Employee Activation
How Focusing on Workplace Culture Drives Marketing Performance

How Focusing on Workplace Culture Drives Marketing Performance

March 11, 2020
4 min read

Every company wants to improve its performance. Here’s the secret: Focus on improving your workplace culture. Discover how here.
We’ve all heard how important it is to have a positive workplace culture. After all, it costs quite a bit of money to replace unhappy employees.

But what you might not know is that when you get it right, your workplace culture can drive performance as well. By whatever standard you measure performance: growth, sales, profit, innovation, or something else, your culture is a critical factor in boosting those numbers.

Quick Takeaways:

  • Start transforming your workplace culture by focusing on your mission.
  • Blend in a diversity of gifts, shared values, and mutual trust.
  • Add a dash of empathy – and savor the benefits of better performance.

Inspire Teams to Fulfill Your Mission with a Value-Oriented Culture

A healthy workplace culture emphasizes the values of its founders. When a company’s current leaders can spark a desire in their employees to internalize those values, those values stop being yours.

Your employees become brand evangelists, extolling the virtues of your products and services to others. That’s not all. They also exhibit more teamwork.

When your teams have a mission, they hold common values that drive them to minimize personal differences and concentrate on achieving their common goal. When there is a common view of what constitutes success, teams coalesce around that goal, drive forward, and achieve it.

Leverage More of Your Employees’ Gifts with a Diverse Culture

Diversity isn’t just a perfunctory nod in the direction of “wokeness” to make your company look good on paper. A truly diverse culture doesn’t hire for demographic differences for the sake of PR.

It hires people for the gifts they bring to the company. One of the most valuable gifts people can bring is their perception – their insights.

Those demographic traits that make your employees different give you an alternative view of the world. When you have that perspective, you have insight into how people who think that way might react to your products, your marketing campaigns, and your policies.

Speed Up the Onboarding Process with a Cohesive Culture

After you’ve hired the best people, signed them up for tax withdrawals and company benefits, you need to integrate them into the company. That process, says Craig, goes more smoothly when there are definitive expectations regarding communication style, who is responsible for what tasks and responsibilities, and, for lack of a better term, where the buck stops.

Source: https://www.greenhatpeople.com/uk/onboarding-game/

The faster that you can onboard new employees, infusing them with your shared values, as well as educating them about how things work in your company, the more quickly they can get up to speed.

Promote Long-Term Trust with a Positive Culture

When you have a culture of honesty and mutual trust, it doesn’t just affect your internal teams. Such a culture makes an impact on customers as well.

When they see a company that owns its mistakes and makes things right, they are more likely to trust that company with their business.

Drive Innovation with a Creative Culture

Innovation in marketing, as Ben Allen points out, depends on both creativity and careful analysis. The same, of course, is true in any department. Whether your job is developing new products or pushing a broom down the hallway, thinking about better, faster, and more efficient ways to do that job makes you more valuable to the company.

  • Flexibility: Creating the kind of company culture that’s flexible enough to allow those employees who need to collaborate the space to do so – and those who need solitude a place to get off by themselves. Not only that, but you should also vary their tasks, Allen says. Tedious tasks for hours on end impede both creativity and the ability to analyze data. Providing variety in task assignments helps to prevent frustration and increase creativity.
  • R & R: Employee burnout is one of the most effective deterrents to innovation. No one does their best work when the creative well runs dry. Companies that pay employees to take the time to dream, such as 3M, see incredible increases in innovation. According to the human resources experts at SHRM, creativity triples when employees can take time off from work.
  • Atmosphere: Create a comfortable, aesthetically pleasing space for your employees. Remember, your employees spend the better part of each day there.
  • Activation: Companies that empower their employees to share content with their contacts foster a culture in which employees feel a sense of ownership in their company. As a result of employee activation, your brand messages are likely to have 561 percent the reach of those your marketing.
  • Empathy: When employers create a safe space in which risk-taking, innovation – and even failure – are encouraged, they can turn their employees’ minds loose on creating new products and services, more effective marketing strategies, and better ways to do their work. Allowing employees to express suggestions and other ideas freely, as well as praising them for those suggestions, provides the ideal incubator for innovation. In today’s corporate environment, there isn’t room for yesterday’s stereotype – the mean boss.

Make a Better First Impression with a People-Focused Culture

What’s the first thing you notice when you walk into a store, an office, or a warehouse? Chances are, it’s the company’s culture. If you see employees who are happy, empowered, and unafraid, you’ll feel an instant sense of relaxation.

On the other hand, if you see stressed-out employees, managers who berate them, and lists of rules plastered all over the wall, you’ll probably run for the door. It’s not a place you want to do business with.

Bottom line – when customers see that you treat employees well, it’s a clue that they’ll treat them well – even after the sale. When they see that you empower your employees to suggest needed changes, they’ll know that they’ll listen to their suggestions.

That’s huge. A listening culture is one that will reach out to its customers to discover their needs and find a way to meet those needs. Above all, that’s the kind of company people want to do business with.

It’s not about your stuff. It’s about how you do business. With an engaged, empowering culture, your company can lead its industry in whatever metric you deem most important.

If you are ready to leverage your cultural transformation with more traffic to your site, get quality content that’s consistently published. You can get that kind of content with our Content Builder Service. Set up a quick consultation, and I’ll send you a free PDF version of my books. Get started today and generate more traffic and leads for your business.

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Michael Brenner

Michael Brenner is an international keynote speaker, author of "Mean People Suck" and "The Content Formula", and Founder of Marketing Insider Group. Recognized as a Top Content Marketing expert and Digital Marketing Leader, Michael leverages his experience from roles in sales and marketing for global brands like SAP and Nielsen, as well as his leadership in leading teams and driving growth for thriving startups. Today, Michael delivers empowering keynotes on marketing and leadership, and facilitates actionable workshops on content marketing strategy. Connect with Michael today.