8 Ways to Create a Positive Company Culture

8 Great Ideas for Creating a Positive Company Culture

1) Envision the culture you want to create.

A great culture doesn’t just happen. You have to know what you want and you have to spread the word. That’s the single most important part of creating a great culture–casting a vision for your people to buy into. We created a detailed 5-page vision that covers every aspect of the culture we’re trying to create at Hivehouse Digital, including key elements, like:

Our Brand Promise:

We promise to make data-driven recommendations to solve your unique business challenges.

Our Core Values:

• Fearless
• Accountable
• Collaborative
• Transparent
• Supportive

We review this document every quarter and make sure the decisions we make support the culture we are trying to create.

2) Hire the right people.

This is the most difficult part of the equation to achieve and maintain. While technical aptitude is obviously important, we also work hard to hire people who share our core values. Mismatched core values lead to conflict and communication headaches, and typically can’t be changed through training or coaching.

It’s also important to put the right people in the right seats, and hire people who can help you get to the next level. As your business grows, your staffing needs change – so you should try to recruit and retain people who can adapt and evolve with the company.

3) Discourage too much work.

We don’t like our employees to consistently work more than 45 hours per week, and we protect their workload as much as possible. One way we do that is by tracking the estimated time for each task. By tracking upcoming tasks and estimated time, we know if someone has too much on their plate and we do what we can to lighten their load. We also try to make sure everyone has time set aside for training and professional development to keep our skills and brains sharp.

Maintaining a balance between billable, productive time and “recharge” time can be difficult in a fast-paced work environment, so it’s important to keep the issue top of mind and help employees say no when they are feeling overwhelmed.

4) Don’t track paid time off.

Officially, our benefits package includes seven holidays and 15 PTO days. In reality, we don’t really stick to this policy –and occasionally we even add a holiday (for example, if Christmas Eve falls on a Monday). As long as your work gets done and you’re not leaving anyone in the lurch, you can take the day off.

Knowing they don’t have to be miserly with their vacation days frees our employees to take a mental health day when they need it, and they don’t have to worry about whether to call in sick if they’re a bit under the weather. Having the freedom to be away from work makes being at work exponentially more enjoyable.

5) Work some fun into the mix.

Take a look at our Slack channels you’re likely to hear movie quotes thrown around, YouTube videos being shared and bad puns being punted.

Even though we’re remote now, we make an effort to meet as a team in-person quarterly, along with our biweekly virtual team time where we play games, catch up, and talk TV and movie recommendations. Even as a remote company, a thriving company culture is important to maintain.

6) Treat their families like they’re family.

Hivehouse Digital was created to provide a place where staff can flourish personally and professionally. We don’t see a difference between personal life and work life–if things are hard at home, they’ll be hard at work too. So we make it easy for employees to leave in the middle of the day if there’s a sick kid or if a spouse needs help.

Life throws curveballs on its own schedule, and we’re willing to adjust as much as possible so staff can take care of problems with the attention that’s needed.

7) Open your books.

Every employee knows the financial health of the organization–good, bad, and ugly–and we talk openly about it as a company every month.

Why on earth would we open our books to all our employees? Because it builds trust and accountability. Besides the fact that our staff better understand business decisions and needs of the company, it creates an honest and trusting environment. People love working for a company that’s willing to be open and honest with them.

8) Work where you want, when you want.

We operate entirely in the cloud, which means our staff can work anywhere there’s an internet connection. And because we realize life doesn’t pause during business hours, we give employees the freedom to work off-site whenever they need to, and to work alternative hours if necessary.

Anyone can work where they want, when they want, as long as they’re not needed at the office and can be reached. We don’t have problems with the privilege being abused–partly because responsible, hard work is built into our company culture (see #1), and partly because we hire the right people.