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Company Culture Doesn’t Just Impact Well-Being — It Also Impacts Productivity
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# Company Culture Doesn’t Just Impact Well-Being — It Also Impacts Productivity

John Hall
Senior Contributor
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

John Hall covers entrepreneurial topics that help companies grow.

Mar 13, 2020,05:00pm EDT

This article is more than 4 years old.

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Although it’s changed over the decades, organizational culture has been discussed and studied since it was introduced by psychoanalyst, social scientist, and management consultant Dr. Elliott Jaques in The Changing Culture of a Factory in 1951.

While culture can be difficult to define, one thing hasn’t changed: the impact it has on productivity. Successfully fostered, culture can improve your team’s health and well-being, increase engagement, and create a more collaborative and supportive work environment.

How Culture Can Boost Productivity

Employees naturally feel less in control of their work than owners do — owners often are the ones holding the reins of their companies, determining who’s hired, how processes are designed, and what happens if those processes or people run off the rails.

A Harvard Business Review survey revealed that 58 percent of employees trust strangers more than they trust their own bosses. Many ethical people have a hard time working for employers they don’t trust — and those who do succeed in working for untrustworthy bosses do so by finding workarounds, as The Muse explained.

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The culture you build has to reinforce teammates’ trust in one other and provide an environment of psychological safety. A culture like this is really a self-fulfilling prophecy:

It improves the health and well-being of your team.

In my opinion, this is an area leaders have been neglecting for quite some time, and that doesn’t make a lot of sense. As I’ve written before, when you neglect your well-being, you’re more likely to be stressed, tired, or sick. You’re also more likely to make mistakes. You’re even more prone to injuries and accidents.

However, as Emma Seppälä and Kim Cameron write in Harvard Business Review , despite this, “many companies bet on having a cut-throat, high-pressure, take-no-prisoners culture to drive their financial success.”

But Seppälä and Cameron explain that there’s a growing body of research that “demonstrates that not only is a cut-throat environment harmful to productivity over time, that a positive environment will lead to dramatic benefits for employers, employees, and the bottom line.”

These types of environments lead to more workplace stress; in turn, these cause more absenteeism and are linked to disease and death. They also create a culture of fear, which leads to disengagement over the long haul. Perhaps worst of all for leaders, it increases turnover rates. That’s just not bad for your bottom line from a sheer supply-and-demand work perspective; it also lowers productivity because of a decrease in morale.

When there’s a merry-go-round of new employees, you and your team are pulled away from more important work so you can train new hires or show them the ropes. Your most important priorities get less time, meaning the productivity rates of your most essential functions fall off.

As an added bonus, reversing or avoiding a fear-filled culture will help you attract top talent in the future. Talented people who’ve endured negative environments will refuse to do so again — and those are the exact people you want to reinforce the positive foundation of your own culture.

It boosts engagement and motivation.

No surprise here: In fact, one study found that companies with winning organizational cultures have 72% higher employee engagement ratings than organizations with weak cultures. When you’re engaged with your work, you have passion and purpose because there’s clarification on the goals you should focus on. Moreover, positive work environments embrace a culture where recognition and appreciation are the norm.

In turn, you’ll have a team that’s intrinsically motivated to go above and beyond without you having to micromanage. And, as you know, this creates autonomy, which is a key attribute to job satisfaction.

It cultivates a collaborative and supportive environment.

“It’s common for us to underestimate the importance of the company we keep,” Jennifer Cohen wrote in a previous Forbes article. “We need people, whether they're teachers, mentors, family or trusted friends, who challenge us and push us to be better. The right circle of influence raises the bar, helping us to set new, loftier expectations of ourselves.”

It’s true: A 2014 Stanford study found that working together increases motivation. People gravitate toward collaboration rather than competition. “The results showed that simply feeling like you’re part of a team of people working on a task makes people more motivated as they take on challenges,” the researchers said.

Moreover, another study from the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) and Rob Cross, Edward A. Madden Professor of Global Business at Babson College, “found that companies that promoted collaborative working were 5 times as likely to be high performing.”

This isn’t shocking. A positive work culture prevents team members from competing with each other. It also ensures that your company doesn’t foster a toxic work environment where bullying and harassment run rampant.

When you build a collaborative and supportive work environment, your teammates can share ideas, help each other develop skills, and pick one another up when they stumble. Additionally, through collaboration, your team members can pull from each other’s talents and strengths, welcome diverse thoughts, and solve problems more quickly.

How to Build a Productive Work Culture

Companies like Apple, Google, Netflix, and Dell have been able to achieve superior productivity by paying their employees what they’re worth, as well as promoting flexibility, investing in professional development, and celebrating team milestones instead of individual performance.

However, as my co-founder John Rampton has written, leaders can also create a positive work culture by developing a core set of values and priorities, being respectful of teammates’ time, optimizing the physical work environment, and having a little fun in the workplace. At our company, we like to celebrate birthdays, volunteer as a team, and organize team-building activities, ranging from snowball fights to Independence Day cookouts.

If you want to improve productivity within your company, you need to create a positive culture. It won’t just boost morale and collaboration; it will also empower people to focus on their most important tasks and engage with their work like never before. A culture that improves employee and company well-being is the sweet spot you should aim for.