With the cost of recruiting, hiring, and training staff, the importance of culture fit in employee retention can’t be overlooked. If you want to build a better team, you need to take advantage of the latest in company culture ideas. It’s vital for the culture at your company to be strong if you want to keep your team happy, collaborative, and productive.

Here are five ideas to implement today.

1. Be More Transparent

If you want to start changing your company culture, start by implementing some new transparency tactics. Transparency has a positive impact on your employees because they get to feel connected and responsible for the direction of the company.

Transparency is all about giving your employees a voice. When they feel like they can speak openly, see the results of their feedback, and talk directly and honestly with superiors, they feel like they can trust you. Employees that have trust in the way that their company works are more likely to be loyal and to share their best ideas with you.

When employees don’t feel like they can trust you, they’ll save their best ideas for themselves. Worse, they might save those ideas for your competitors, leaving you without the chance to outdo the other companies in your industry.

Modern communication and collaboration tools are the best way to improve transparency. Let your employees track their own progress on a project and where they are with productivity tools. Use communication tools that show everyone what’s going on, regardless of the size of your team.

If they want to opt out, let them, but make sure they know where the info is if they want it.

2. Offer More Rewards

Healthy competition is a great way to encourage a vibrant and exciting company culture. However, winning and losing doesn’t have to put your team members against one another.

The best way to run a productivity competition is against yourself. Look at what you did last month or the last time you had a project like this. If the conditions were the same, see if you can beat your numbers.

If the conditions have changed, make it so you can try to be as good as you were last time.

Make sure the rewards are worthwhile but not devastating if you don’t meet the mark. The reward can be small if the scale is small. One idea would be if you hit your daily figures, the team picks lunch, or else you get to pick lunch.

Either way, everyone eats. They might just have to deal with the pizza place you like over the chicken place they like.

You can offer material rewards as well, so long as the playing field is even. Offer gift cards or duties to the people who exceed expectations. There will be different experience levels so make sure you’re comparing staff on their own terms, not against one another.

3. Encourage Collaboration

If you want to change your culture, you need to shake things up. People naturally build tribes over time and stick with working with one or two people again and again. While this has its benefits, you should encourage people to work with people who they’ve never worked before.

If two employees struggle to see eye to eye, try making them depend on one another for a project or for running a meeting. This puts them in a situation where it’s mutually beneficial to work together and to succeed. The more you get them to collaborate, the better morale will be on your team overall.

Encourage older and more experienced people to work with your newer team members. This creates a skill exchange where the people who’ve been there the longest, learn new tactics. The newer team members are going to learn why you do the things you do the way you do them.

This is a powerful way to get everyone on the same side, working to ensure that your team succeeds above all else. For more ideas on how to build your teams up with collaboration, check out this website.

4. Embrace Progressive Stack

This is an esoteric idea but in a world of inclusivity and intersectionality, it’s vital. You know that there are people on your team who are quieter than others. They’re no less clever or productive than the loudest voices on the floor.

However, you need to find ways to get those quieter voices to roar a little louder.

One way is for you to teach your team about the progressive stack. In this model, people who have perspectives that are less likely to be heard get the top priority. In tech culture, this means giving more women of color and queer people voice on the direction of where you go.

Where one identity tends to dominate, try to move in the opposite direction so that your company’s culture is one not just of visible diversity but real inclusivity. It takes real effort to make everyone welcome and you should embrace the way that real diversity makes a company stronger.

5. Reflection and Feedback Matter

Your company culture won’t really be able to grow if there’s no time for you to reflect on your past mistakes and why you’ve succeeded. Reflection is one of the most important parts of any project because it informs the way you do business moving forward.

Make sure your staff knows how important their feedback is so that they feel comfortable sharing it. Start each meeting like this by admitting a fault and a success so that other people feel comfortable doing the same.

Company Culture Ideas Can Be Simple

A few simple changes to the way that people communicate in your office can have a massive impact on your productivity. If you want to ensure that everyone feels their voice is heard, use company culture ideas that inspire communication and feedback.

After you’ve improved internal communication, follow our guide for improving outside communication.