Office Culture

Positive workplace morale isn’t just contagious, it’s a business advantage. “Most employers would agree that keeping employees happy and healthy is intrinsic to a company’s success,” writes Forbes contributor William Craig. Improving the attitudes and enthusiasm of your employees is key to company loyalty; Craig cites studies where organizations who undergo morale initiatives experience 89 percent better retention. Happier employees are more likely to go above and beyond to provide exceptional work, which makes for better profitability for your organization. Read on for a comprehensive crash course on the benefits of boosting workplace morale and research-driven ways to improve your employees’ engagement. 5 Data-Driven Benefits of Improving Morale in the Workplace Years of academic studies in workplaces across industries, including academia and healthcare, reveal that everyone within the enterprise benefits from better culture and morale. These benefits vary, ranging from more creative employees to happier customers and even fewer employee

Investing in your company culture is just good business. Organizations that make their talent feel valued are more likely to experience better retention, a superior employee brand and more engaged employees. However, just 60 percent of today’s employees feel they have a voice at work. Only 50 percent feel they have more influence than they did five years ago. Nearly everyone can benefit from culture hacking, whether you’re a startup, well-established firm or considering a cultural initiative as part of change management. Read on to learn what culture hacking is, why it matters and five facts to know about real-world firms with winning cultures. What in the (Business) World Is Culture Hacking? The idea of cultural hacking was introduced by Seb Paquet in 2010. Inspired by the tools and methodologies used to hack technology, Paquet proposed the idea of a new way to inspire disruptive change for the better within

Happy, productive and well-synchronized teams of employees aren’t just built overnight. Instead, diverse groups of talent are often nurtured into teams by highly effective employers. If your mental image of team building involves cringe-worthy corporate retreats centered around “trust falls” or dangerous walks over glowing coals, you really should keep reading. Team building definitely shouldn’t be awkward or dangerous and it doesn’t need to involve a rented-out retreat center to be effective.  Team building is the single most important people investment an organization can make, writes Forbes Contributor Brian Scudamore. “It builds trust, mitigates conflict, encourages communication, and increases collaboration.” At Corporate Essentials, we’ve worked hard to develop expertise in just what fuels culture and feeds positive relationships. Read on to learn what real organizations and researchers define as team building that actually works. Don’t Always Make It About Productivity While shared learning and collaboration facilitate team building, your organization

What is the ROI on a bottle of Harmless Harvest Coconut Water in an office? Sound like a ridiculous question? Maybe so; but let me take just a few minutes to explain why this might not be as ridiculous as you think. In the office refreshment business (and just about every other business as well), it is very en vogue right now to focus on break room design as part of a solid foundation for a positive company culture. Just a few weeks ago, I sat in a room full of office refreshment operators as a lead designer from the American architecture and design firm Gensler gave a presentation on ways they look to design break rooms in offices in order to improve employee engagement and create more of what Zappos.com’s Tony Hsieh has termed “meaningful collisions” – creating areas where employees from different departments regularly bump into each other.

While the connection between office design and a healthy, productive work environment is clear, facilities and culture experts are also beginning to unpack the importance of break room design in your company culture. A recent study published in Healthcare Design Magazine revealed that “an extreme break room makeover” at one health facility reduced staff “stress and fatigue” so dramatically that staff turnover-related costs even improved. Among many research-driven organizations, there’s a definitive trend toward investing heavily in break room designs that act as a holistic, healthy retreat for staff members. In the words of workplace strategist Stephanie Heiple, “A break room with some vending machines is not cutting it anymore as a nice place to which employees can retreat.” According to Heiple’s research published in FMLink, companies are wise to consider their ratio of individuals to break spaces, the quality of break room amenities, the selection of color and furniture