Examples and Remedies – Knight Frank (UK) (2023)

Your business has bloomed from brainwaves on the back of napkins to a fully-fledged office with employees. Your balance sheet is looking less and less daunting. Money is being made. You’ve secured funding and you’ve found an office space that helps you thrive.

You think things look hunky-dory.

But, under the surface, something’s not quite right. Employees are feeling burned out, team leaders are becoming frustrated and it would seem morale is on the decline.

Something might be wrong with your company culture.

The Importance of Company Culture

Simply defined, company culture is the environment in which your employees operate. It is one of the main factors that make your business what it is, as it focuses primarily on the employees. And what is a business without employees?

All businesses have a company culture which scales along with your business. Defining and nurturing the culture you want from the start is crucial in ensuring you attract the right kind of audience — from potential employees to clients. It also counts towards creating a healthy work-life balance for your employees.

Startups are fantastic environments for attracting new talent. They welcome ambitious millennials keen to swim in the deep-end and hear the CEO sitting next to them debate decisions. They welcome experienced professionals eager for the rollercoaster of challenges of what really could be the ‘next big thing’.

But startups are wired to grow quickly. Their ambition is to scale up and streamline existing workflows. But when the focus is on year-on-year revenue stats, it’s not uncommon for the people actually driving the growth to be overlooked. This could lead to employees feeling neglected and, eventually leaving, damaging your employee retention rates. This is a fundamental symptom of bad company culture which, as we’ll come to see, can seriously impact your bottom line.

What Are Company Culture Examples

As mentioned, company culture is what makes your business tick. While you might think it covers perks and benefits, such as free health insurance, work drinks and snacks and refreshments, the culture actually goes well beyond that.

Company culture can include your employees feeling comfortable to:

• Take a full hour for lunch
• Share personal issues with colleagues
• Say: “No”
• Speak openly about their mental health
• Stand up for themselves
• Feel excited about career progression
• Feel safe enough to fail on occasion
• Say: “I don’t know how to do that”

As a startup grows and scales, it can be easy to forget about the all-important company culture. In this case, employees can find themselves working under extreme pressure to reach mounting deadlines. If this isn’t caught early, it can create unrealistic expectations and toxic attitudes amongst teams.

Bad company culture examples

A bad company culture breeds presenteeism, burnout and high turnover. While these may sound a bit like buzzwords, they’re poisonous symptoms of poor company culture - and it’s essential that every CEO, founder and manager actively avoid them.

Not only can they create toxic work environments, but they’ll push your top talent out the door. Here are some of the prime symptoms explains:

• Presenteeism is turning up to work for more hours than required. For some business leaders, that might sound like real dedication. But regularly getting in early and leaving long after contracted hours can be a sign that your employees are trying to overprice their abilities or — worse — trying to overcompensate for imposter syndrome.
  This culture of needing to “show face” could be blamed for the general decrease in sickness-related absence days throughout the pandemic. However, it’s been theorised that the findings point to a larger issue of presenteeism, whereby employees continue working despite feeling unwell. A June 2020 study by Canada Life UK backed this theory, reporting that 46% of employees felt pressure to be ‘present’ during lockdown.
• Imposter syndrome is believing you got a job out of sheer luck and you’re anxiously waiting for someone to realise, tap you on the shoulder and say: “You don’t really know what you’re doing, do you?”
  Employers can unwittingly worsen this in their employees by setting unrealistic targets and a “never let them see you sweat” mentality.
• Burnout is the result of excessive, prolonged, work-related stress. Symptoms include poor performance, low levels of creativity, nausea or headaches, exhaustion and workplace insecurity. Employees experiencing burnout have usually overworked themselves due to the pressure to perform, or may not have had a support system to help them cope effectively with workplace stress.
  In a Digital Detox survey by Just Eat for Business, it was found that 43% of UK workers polled admitted to sometimes feeling the effects of burnout, showing that it is an issue that all management teams need to address. The effects of burnout can be so severe that, if left unnoticed, it can cost the business - research by Deloitte revealed that the cost of poor mental health to employers reached a massive £56 billion in 2020-2021.

Naturally, employees can’t thrive in an environment of poor company culture and will leave in search of a more supportive environment.

How to Avoid Creating a Bad Company Culture

Create a company culture where it’s okay to say ‘no’

If your employees are feeling insecure, they’re likely to say yes to every extra task that comes their way, even if it means staying late — and especially if they don’t know that saying no is an option.

As a manager, you can lead by example here. When you’re open about pushing back on your workload without having your employees fill in the gaps, they can stop comparing their behind-the-scenes stress to your productive highlight reel.

When they’re given any extra work, allow them the freedom to say: “My current priorities are XYZ, which would you like me to deprioritise to fit your new tasks in?”

Offer clear expectations

In startups, it’s common to have one-man-band departments. Ensure you’re clear with how you measure success in their role and be realistic with them. A lack of clarity combined with unmanageable workloads can lead to burnout, as it runs the risk of keeping employees behind to stay late to meet difficult demands.

Remember, you want to encourage sustainable growth — not firecracker growth that shoots up to the sky, shines brightly, and then dissolves.

Build a company culture that doesn’t punish failure

Everybody knows that failure is part and parcel of success. No great thing ever prospered without its fair share of setbacks — and not just in the world of startups.

The French state railway ordered $15bn worth of trains that were too wide for hundreds of platforms. George Bell could have bought Google for $1m in 1999 but said no — it’s now valued at $1420 bn.

Create an environment where sharing failure is just as important as sharing success. After all, learning from your mistakes is crucial to the success of your business.

Introduce a wellbeing offering

Your wellbeing offering should be less of a perk and more of a necessity. The next generation of workers, Gen Z, can spot tokenism when it sees it, so try to think beyond free fruit and a kettle for hot drinks.

Rather than piecing together a package and hoping it lives up to employee expectations, consider asking your teams to help you design the wellbeing offering that will suit them the most. Ask what they expect, what they value the most and look at how to alleviate jobs that give them the most stress.

Remember, workplace wellbeing is a combination of financial, physical and mental. Offerings can even include budgeting support and financial planning. For a bit of inspiration, take a look at how these office spaces can boost employee wellbeing.

Make company culture everyone’s responsibility

Bad company culture can sometimes give life to an “us-versus-them” mentality. In this, the more junior employees may feel disconnected from senior team leaders — even in startups that say they have no hierarchy.

Giving your employees accountability also gives them agency. If they’re responsible for contributing to the company culture by helping others, cheerleading their teams and boosting morale, they become a part of the solution and will be more willing to take positive steps.

Even in hybrid working arrangements, it’s easy to create a company culture. By keeping your employees a number-one priority and being intentional about connecting in person with face-to-face meetings, you can easily nurture positive relationships and confident teams that are happy at work.

Great Company Culture Can Boost Business Success

By successfully increasing employee engagement, wellbeing and job satisfaction, you’ll also be improving your bottom line. A recent study found that 69% of organisations that adapted the business during the pandemic found that the company culture offered a competitive advantage. A further 72% reported that the culture was behind the success of changing initiatives.

Taking the time out to establish your company culture - and continually working on improving and adapting it - can work wonders for your employees and business.

As the world of work evolves, how can you stay competitive?

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