Company culture is the hidden hand that shapes your business. Having a strong company culture makes all the difference when it comes to retaining employees and fulfilling their expectations of you as a business.

Your companies’ culture reflects what your organization stands for and as the voice of your business, your employees are key to ensuring that it succeeds. It’s no secret that if you can provide a work environment that your staff enjoys spending time in, it can boost overall performance.

Property management is a demanding role. Whether you’re dealing with property owners, tenants, maintenance contractors or co-workers, someone is always trying to get a hold of you to present you with a new issue. It’s easy to get stressed out and overwhelmed especially when you are in a negative environment with poor company culture.

According to Deloitte’s 2018 Global Human Capital Trends report, a whopping 88% of all respondents regarded “Company culture” as crucial for business success. Compare this to the mere 12% that thought their organization was “driving the correct company culture,” and it’s clear to see that most businesses are falling short of providing a great company culture.

Keep reading to learn five simple steps to lay the foundation to grow a robust company culture at your workplace or business.

Build a foundation.

Step one in building a strong property management company culture is to create discussion about core values among all staff members. What does the company want to be known and remembered for? How do the company’s overall goals align with your staff and their values? Does the company value hard workers that stay late and exceed goals? Or do they pride themselves on a healthy work-life balance that enables employees to work at a pace they dictate?

Make sure before asking these questions to your team you create a relaxed, calm environment where all employees feel comfortable to discuss company issues, morals, values, etc.
The answers should help you generate a set of values that you and your employees want the company culture to reflect.

Don’t be a clone

While it’s entirely reasonable for a business to aspire to be like another, there’s no denying that the best kind of company culture is unique and one of a kind. When you get caught up in trying to replica another organization, you lose the essence of your own companies’ values, resulting in a watered-down version of what you were trying to achieve; a mediocre company culture that doesn’t inspire anyone.

Be bold, be adventurous and be open when creating with your team. The best company culture for you hasn’t been discovered yet.

Put it into Action

Once you have compiled a short list of core company values, it’s time to put them into action! Share your new company values around your team internally via employee communication. For them to be taken seriously, refer to them on a regular basis, ensure your leadership staff adheres to them and that their actions reflect the core values of your company culture.

To further implement company culture, your values should help guide hiring decisions and questions that you ask potential candidates; this allows new staff to already be in line with company values and makes it easy to onboard and educate them on your business culture.

For your businesses company culture to flourish your values must be mirrored in day-to-day activities and processes. For example, if one of your companies’ values were to become a fully sustainable office, it would make sense that you turn into a paperless office and restrain from printing paper out unless it was utterly unavoidable.

Assess Company Culture Regularly

Like anything in business, your company’s culture requires continuous nurturing and monitoring. As your company grows so will your core values and culture efforts. Typically businesses with a robust company culture will conduct annual “all staff” surveys that gauge whether or not companies current culture is heading in the right direction or if it needs to alter paths.

It’s never too late to create a positive culture for your staff. Even businesses well past their start-up days can redesign and create a culture that instills pride among staff and attracts a large pool of talented job applicants wanting to work for you.