3 Signs Your Company’s Culture is Turning Toxic

Research suggests that employees thrive in workplaces with a positive and supportive internal culture. A well-organized, pro-worker culture increases employee motivation and creativity and encourages everyone to work harder and set higher goals.

But, the opposite is also true.

A toxic organizational environment can weaken the bond between a company and its employees – hurting productivity and performance. As a leader, you must be constantly vigilant of the warning signs and act proactively to ensure that they are nipped in the bud.

Minimal Knowledge Sharing

Sharing knowledge is like a rising tide – it improves everyone’s performance and fosters innovation. However, not all employees are equally excited by the idea of share their hard-earned skills and experience with their colleagues and develop a “manage it yourself” kind of attitude. Such an attitude spreads toxicity across the organizational  culture. Cliques form, silos are created, collaboration and innovation become harder and productivity declines rapidly.

Few Motivated Employees

For anyone managing organizational internal culture, the issue of unmotivated workers must be  high on their priority list. Often acting as the “black holes” of the organization, the lack of motivation creates an energy drain that has an impact on the entire organization. Their unwillingness to succeed, negative attitude and a penchant for nitpicking helps no one but widens the gulf between where a company is now and where it intends to be.

Lack of Communication

Keeping employees in the dark, having minimal or ineffective communication within the organization leads to confusion and avoidable stress – two symptoms of a lack of quality communication. Thankfully, this issue is the easiest to tackle. Leadership must encourage open communication where employees can speak their minds without fear. It  must also make it a point to share key developments and changes across the organization. This simple  step  goes a long way to promote transparency and foster a positive culture.

Toxic cultures force good employees to leave, stifle productivity and reduces your organization’s ability to compete. Three main reasons for toxicity in a company’s culture are: hoarding or controlling knowledge, demotivated employees and a lack of communication. If you are in a leadership position managing organizational internal culture, you should take proactive measures to ensure these causes do not spoil your company’s environment. We can assist you in that.

3 Lethal Mistakes Startups Shouldn’t Make

Entrepreneurship is always a hot topic of discussion. But recent entrepreneurial successes like Uber, Airbnb, Careem and more have made even more people anxious to jump into entrepreneurial waters and make it big.  While there is nothing wrong with the desire, we must that remember passion alone isn’t sufficient for success. The right strategy coupled with the right brand is equally important. Something that is often overlooked in our initial excitement.

In the UAE we find that often many entrepreneurs never go through the pain of articulating or adopting clear strategies that will acquire trust, build customer relationships and generate sales. So when reality kicks in, which it eventually does, they falter.

Fewer than 50% of startups survive to celebrate their second birthday. Your company can buck the trend if it avoids these three costly mistakes most startups make:

Error 1: Quantity is Better than Quality

Targeting a huge audience sounds promising when you’re new to business. The line of thinking goes something like this: “We will contact a million (think of some arbitrarily large number) people. Even if one per cent of them decided to buy from us, we would be a million-dollar or a billion-dollar company in one year.”

If only! It doesn’t work in the real world!

In trying to reach out to an expanded audience, start-ups usually compromise on research and audience understanding. And a lack of research doesn’t impress prospects.

An alternative is to map your audience and spend some time on customer research. It’s the only way to build trust and outstrip your competitors.

Error 2: Relying on the Word of Mouth

It’s said that word of mouth is the best marketing money can’t buy. It’s true. But this strategy just doesn’t work that well for new companies. Word of mouth marketing will be far more successful when you have built a committed core audience. Otherwise, your brand ambassadors can be mistaken for paid marketeers from some shady agency.

Error 3: Reliance on Paid Traffic

Google AdWords and Facebook Ads are among the largest sources of paid traffic to websites. They are deceptively simple to use. The results are immediately visible. As a result, many entrepreneurs get hooked quickly and think that it makes sense to bring in visitors at an exorbitant price. Well, it isn’t.

While there is nothing wrong with those two and other ad platforms, relying solely on them is not a wise business decision, they need to work together with clear SEO tactics to build a noteworthy presence for you. Learn SEO (Google offers some free courses) or, if you are short of time, work with brand marketing consultants to ensure that you make the right decisions for your business.

Takeaway

A broad customer focus, an over reliance on word of mouth and a blind commitment to paid advertising can be lethal for a new business. It is worthwhile to prepare (if you have time) or speak to a good brand marketing consultant to help you identify the right strategies to turn your start-up into the next successful multimillion dollar company.