The Importance of Corporate Culture and Communication

In the last ten years, corporate culture has become a popular topic in the business world.

The idea is simple: creating strong, real ties between employers and improving their work environment will, in turn, increase productivity and innovation.

Yet, changing your company culture is no easy feat, since the whole business model and plan needs to adapt to a new culture.

Thankfully, there are tried and tested methods that can help your company culture blossom and thrive.  Adopting Agile methodologies and frameworks can help encourage cultural change.

How Does Agile Improve Business Innovation?

Agile is a series of practices, frameworks, and methods that can be applied to every business to increase innovation and productivity. The Agile Manifesto, which foundational to the Agile movement, contains principles and values that are foundational to achieving those goals in the smoothest way.

Why is innovation so impfortant, you might wonder?

Well, according to a survey by MindMatters, up to 75% of employees believe that their original ideas are overlooked or not reviewed correctly.

If you consider how businesses like Apple and M3 returned from the brink of bankruptcy thanks to innovation alone, you realize that businesses that overlook innovation risk extinction.

This is where training comes in!

With just a few seminars and some determination, your business can change to support a company culture that helps employees create new, original ideas. In short, Agile will help you create a stable company culture that delivers.

The Basic Principles of Good Company Culture

Healthy company culture isn’t all about being polite and kind to each other in the workplace. It is, above all, about driving people to do their best.

To get employees to a state where they want and feel able to deliver top notch work, you need to:

1. Offer Clear Feedback. Timely feedback can make or break a project. Offering feedback while it is still useful is important to guide employees to improve while working. Avoid yearly or monthly employee reviews and offer your advice as soon as possible.
2. Balance Negative and Positive Feedback. People get discouraged when they receive negative feedback. This is why it is important that for every negative comment there are at least 6 positive ones.
3. Promote Cultural Tolerance. It is important that a workplace is welcoming to cultural minorities. Having an open mind about individual lifestyles, cultures, and beliefs, will create a welcoming atmosphere that allows originality. An open mind is, after all, the basic prerequisite for innovation.
4. Encourage Casual Meetings. Not every meeting should be goal-oriented. Top-tier businesses like Google allow their employees to meet and discuss whatever they want, promoting individual thought and creativity.
5. Embrace an Agile mindset.   Agile practices, such as  Scrum  and Kanban promote a continuous improvement encourage your team to divide work into small, manageable chunks, implement the change, evaluate the results, and then start the process again.   This helps change be implemented faster and have greater success rates.

In the end, company culture is all about creating a workplace that is both focused and creative. Achieving this balance might seem difficult at first for a company that is new to the concept. Thankfully, you can find reputable Agile and culture coaches available to help moving forward. Partnering with such a provider will enable you to create a healthy and productive company culture.

Thanks for coming in today.

Chris