In 2017, a whopping 80% of businesses claimed that they were planning to improve their corporate cultures, most likely in an attempt to better engage their employees and promote better cohesion across their organizations.
But, as studies have discovered, having an established company culture isn’t all it’s cracked up to be if it isn’t established properly or with the appropriate strategies in place.
Here are four consequences of a poorly inspired and established company culture.
1. Poor Management and Office Practices
When your corporate culture isn’t established strategically, with both your organization’s and your employees’ goals in mind, you’ll probably start to see some poor office practices and poor-performing managers. You’ll notice things like:
- Managers who micromanage their employees and don’t trust them to do good work on their own;
- Managers who don’t hold themselves or their employees accountable for schedules, deadlines, unacceptable behaviors, poor work quality, etc.;
- Managers and employees who consistently engage in unproductive or highly unethical behaviors such as stealing or cutting operational corners; and
- Hyper-competitiveness and employees who actively sabotage one another to get ahead and stay at the top.
2. Toxic Internal Communications
If your company culture isn’t inspired by trust and open and transparent communications, you’ll experience officewide gossip running rampant. You might even see managers explicitly expressing their favoritism toward certain employees or groups. And you’ll also notice certain cliques starting to form, where a group of select employees will gossip about, actively ignore, or even bully other employees.
With toxic communications, your employees will not be productive or inspire positive and sincere relationships with one another or your stakeholders and customers.
3. Decrease in Innovation
When employees are micromanaged or experience pressure to conform to officewide cliques, they will never speak up and introduce their new and innovative ideas because they don’t want to risk being ostracized or reprimanded.
Instead of having employees who openly and respectfully communicate with one another and bring new ideas to the surface on a regular basis to propel your organization forward and to guarantee it remains competitive long term, you’ll repeatedly get the same ideas and practices from employees.
4. Negative Public Image
Customers, partners, stakeholders, investors, etc., can sense when your organization has a poorly inspired and established company culture. And they will actively avoid engaging with and doing business with your organization if they sense that your employees and managers are unprofessional or unethical. Consider the real-life story of Uber and its purportedly toxic company culture.
After the company’s former CEO was videotaped berating a driver and the company reportedly underpaid its employees in New York by millions of dollars, the company has been having a hard time recovering its public image and financial success.
As you develop and implement your company’s culture, be sure to consider the four consequences highlighted above if you want to guarantee that it’s successful and effective.