After you’ve launched your startup and reached a modest level of business success, it’s only natural to be curious about how to improve your business even more, perhaps even double your current results.
This line of thinking can suggest a wide range of ideas. In fact, when you spend some time mulling over it, you can probably come up with at least a dozen good ideas on how to improve your company. Unfortunately, the limitations of time, money, and opportunity might force you to choose just one big idea.
One simple, but powerful big idea is to focus on increasing motivation and productivity throughout your company. One thing all highly successful companies have in common is a highly engaged staff. When your staff is fully engaged, the synergy of various talents working in harmony toward a joint goal can create a quantum leap in success. You can achieve this by upgrading your office environment and strategically designing an improved corporate culture.
Upgrade Your Office Environment
Our environment influences us in many subtle ways. It affects our moods and impacts the quality of our thoughts. In an office, the environment influences how people work. The more positive and inspiring the environment, the more people are inclined to feel better about where they work and about the nature of their jobs.
Two ways of upgrading your environment are by offering employee perks like providing coffee services and renovating the layout by hiring a first-class interior decorator.
- Provide a coffee service: A basic coffee machine is a standard fixture in most office break rooms. In fact, it’s something employees take for granted, despite the fact that they look forward to drinking a few cups during their breaks. Think about graduating from a basic coffee machine to a premier coffee service. High-end coffee services don’t simply serve the same old coffee your employees have become accustomed to drinking. Instead, they offer premium coffee brands. When employees into the break room, they’ll be greeted with a rich aroma of select blends and gratefully sip the finest coffee flavors in the world.
- Hire an interior decorator: Why not call in an interior decorator whose work you admire to refurbish the entire look and feel of your office? They will come up with a number of innovative ideas that will thoroughly transform your office.
Improve Corporate Culture
One reason some of the top technology companies in the world have some of the most engaged workers in the world is that they have mastered the art of cultivating an exciting corporate culture. In an article on Google’s unique culture, Kissmetrics reports, “Google has people whose sole job is to keep employees happy and maintain productivity. It may sound too controlling to some, but it’s how this world-changing organization operates.”
Here are five ways to improve your company’s corporate culture:
- Clearly define your company’s vision. It shouldn’t be too narrow, but broad enough to help everyone feel a part of a bigger purpose. Again, Google provides an excellent example. Google’s vision and mission statement doesn’t talk about mundane things but is broad general enough for most employees to fully support. Its vision statement is “to provide access to the world’s information in one click,” and its mission statement is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
- Provide employee satisfaction. By giving employees what they want and need (within reason of course), they’ll feel good about working at your company. This can range from giving them a fair salary to offering flex hours.
- Communicate with your staff in a clear way, and do it often. Don’t leave people guessing about what you expect from them, where the company is heading, or what kind of marketplace challenges the business is facing.
- Provide personal and career growth opportunities. Offering coaching, in-house training, and seminars can improve morale as people are always looking for ways to improve their lives and careers. For instance, you could improve sales performance by hiring a famous sales trainer to introduce your sales team to new ways of closing sales.
- Create benevolent policies. Focus on creating policies that place an emphasis on treating employees fairly and with respect.
In closing, another powerful idea you can try once you’ve upgraded the environment and increased the level of employee engagement is to review your business successes and failures over the years and then double down on what’s working and discontinue business processes and products that didn’t quite pan out the way you had expected.
