Office Culture: What is it and Why is it so Important to your Business?

Excellent workplace culture is something that every office should have. Some businesses, however, don’t know where to start – is it something you can create or is it formed by the team you have?  A lot of fluff or fundamental to the growth of your business?  Here at AAG we understand the importance of an evolving work culture and strive to be the best place to work.

What is Office Culture?

In order to have good office culture, you will need to have some basic understanding of what it’s all about.  An office culture is the resulting behaviours, produced by the team you have, creating a dominant set of norms.  There are initiatives, practices and actions you can take to help influence these behaviours but fundamentally it comes from the individuals within.  This makes recruitment and positive retention of staff crucial factors in creating the culture you desire.

Each business will have its own ‘what good looks like’ but a great office culture tends to be based around reward, performance, development, attitude and agreed expectations.  It must be led from the top and be based on true and authentic beliefs that people see, or feel, a benefit of being a part of.

Why is Office Culture important?

For a business to thrive it is imperative that the key success factor, the team, are happy, motivated, loyal – in short, raving fans!

Millennials cite culture, values and the opportunity to develop their biggest motivators when looking for companies to work for.  If you want to attract the best staff you have to have a culture that will fulfil their needs.

For your business to grow, your staff must develop.  For customer service to be excellent, your staff must be happy.  To achieve an outcome, clear expectations must be set and agreed.

‘Engage for Success’ believe there are four enablers to creating a positive office culture and staff engagement:

• Strategic Narrative
  A compelling story of the business, its vision and proposed journey to achieve its goals. Employees must understand the vision, the role they play and become empowered.
• Engaging Managers
  Engaging managers who focus their people and give them scope, treat their people as individuals and coach and stretch their people.
• Employee Voice
  Where an organisation sees its people not as the problem, rather as central to the solution, to be involved, listened to, and invited to contribute their experience, expertise and ideas.
• Integrity
  The values on the wall are reflected in day to day behaviours. There is no ‘say–do’ gap. Promises made are promises kept, or an explanation given as to why not.

AAG Culture

At AAG we consider our office culture to be nothing less than outstanding, so here are a few examples of what we have done that have proved extremely successful in building a workplace, culture and team we are truly proud of:

• A learning culture where every member of staff is encouraged to take up formal or informal training to help develop themselves and the team around them
• Quarterly reviews aligned to individuals own Vision, Intentions and Purpose with clearly defined KPIs and success targets
• The right to challenge. Every member of staff is encouraged to challenge the management team, their peers and the processes in order to learn something new or find an improvement that will benefit the customer, the staff and the business
• Regular personal development meetings to track progress and achievements in goal setting
• Employee of the Quarter and a regular Staff Engagement Survey tracking feedback for continual improvement
• An internal instant messaging system to share news and updates in real time.