Friday Highlight  

Avoiding effects of negative organisational culture

Avoiding effects of negative organisational culture
Credit: Christina Morillo/Pexels

Organisational culture is the shared values and beliefs of your employees. Each staff member in your business will have past experiences that shape how they think, their values, and their beliefs.

They have certain thoughts on how decisions and tasks should be carried out. In a healthy organisation, the effects of organisational culture on that employee’s performance will be positive.

The culture has to be positive throughout the business for each employee to benefit and feel comfortable. Research has found that employees that don’t like their organisation's culture are 24 per cent more likely to quit.

In this article, we will tell you about the different signs of negative organisational culture, the effects it can have on your workforce, and how you can change this pattern of negativity through your business even during the remote working transformation.

Examples of negative culture

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Bad habits may not be something that employees have brought with them from other corporations; they may have been picked up in your business.

For example, if the boss is late every day, then the employees are going to pick up on that and think if he is late everyday then this is okay for everyone else.

If high standards aren’t applied every time a piece of work is completed, then standards will start to slip. 

Office gossip can be negative in any environment, but in a business, it can be much harder.

Employees have to be in a room with people that are gossiping about them most days.

You want your employees to feel comfortable in their working environment, not feel like they will be ridiculed. Gossip can cause a shift in the entire company culture and leave people closed off and guarded. 

Creating good engagement between employees and management is important for strong relationships. If all employees do is talk about work all day and not socialise about what they do out of hours, they won’t have that strong bond you want your employees to have. 

What you can do

There are ways you can change the negative organisation structure in a business. It does not matter whether you are a chief executive or manager – anyone can make the differences to change the business for better. 

With bad habits, it’s not just the boss that can make a difference in the way staff act.

All employees can influence their colleagues on how they act and complete work.

There can be standards set in a company, whether that be formally or informally, by having an employee handbook or conversations when a new employee starts.

Outline what the standards of the company are and what is expected of them.

Make sure existing employees keep following these guidelines too, and this should naturally expel any bad habits that people may have. 

Office gossip is something that should not be tolerated within the workplace. The effects that gossip can have on an office is not something you want hanging over your business.

This could affect the way your business retains employees, but it could also impact your customers. If customers hear about how your employees are treated by other employees, they may not want to use your product or service.