Building an Agency Culture Your Team Will Adopt & Love

We have all heard about the importance of the company culture as a part of the growth strategies. Unfortunately, people are familiar with the term and the basics of its meaning but have no idea to use it to scale their business efficiently.

A strong company culture is important for a number of reasons; it can increase brand awareness, provide you with new clients, better leads, and a big community of fans.

One of the reasons that happen is the employees themselves. When they love their work environment, they are more prone to get actively involved in solving issues and crises, they care about the agency’s success, and they are more likely to share the good news about the agency online.

But in order for that to come to pass, you first have to know how to build a culture the employees can quickly adapt to and love.

Employees and collaborators are the key

Web design agencies are often full of creative and open-minded people which makes the agencies themselves seem more engaging, more flexible, and warmer.

However, speaking of long-term growth, it can be challenging to keep the employees excited in the long haul. It often happens that the employees stop feeling like the decision-makers and start feeling more like factory workers. When that happens, productivity and the quality of work drop significantly.

What can you do about it?

The best thing you can do to motivate your employees and to keep them actively engaged in the company’s development is to make them feel important within the agency.

With that in mind, you actually have to add more responsibilities to their job description. The best way to go about that is by making them the agency’s most active brand advocates.

You should try and encourage your employees to share their success with the world, to post about your agency on social media, to share the lessons they have learned working for you, to keep a progress journal, to get involved in improving the work environment as well as organizing company events, etc.

These are just top of the head ideas, but you can use them to inspire you to keep your employees engaged and motivated.

Building culture with new employees vs. with old employees

The new employees usually align with the company culture naturally by working closely with their colleagues and assimilating their behavior and attitude as well as by getting involved in useful daily activities.

There are many daily activities that are great for the company culture, for example, keeping progress journals, posting success stories online, etc.

On the other hand, getting old employees to adopt a new company culture is usually a bit more difficult. People feel comfortable with what they are familiar with. Also, they usually don’t enjoy what can be perceived as extra work.

If you want this process to go smoothly, you have to involve the old employees in the culture and help them understand the importance of their involvement in the process. If you place them in the decision-making roles, they will be more engaged and work harder.

Get the new and the old employees on the same page

Getting all of your employees on the same page when it comes to the company culture can be tricky. Luckily, there are solutions that will help you bridge the gap faster.

For example, you can create an actual space for the culture that everyone can access. A good example is Smarp — a virtual hub where the employees and collaborators can access company news and stay up to date with the current events, create content, communicate easily with each other etc.

Platforms such as this are great for helping all the employees celebrate successes together, solve crises together, share the news, get involved in organizing events, and so on.

Consistency: The key aspect of the company culture

The importance of consistency in building company culture should not be underestimated. You need to stay consistent on all levels of communication if you want to build a company culture that sticks.

There are many useful tools that can help you achieve that. One of the best examples is Canva — a tool for personalizing even the most impersonal forms of communication, for instance, memos.

With Canva, you can customize a memo in a matter of minutes. You get a bunch of templates to choose from, then change the background image, pick your favorite font, upload the company’s logo, add the text, and send it to your colleagues.

Not only does this tool help you create personalized memos, but it also makes them seem more professional and friendly — which in a result makes your agency seem more professional and friendly too.

You need to lead by example

You’re the #1 advocate of the agency’s culture, which means you need to set the example.

You might think that this goes without saying, sometimes you might not even realize that the culture transpires from your emails, memos, face to face conversations, group meetings, etc.

If you want your employees to be engaged in all the ways we mentioned above, you are the first person that needs to be involved in organizing events, managing crises, celebrating success, etc.

Just show them how to do all these things, and they will naturally follow.

Summary

Building a strong company culture is not easy, but the effort to do so will definitely pay off in the long run.

The first thing to keep in mind is that you need to lead by example. If you set the right tone, the employees will follow.

You should also make your employees feel important and more engaged in the agency’s growth. Turn them into internal marketing heroes and give them space where the old and the new employees can familiarize themselves with the company culture.

Remember to stay consistent and follow the idea all the way through if you want the company culture to stick.