Toxic Workplace Culture: Detecting Issues Before They Begin
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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowWorkplace culture encompasses the personality of your company, how work gets done and how operations influence the behavior and habits of employees. Employees are the foundation of any business model and unfortunately, poor workplace culture can sabotage even the most cutting-edge company. If you want your business to excel across all locations, you must be able to identify performance problems before they lead to unhappy employees and decreased productivity while also hindering opportunities to scale your business.
Recognizing and regulating workplace culture can be a major pain point for businesses, but there are tactics to minimize and even eliminate culture issues affecting your business.
Evaluate turnover rates.
High turnover could be a telling sign that things aren’t right with your work culture. When employees aren’t happy or receiving the fulfillment they need, it’s unlikely they will stick around. If you have multiple employees resigning within the first few months or in the same quarter, it’s important to analyze why, specifically management operations.
When high turnover is present, an effective way to find the source of the problem is through exit interviews or surveys. When responses such as “poor management” turn up, it can indicate small communication issues between employees and management or even more serious conflicts in personality. In an era with many hourly wage positions available, employees are becoming less willing to put up with an unhealthy work environment when they can easily find a better fit elsewhere.
By having the tools in place when turnover rates unexpectedly rise, it will make it easier to identify and remedy the issue early.
Commit to an open communication strategy.
Strong and clear communication is key to any and all business success, however, many organizations have room for improvement when it comes to encouraging open communication. Opening up communication takes commitment and intentional effort, but can lead to benefits like increased employee engagement and productivity, which supports business growth long-term.
The first step when implementing open communication is to ensure that management is committed and understands their role in employee communication. With management connected to all communication, they can recognize gaps in engagement and signs of miscommunication. To simplify workplace communication, business leaders can invest in a workplace management software that supports managers in their efforts by tracking engagement on announcements, messages, policies and more.
Evaluate roles and responsibilities.
Accountability in the workplace is linked to an increase in commitment to work and employee morale, which leads to higher performance and happier employees. However, accountability is lacking in many workplaces and this can stem from employees and management not fully understanding their roles and responsibilities.
In order to establish accountability, you first have to ensure management, and your team at large, feel confident in their roles and responsibilities. By collaborating with employees on their role in the workplace you can better understand where issues or miscommunications are occurring and fix them before it becomes a serious problem.
Roles and responsibilities should be well thought-out and communicated with the employees to establish clear expectations. It’s also important to provide employees with an outline of their roles and responsibilities that they can access at any time.
Utilize micro surveys.
As a leadership team, it can be challenging to receive accurate insight into how your employees are feeling in the workplace. Fortunately, it is fairly simple to set up an anonymous survey for an authentic perception of the work culture at each location.
An employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) is a tool that is often used to assess employee loyalty and touch base with employees. These scores can analyze employee engagement and employee experience, which encourages a healthy workplace culture. An eNPS is easily digestible and can help business owners and operators efficiently track improvements or lack of improvements over time to make changes that are beneficial in the long-term.
By having these tools and strategies in place, all businesses will be better equipped to encourage a positive and cohesive workplace culture.
Matt Goebel is a multi-unit franchisee and the founder and CEO of Woven, an all-in-one workplace management tool for multi-unit franchising founded to keep franchise operators focused on growing their businesses.