6: How to Leverage Your Company Culture for Enhanced Performance and Customer Loyalty

Is there a magic formula for building an engaging company culture? When you dedicate time and effort to leverage your company culture, you’re making a wise investment. In this article, I have shared five ways businesses can build a strong company culture and get the most out of it. 

The corporate culture framework may be difficult to define, but it’s harder to implement and even more challenging to manage.

Company culture encompasses values, beliefs, and behaviors implemented as an organization and reflected in your interactions with employees, customers, and other stakeholders. Crucial for any business to succeed in today’s competitive market, your company culture can generate improved sales, high team performance, and customer loyalty.

Company culture can set you apart, one that cannot be replicated by competitors overnight. Competitors can copy products, services, and strategies, but they can’t replicate the essence of a strong company culture. It’s the intangible force uniting employees, driving purpose, shared values, and a unique work environment. Company culture fuels innovation, inspires excellence, and fosters a genuine sense of belonging. It can’t be purchased or imitated—it must be nurtured and grown organically over time.

Company culture is a living, breathing entity that demands time, effort, and genuine dedication to cultivating. There are many ways of creating an engaging culture, however, here are five that I think would be most effective.

5 Ways of Creating an Engaging Company Culture 

1. Define and communicate clear goals

Research by Deloitte found that 76% of employees believed “a clearly defined business strategy” helped create a positive culture.^[1] That is because awareness about the company’s goals helps your employees understand how their work fits the big picture and why their contribution is important. 

2. Foster collaboration between employees

As teams have become more virtual post-Covid-19 pandemic, with employees spread across multiple locations globally, there’s a greater emphasis on the need for cooperation. I have sensed this, especially when working on complex projects such as product overhauls that involve cross-functional team members, highly educated specialists, and senior stakeholders.  

Generate an inclusive environment and make conscious efforts with team-building exercises and open communication to encourage a collaborative culture. 

3. Promote customer-centricity

More than 80% of customer-centric companies are reporting an increase in revenue, making them 60% more profitable than companies that aren’t.^[2] 

Ensure your employees understand the importance of customer satisfaction and their role in it through customer service training and a regular feedback loop. 

4. Encourage employee development and provide meaningful rewards

How the positive effects of a great employee reward system on employee experience are linked with the company’s success is no longer a subject of debate. Going that extra mile to alleviate employee stress levels and ensure their emotional well-being is a must! 

5. Use data to drive decisions

Data-driven organizations strategically utilize business insights to identify new growth opportunities, provide better customer service, increase sales, and more. When leaders and teams make business decisions with a data-driven approach, they may more easily determine an effective business strategy and realize when it needs improvement. Data culture drives better outcomes that generate employee and customer satisfaction and even business success, eventually! 

The Importance of Leveraging Your Company Culture

Employees who believe management is concerned about them as a whole person — not just an employee — are more productive, more satisfied, and more fulfilled. Satisfied employees mean satisfied customers, which leads to profitability. 

Anne M. Mulcahy, Chairman and CEO, Xerox  

Creating and maintaining a strong company culture can be a challenge, but it’s worth the effort. Your company culture can be a major asset if leveraged to its fullest potential. There may be multiple other benefits, but a positive company culture will help you attract and retain top talent, build a highly productive workforce, and improve customer loyalty. Additionally, a strong culture can help an organization weather difficult times and emerge even stronger.        

The Role of Company Culture in Building a High-Performance Team

“High performance” is more than just a buzzword. It is an aspiration for all companies worldwide. It’s like a trait you covet in other successful individuals that needs to be cultivated.  

A high-performance team is a group of individuals who feel motivated to work together to achieve common goals and success. When your corporate culture is centered on how the employees perceive the business as a whole and vice versa, your company is well on the path of building engaged, proactive, and highly inspired teams.  

Positive company culture starts with providing a supportive environment of trust and collaboration, encouraging transparency in communication and daily practices, instilling a continuous improvement mindset, and building constructive feedback into the system.  

In a study conducted by the Center for Sales Strategy, more than 90% of the CEOs and CFOs said that upping your culture game is of utmost importance, while over 50% said corporate culture influences individual productivity and creativity, which in turn influences the firm’s profitability, value and growth rates. ^[4]  

Every happy employee is a contributing member of the bigger high-performing team! 

How It Directly Impacts Customer Loyalty

What many business leaders don’t realize is that a company culture translated into action has the power to transform a customer’s experience. You can get a competitive edge by creating a culture that values the customer. 

Employees in a company that listen to the client’s voice, directly interact with customer issues, duly collect relevant data and chase to resolve the problems quickly and reliably. A customer-centric organization will deliver a positive experience at every stage of the customer journey, building satisfaction and loyalty. 

“The way your employees feel is the way your customers will feel. And if your employees don’t feel valued, neither will your customers.”

Sybil F. Stershic, Author of Taking Care of the People Who Matter Most: A Guide to Employee-Customer Care

Winning company culture cannot grow magically. It is a concentrated effort by all stakeholders—from the investors to the management and the employees—to imbibe company values holistically. 

Bibliography: 

[1] Agarwal, D. P. (2018, August 29). How To Create A Positive Workplace Culture. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/pragyaagarwaleurope/2018/08/29/how-to-create-a-positive-work-place-culture/?sh=3232b6674272  

[2] Battaglia, F. (2020, October 13). 14 Ways to Build a Customer-Centric Culture. Global Partners Training. https://globalpartnerstraining.com/blog-customer-centric-culture/  

[3] Mulcahy, A. (2013, September 26). Motivation. Anne M. Mulcahy.  https://storyofmulcahy.wordpress.com/motivation/

[4] Smith, S. (2019, April 2). The Case for Company Culture + Stats to Support It. The Center for Sales Strategy – Sales Strategy Blog . The Case for Company Culture + Stats to Support It

[5] Warnock, M. (2020, November 12). 12 Employee Recognition Quotes From Titans. http://Www.speakap.com . https://www.speakap.com/en/insights/employee-recognition-quotes