By Bond Collective Staff

Want to improve the way your business runs and how your team interacts with each other and your customers? Build a strong, positive, and productive company culture.

In this article, we define business culture, tell you why it’s important, and give you a number of tried-and-true ways to create the culture you want in your organization.

Company Culture Defined

Company culture, or organizational culture, is the behavior within your business and the meaning that people — employees and customers alike — attach to that behavior.

Within that broad definition lie a number of smaller components that make up the foundation on which your business operates. These fundamental components include various intangibles, such as:

• Values

• Norms

• Ethics

• Systems

• Beliefs

• Habits

• Symbols

• Language

• Assumptions

• Company vision

• Mission statement

• Business strategy

The nice thing about these building-block components is that you can make small changes — to your team’s habits, beliefs, and language, for example — that can send waves of improvement to every corner of your business.

Why Company Culture Contributes To Success

Aside from the fact that, as we mentioned above, company culture can have a profound effect on the way your business operates, it also matters because it’s the lens through which your employees view — and interact with — your organization.

More to the point, the culture in which your employees work every day is the tone and mood they experience with their teammates, managers, and customers.

When your employees feel comfortable within your company culture, they are more likely to enjoy their time at work, develop stronger bonds with coworkers, exhibit better customer service, and be more productive.

This translates directly into higher job satisfaction from within and higher customer satisfaction from without. Both of those variables affect the bottom line and the success of your business.

How To Improve Company Culture

1) Establish A Business Strategy

Your business strategy is a plan that describes how your organization will allocate resources like money, technology, and labor in order to support the everyday activities of your team.

Ideally, business strategy is part of a larger system that includes functional strategy, corporate strategy, and the overarching organizational strategy.

But, when your business is new, you may only have a very basic strategy for moving forward. That’s OK. You can build on it as your business grows.

When it comes to company culture, your business strategy is like the background against which your employees work. It affects their priorities, decision-making, ability to adapt, and many other variables your business needs to be successful.

Establish a business strategy first in order to give your company direction and purpose. This direction and purpose, then, will nurture your company culture.

2) Define Your Company Culture

You don’t want to leave your company culture up to someone else. Nor do you want it to be some nebulous quality that no one in your organization understands.

To avoid those pitfalls, take the time to define your company culture the way you want it to be. Then post that definition — on your website, in your employee handbook, wherever — for everyone to see.

3) Hire The Right People

Once you have a clear definition of what you want your company culture to be, you can start hiring people who will work well within and contribute to that culture.

Don’t just focus on hiring according to skills. A significant part of building a successful business is making sure that your employees can be productive within the culture you envision.

Are they extroverted or introverted? Do they work well with others, or do they prefer to be on their own? Do they demonstrate the same beliefs and morals that you want in your business?

When you hire the right people, you’re building a strong, successful culture one brick at a time.

4) Strive For Diversity

Striving for diversity means hiring people from a broad spectrum of backgrounds, viewpoints, personalities, and values.

When you hire with an eye toward diversity, you promote equality and inclusivity amongst your team members. That feeling will make the individuals on your team happier and more comfortable in their working environment.

And when your employees feel that way, they’ll be more engaged, more motivated, and more productive.

5) Perfect Your Vision And Mission Statements

There’s much confusion surrounding the vision statement and the mission statement, mostly because they seem very similar.

But the vision statement and the mission statement are two very different things. And when you understand that difference, you can perfect them both to improve your company culture and the way your business runs.

A vision statement is:

A declaration of an organization’s objectives intended to guide internal decision-making.

A mission statement is:

A short description of what your company does for its customers, its employees, and its owners.

As you can see from the definitions, a mission statement and a vision statement are closely related but describe different aspects of your business.

Your vision statement is where you want your company to be and where you want your customers, your community, and your world to be as a result of your product or service.

Your mission statement, on the other hand, is the practical plan for making the vision statement a reality. It’s how you’re going to run your business in order to reach your goals.

Perfecting both statements informs your customers and employees what your business is all about. You can also harness that information to guide your team in how they should act toward you, toward each other, and toward the customer.

Work Environment And Company Culture

Company culture is, first and foremost, about people.

People need inspiration to do their best work. They need the best tools at hand. They need comfort, flexibility, and community.

Without these variables, employee performance suffers, business success decreases, and your company culture falls apart.

How can you provide all of these essentials without burning through your hard-earned capital or locking yourself into a restrictive and expensive long-term lease? By basing your team in a coworking space, like Bond Collective.

Bond Collective offers thoughtfully curated boutique work environments that provide an unmatched experience for startups, small businesses, and large corporations alike.

We know inspiration doesn’t come easy. When your team does experience a moment of creativity, you want to prolong it as much as possible.

Bond Collective decorates, arranges, and operates each one of its many locations with inspiration, creativity, and innovation in mind.

Bright colors, natural light, stimulating textures, and plenty of space for your body and your mind to move around — these are the unique ways in which Bond Collective brings inspiration into the work environment.

Another crucial aspect of strong company culture is having the right tools. That’s why Bond Collective offers:

• Fast, reliable WiFi and Ethernet connections

• Unlimited black-and-white printing

• Mail and package handling

• Private meeting and phone booths

• Guest reception and greeting

• Custom build-outs

• Daily porter service

• Nightly office cleaning

When you and your team don’t have to think about these features — because they’re just there whenever you need them — you can focus all of your efforts on getting the job done, pleasing the customer, and improving the way your business operates.

And don’t forget about comfort and flexibility. Bond Collective offers those as well.

All our office spaces are furnished with the highest quality of comfort and design. Many areas within Bond Collective allow for easy reconfiguration to accommodate an impromptu brainstorming session or emergency meeting — that’s flexibility in a nutshell.

Or, if privacy is paramount, take advantage of private phone booths, exclusive workspaces, and reserved conference rooms for two to 20 or more.

At Bond Collective, you’ll work side by side with other like-minded professionals and experience the connections, stimulation, innovation, and a whole host of other intangibles that your team can’t get from working in isolation.

That in itself is a huge boost to your company culture.

Take advantage of all that Bond Collective has to offer to help you improve your company culture, your team, and your business as a whole.

Visit any one of Bond Collective’s many locations in the United States, including workspaces in New York, Pennsylvania, Washington D.C., Illinois, Tennessee, and Texas. Or call us today to find out more.

And while you’re at it, schedule a tour to experience first-hand how the boutique work environments at Bond Collective can benefit your business.