Developing a healthy company culture is essential for making sure that your employees are happy and loyal to your business. It also helps to ensure the growth of your company. Having a toxic company culture can lead to high employee turnaround rates, dwindling sales, and a general sense of apathy among your workforce. There are a few key ways to help build a healthy company culture, and with a little communication and teamwork, you can develop a great environment for your employees.

Determine Your Purpose

Having no purpose can lead to a sense of listlessness and your employees not really being sure what to do or why they’re even needed in the first place. The first step to building a healthy culture is to give those employees a purpose. Determine what you want to do with your business beyond the broad goal of making money. Set up a plan for goals you’d like to achieve, such as opening new locations and setting customer service standards and goals. This gives your employees something to strive for, and giving some generous incentives toward achieving those goals is also helpful.

Let Your Employees Lead

Your employees bring more benefits than just being a body to perform a required task. Your employees are there in the thick of it, and they can see things firsthand that might get overlooked by upper management when it comes to operations and other project rollouts. Your employees will also naturally start to develop their own takes on corporate culture, building relationships, and establishing traditions. Don’t try to force corporate culture on your employees. Rather, guide it along through events and other ways to make work more social. A good company will take steps to encourage team building among their employees. If your employees can’t work as a team, then your business might be in trouble.

Keep Your Integrity

Employees can sometimes feel isolated and even begin to develop an us-versus-them mentality when dealing with company leadership if they feel they aren’t being held to the same standards. It is important to maintain your integrity and hold yourself to the same standards you hold your employees. Don’t tell yourself you don’t have to fulfill your promises just because you’re the boss or the owner. Accountability is key to maintaining employee trust, which will do wonders for maintaining a healthy company culture.

With these simple practices, you can build a positive work environment and company culture from the ground up or help start fixing what’s wrong with a broken system. Having a healthy company culture can have a direct benefit on profits and overall business health, and maintaining a healthy culture requires constant effort and review.