OrgHealth - Implementing a positive work culture

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Implementing a positive work culture

The starting point to implement a positive work culture is for leaders and managers to listen to their staff. This is achieved in several ways. The most effective is for individual managers to engage with their staff in focus groups, meetings and learning sets to listen to what they have to say about their work and the organisation in which they work. In return, controllers need to discuss their own concerns and ideas, so that staff understand fully their perspectives on working lives.

Staff representative organisations should be encouraged to engage with leaders and managers in critically appraising the working lives of staff and offering ideas that will lead to a Positive Work Culture.

At the same time a staff survey, designed to encourage revealing information about working lives, should be undertaken. The results need to be shared, and actions on the results implemented. Staff surveys must be promoted with genuine interest by managers. Until trust and commitment is established between staff and their organisation, it should be expected that staff will want a survey to be completed anonymously.

Leaders and managers, at all levels, need to be committed to reviewing and changing, as necessary, the cultural foundations to embed a Positive Work Culture based on wellbeing and performance. Leaders and managers should review the processes required to build a Positive Work Culture and make the necessary changes within their organisations.

The leaders and managers will require training and development in building a Positive Work Culture.

Training and development should adopt a triple loop learning strategy that combines the introduction and training in behaviours with their application in practice. This cycle of training typically involves workshops with learning sets and specific action plans that are reviewed and reinforced in a continuous cycle over an extended period of time, until a Positive Work Culture is embedded in the organisation.

Regular training sessions between managers and staff should be instigated where the cultural foundations are reinforced, and any concerns raised and resolved. A typical example is a weekly 15 minute session between managers and staff on a specific topic relevant to the cultural foundations.

Staff satisfaction
Customer/client satisfaction
Fewer errors, delays and repeated activities
Increased skill, knowledge and experience capacity
Lower use of complaints, grievance, bullying, harassment and tribunal procedures
An increase in innovation and development of products and services
A greater resilience to change
An increase in the energy, inspiration and inquisitiveness of the workforce
Enhancement in the personal development of the workforce
A strengthening of personal standards
An increase in the wider contribution to the organisation from the workforce
An increase in the stability of the workforce