Whether it is a startup or a big organization, solid company culture is the key to success for the business. Having a healthy company culture determines how engaged your employees are and for how long you can retain them. And one department that plays a vital role in maintaining company culture is its Human Resource Management.
In simplest terms, how a company performs is directly related to how well HR empowers employees to give their best at whatever they do. The pandemic has taught entrepreneurs many harsh lessons, but chief among them is that if you don`t take care of your employees, they won`t take care of your business.
An HR professional`s job is to develop and maintain a company culture that is sustainable for the long run. Hence, the HR department needs to enhance a company`s culture that makes every employee come to the workplace every day.
So how can Human Resource department help to create a sustainable company culture? Here are five ways to do that:
1. Be Proactive
The major role of the HR professional is to be an active organizational culture consultant to the teams. HR professionals need to analyze and understand the current company`s culture. Post that they should come out with a strategic cultural plan that also aligns with the organization`s values and goals and then collaborate with leaders to enhance and implement the plan.
2. Define & Communicate Clearly
HR leaders need to define a clear understanding of sustainable company culture. What does it mean? How can they improve on it? How is it measured? What role will leaders play? How will employees have an impact?
Once it is defined, they must involve everyone at all levels in the communication. Developing and fostering a transparent environment engages both employees and leaders in ownership of achieving these goals.
3. Make Employees an Integral Part
HR leaders must foster a company culture that was derived from employees` feedback, and not from something that they heard at a round table conference held inside the ac rooms. Just like every individual is different, each company`s culture is different. Hence, the Human Resource management must include employees when deciding how to build a culture in the company that can contribute to their as well as the organization`s success.
4. Enable Strategic Alignment
The HR department can play a pivotal role in an organization when it comes to building roles and sustaining a company`s culture. They can consult and collaborate with the leadership to align the organization`s mission, vision, values, and core principles with the performance management process.
They can also encourage leadership to cultivate recognize and reward programs to reward positive behaviors. Lastly, HR should be a great role model, easily approachable, and should coach other leaders.
5. Identify Key Areas
It is vital for HR to identify the best practice areas of focus that can help to cultivate and promote the desired culture. Once it is clear and defined, HR needs to assure the value proposition for the change is clear. It simply means that the leaders and the employees must have a clear idea about what`s in it for the company and the employees.
A company`s culture is defined by the environment and how it feels when you walk through the door and interact with employees. To build and maintain a sustainable culture that feels positive and empowering takes the whole village. Hence, it is the responsibility of the HR department to talk to the top management leaders and remind them how business decisions are perceived.
6. Find & Retain the Right People
A company`s culture is composed of people. People make the culture in a company. No matter how capable leaders or the operational processes are in place, if the right people are not hired, the organizational goals will never manifest into reality.
The sacred and the foremost duty of HR professionals is to help managers bring in the most compatible candidates, maintain open communication, recurrent feedback, proper documentation for the rights ones, and protections in place for when the wrong ones need to be sent out of the door.
If you are an entrepreneur and feel that you do not need an HR professional, you couldn`t be farther from the truth. HR is the glue that helps to stick every department of a company together.
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