Hiring and onboarding new employees is one thing. But as we know, the costs of employee turnover is high. If you don’t work on having a great environment where your employees thrive, then it’s going to be very costly for you to keep replacing everyone.
Employees changing jobs is impossible to stop – especially in the tech industry – but there are things you can do to keep your turnover rate low.
This post could just be called ’’culture in the agency space’’ because that is the true key to acquiring and keeping top talent.
But what is company culture?
The 17-word, aka the short answer: Company culture is the combination of all the values, social interactions, and psychological behavior in an organization.
The 340-word, aka the long answer:Company culture is hard to define in specific terms, because unlike most essential things in business, it is entirely intangible, a feeling. Branding is closely intertwined with culture in every interaction that the company makes with any of its outside stakeholders. And if you want your brand to be consistent across all channels, you have to work towards a work culture that aligns with your corporate messaging.
A brand is a reflection of your company in the minds of your stakeholders.
That is why it takes on new forms in every piece of content shared on social media, every meeting with a possible client, and every shared lunch break with Debbie from the agency next door. A brand consists of many moving parts, some tangible, some not. The tangible can be boiled down to visual identity, messaging, and imagery, if need be. These can all be changed with a new set of guidelines, a new designer, or a new marketing department, but how do you control a culture?
Culture is not just a code of conduct, communication strategy, or a list of processes. Company culture includes all the small details:
- The tone of voice the CEO uses to address a reporter while discussing a new acquisition
- If your employees feel comfortable to talk about non-work related issues with their manager
- If the new sales intern feels like waking up in the morning on his second week on the jobAnd that’s why culture is one of the hardest things to get right in an agency, as it can not be acquired, mandated or forced.
Culture has to be built and continuously monitored and maintained.
You can tell a lot about an agency culture:
- In the way, your company treats employees, customers and the surrounding community
- In the degree that your employees are committed to the company values and goals
- By how comfortable employees are with innovating, making decisions and expressing their opinions
- In how information is broadcasted from one department to another and from the higher-ups to the lower-level employees