10 Predictive Areas Of High Performing Cultures

Culture is one of those words that’s thrown around a lot but is rarely understood. It’s a bragging point of nearly every company in business today, from a startup with three employees to multinational corporations. To help clarify and define company culture, Entrepreneur Magazine and CultureIQ teamed up to create a list of top company cultures. To create the list, they measured 10 areas that are predictive of high-performing cultures and combined the scores with the employee Net Promoter Score to create a cumulative CultureIQ Score (CIQ), which determined the ranking. Below are the 10 predictive areas, including one we feel particularly strong about: wellness.

#1 Collaboration

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. Teamwork and collaboration are keys to success, and companies that create team-oriented work environments excel.

#2 Innovation

Stale thinking leads to stale businesses. The best companies take the collective ideas from their teams, foster them, and put them into motion.

#3 Agility

It’s one thing to spot trends in your marketplace. It’s quite another skill to be able to adapt to them. Successful companies adapt quickly, and the best way to move a big ship is to have an entire crew working towards the same goal.

#4 Communication

Communication is a two-way street. Employees need to hear from leadership and have the ability to provide meaningful feedback.

#5 Support

It’s tough to do any job when you feel like you’re denied resources. This metric also requires that the teams feel confident leadership is aligned with their work.

#6 Wellness

Healthy employees are happy employees, and happy employees are productive employees. Employees want to know that they are valued, and one of the best ways to show that is by caring about their health.

#7 Work Environment

Culture is more than just ping pong tables and kitchens loaded with food. You can assemble the best team in the world, but if you stick them in a work environment that doesn’t catalyze the sharing of ideas and transparency, the business will suffer.

#8 Responsibility

Teams and individuals desire ownership of projects, products, and processes. More importantly, the best teams welcome the accountability that comes with such ownership.

#9 Performance Focus

Smart leaders give employees clear expectations and regular feedback. It is a way for management and employees to continually assess their performance. When teams do well, they are both recognized and rewarded for it.

#10 Mission and Value Alignment

Everyone understands where leaders want to take the company and that understanding is reflected in the core beliefs of everyone working there.

By identifying areas where strong company cultures excel, Entrepreneur Magazine and CultureIQ have, in many ways, created a checklist for companies looking to build a strong culture. By focusing on improving these areas, companies can strengthen their culture and reap the benefits that strong cultures provide, including higher productivity and lower turnover.