How do you create a positive workplace culture?
A positive workplace culture at its core is an environment where team members really enjoy coming to work. A place that provides inspiration, creativity and team members are engaged in their roles. Everyone is contributing towards a similar goal and are in the business to make a difference.
What does a positive workplace culture look like for you? What is your own definition of a positive work environment?
If you aren’t sure where to start to achieve this, or are looking for inspiration to create a positive place of work for your team, today on the podcast I’m sharing my top 8 tips to create a positive workplace culture.
Including:
- Why knowing your values, your team values & the company values are so important
- Building trust and creating psychological safety
- Fostering workplace relationships and connection
- Why having a common purpose is important
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Anne:
Hello, and welcome back to the Lead Like You podcast, where we empower emerging leaders to lead with courage, vulnerability, with their strength and emotional intelligence.
In today’s episode, I’m going to share with you eight tips on how you can improve the work culture in your team and organization.
Hello and welcome back to my YouTube channel, where I empower emerging leaders to lead with courage, vulnerability, with their strength and emotional intelligence. Let’s change the world of leadership and work together to improve our workplace cultures.
And that gets me straight into the topic today. We’re going to explore eight tips on how you can improve your culture in your team, right away. Make sure that you subscribe to my channel and hit the notification bell so that you will always be up to date on new episodes.
So let’s get straight into it. So tip number one is to really focus on your leadership values. What is it that you stand for and how do these values show up in the work that you do, in how you show up as a leader every single day, how do you make decisions based on your values? How do you provide feedback based on your values.
And then in a second step, look at the company’s values. If you work for a bigger corporation, what are their values and how are they lived? How do your values work together with the company values? Where are they similar, where they’re different and what does that mean for you as a leader? Where’s the potential conflict.
And how do you show up based on that, and also look at maybe defining values with your team. What does your team stand for? What does your team want to achieve and how do they really want to show up. Looking at values is key so that everyone understands your personal leadership values, the leadership values of the organization and the leadership values or the values of the team.
If you would like some help on understanding your leadership values I have a great free workbook that you can download under annekoopmann.com/values. and I will link it in the show notes as well, and through a few simple reflective exercises, this workbook will guide you to identifying your leadership values and how they show up in your leadership everyday.
Tip number two is all about trust. So you need to build trust to have a good positive workplace culture. And to do that, the key really is that you trust first as a leader, you have to give trust before you can receive it. So you can think about giving your team members the trust that they can be empowered to do their own tasks, their own decisions, to learn and learn from their mistakes. And you can open up and share your mistakes, your learnings from the past, you can empower them with the next big step or with the next big presentation. And also really show up and do what you say you will do. That’s really important to build trust in the long run.
Tip number three is to improve the psychological safety in your team. What does that mean?
Amy Edmondson defined psychological safety and people individuals feeling safe to speak up about their ideas, concerns, questions, and mistakes. And it’s the belief that they won’t be punished if they do so.
To understand if you have psychological safety established in your team, ask yourself, do team members come with you with their mistakes, with their doubts, with their questions. Do they feel safe to take risks and learn from their mistakes? Do they feel safe to criticize you and give you feedback?
Do people in your team feel like it’s okay to ask for help. So this can be quite good hint for you to figure out if you have psychological safety established in your team. And if you would love to learn more, I’m going to link another podcast episode where I have gone down really deep into how you can establish psychological safety.
Another important point to establish a positive workplace culture is to focus on the wellbeing of your employees. How are they feeling what’s been going on? How are their stress levels? How is their personal life effected? Do they have resilience and coping mechanisms in place?
How can you help them to cope? And key really is here to have regular conversations about wellbeing and even build it into the personal development plan for each employee. Make this part of your discussions of your goal settings to help them focus on their wellbeing aswell.
Tip number five is around focusing on the workplace relations and the relationships. How do people feel like as part of your team, do they feel like they belong? Do they feel like they can trust the people in their team? Do they know each other well? Do they have enough moments to really build those connections?
So start to think about, are there anything that you can put in place, any regular meetings, any regular social interactions so that people really can get to know themselves
The next tip is all around a common purpose. People want to work for something that is meaningful. They want to know that what they work for has a bigger purpose is going to change something, is going to have impact And sometimes it’s all about trying to find out how you can make the goal of the company meaningful to them. How can you create something powerful behind that? What they have to achieve and behind their goals, how can you connect it to their personal lives and just help them see how working towards the company’s goals is going to help them achieve a personal goal as well.
And then look at how can you create a common purpose amongst your team members so that they really feel like they’re working together towards something bigger.
Tip number seven is all around establishing a good feedback culture. So is it the norm that people give and receive feedback towards you as their leader, but also to one another. And how are you focusing on making sure that this is strength-based feedback that leads with positive intent that focuses on what the people are good at and help them amplify doing the things they do best naturally in an order to achieve the challenges and goals. People crave ongoing feedback. They want to know how they’re going. They want to feel appreciated regularly. They want to get some feedback of how they’re tracking against their goals, they need to know how can they measure up against their goals. So what are your expectations, making sure they’re really clear.
And then what are you checking mechanisms to provide feedback regularly and really making sure that you open up the dialogue. You’re ensuring that there is a possibility for them to also give you feedback, ask for feedback regularly. What do you need from me to do your job? What do you need me to do more of, to do less of?
What can I do to support you right now? Give them a chance to provide feedback and really focus on building this strengths-based culture so that everyone can start see what every individual brings to the team. So they learn to appreciate everyone for their differences for their uniqueness, and is able to point out when someone is working in their strength and at the same time pointing out when someone can improve on something without using shame.
And show that to provide feedback regularly on a regular basis. Don’t just wait for once or twice a year in the performance reviews really provide feedback on the go. So everybody knows where they’re at and how they’re tracking to what’s their goals and expectations.
And this leads me really well into tip number eight, which is about creating a culture of development. Individuals want to feel like you are investing in them and their development that you care about their development and their personal goals. Help them become better at what they do, help them achieve their career goals. Even if that means that they will move on. The best compliment for you is that your employees will move on to an awesome role.
That they are really, really excited for either promotion or a sidestep that they feel like going to fulfill them and bring them closer to their goals. So how can you help them get there, invest in training, ask them what they want to do, give feedback, and really see how you can create this culture that focuses on employee development.
Help people step into their strength, help them do what they do best every day. How can you shift their role? How can you shift their tasks? How can you create an environment that fulfills the needs of their strengths so that they can be at their best every day?
And as a little bonus hint here for development in adapting, a leadership style that is focused on coaching, it’s really going to help you here, help them figure out where they want to go within themselves. Ask really deep questions so that they can reflect on, what it is that they want, where they can improve, where they think they can invest in themselves.
Really look at helping and support them, by a coaching style to help them figure out the solutions themselves. That’s really going to create a difference.
So these were eight quick tips for you to implement straight away, to invest in a positive workplace culture, or even just focused on your team. Just take one bit at a time and start to take some actions to build this positive environment where people are seen and appreciated for what they bring to the job.
where people have the ability to give input, provide feedback and feel like they can grow. And the company and you are invested in their growth aswell. If you liked this episode, I would love to hear your biggest takeaway or which action you’re going to take to support your team and build a positive workplace culture.
Can’t wait to hear from you.
