Craig

It’s not possible to conceive of a country with no culture. Wherever people gather, that’s where culture can be found. Nevertheless, it doesn’t happen on its own — especially where companies are concerned.

The right cultural foundation and the right priorities now could help your organization realize significant performance improvements. It might also deliver some of your strongest value propositions that can place you decisively above the competition. Read on to learn more.

1. A Rich Company Culture Leads to Innovation

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that companies with healthy and well-realized cultures tend to innovate better and more often than companies that do not. Now we have formal scientific studies to explain why.

The researchers mince no words: “Corporate culture is … the most important factor driving innovation,” said Rajesh Chandy, who teaches at the University of Minnesota.

The “why” is something we’ll touch on further as we explore the other ways culture influences performance. It makes good intuitive sense though, doesn’t it? If culture is, in part, about how well a company empowers its team members to perform their jobs accurately and thoughtfully, it follows that a healthy culture would inevitably lead to a stable of professionals who can solve problems in brand-new ways.

2. Culture Stresses Common Values and Common Goals
Another of the most important facets of company culture involves values. It might not sound like the most compelling priority for a new business venture or one that wants to hit the ground running with new products, but nothing in life is worth doing unless you have a good reason and a solid mission, right?

Your company was founded on more than just anticipating incoming profits. It was founded because, as an entrepreneur, there are things in life that you value — and you want your company and your products to bring those values to others and help enrich their lives.

Having a robust company culture means living by those values and that mission each day and encouraging your teammates to do the same. A strong culture produces employees with a well-tuned sense of direction and helps create common definitions of success, so your company can grow as a team.

3. Strong Culture Means Better Retention

There are quite a few reasons why high employee turnover is a situation worth avoiding. Look beyond the immediately practical — it’s about more than the material cost of seeking out, bringing aboard and training a new employee, which is admittedly quite high.

Think instead about what it means to preside over a company that people simply don’t want to leave. If you’ve never researched which companies in America have the lowest and highest turnover rates, the results might surprise you. In 2013, the most famous names in the high-turnover column included Google, Amerigroup Corp. and Berkshire Hathaway. Meanwhile, Eastman Kodak, General Motors and CenturyLink had some of the longest median tenures.

What separates the wheat from the chaff, so to speak? It’s culture — almost certainly.
 
Read full article on Forbes.