Member Article

Three reasons a healthy workplace culture enables growth

When you are a successful entrepreneur running a busy start-up poised to take the steps to scale your business, you’re juggling a number of priorities. Everything from funding and resources, to office space, networking, branding - all while trying to achieve your business goals.

You may feel like you don’t have the time to take to define your values, or put a framework in place to ensure that as your company grows you can make sure it promotes a positive and productive culture, where people are empowered to do their best work. Or perhaps you believe this will happen naturally.

But establishing a healthy culture for your business is as integral a part of success for your business as securing investment. The 2014 Scale-Up report commissioned by the Information Economy Council, sites hiring employees that have the skills you need to grow your business and building leadership as two of the most important hurdles you must tackle in order to successfully scale and grow a business, and culture has a huge roll to play in recruitment and leadership.

The same report found that fewer than 4% of all UK start-ups have ten or more employees ten years after their founding, illustrating just how crucial culture is for growth.

Building a positive and productive culture is laying a foundation for success. Creating an attractive culture for prospective hires and investing in building capable, skilled and authentic leaders needs to be some of your top priorities if you want your business to grow.

Here are three other ways culture contributes to growth:

1.) People will do better work. Establishing a healthy culture means that employees will be inspired to do better work, after all, we are all wired to spend more time and energy in place that inspires us. People who feel good, do better work, and are also invested in maintaining a positive workplace, which helps create an environment that prospective employees and clients will find attractive.

2.) Investors will be more interested. A stable, positive culture is far more attractive to investors. When you’re growing a company, and hoping to get people to put money into it, in today’s competitive environment, one of the things they’ll certainly want to look into is what people think about working for you. Social media and sites like Glassdoor make this easy; if the word of mouth about your company is good, people are more likely to see it as a good option for becoming involved with.

3.) It will save you money. An environment where everyone can be their best selves, and support the vision of a company is an environment where ideas will be able to become actions – this will improve productivity, and companies will save time and money that might otherwise get bogged down in projects that go nowhere, or that are spent on a cycle of recruiting and hiring the wrong employees.

If you want more insight about how a healthy work culture enables growth, attend the free event, ‘How A Healthy Workplace Culture Enables Growth’ for tips and practical advice about how to establish a healthy workplace culture to promote the growth of your business.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Maggie Eckel .