Yes, Company Culture Can Make or Break Your Business

You don’t have to look far to spot notoriously bad workplaces — it seems another corporation makes news every other day for a cutthroat policy that pushes its workforce to the brink.

We live in the age of the bad corporate citizen, so it might not be surprising that insurance companies are often named as miserable workplaces. A 2015 survey found that 78 percent of financial services employees (including those who work at banking, insurance, and real estate companies) are unhappy at work, 46 percent are either indifferent or dissatisfied with their colleagues, and 53 percent are indifferent or dissatisfied with their managers. To boot, 80 percent feel that aren’t valued and that their work is only evaluated on what they could have done better.

Yikes.

We’ll be honest — we didn’t have these numbers in front of us when we first founded Kin and started dreaming up what our company culture might look like. We just knew we wanted it to be a great place to work. Here are the lessons we’ve learned as we established our culture.

Trust Your People

A Deloitte survey shows there’s a striking correlation between a strong company culture and employees who feel valued at work. In other words, your culture is inextricably tied to your people — and vice versa.

That’s why we emphasize trust first and foremost. We hire smart people and give them the tools to make real, meaningful change in our industry and at our company. We have this philosophy: the person closest to the problem should be the one to solve it. That maximizes the potential for autonomy and efficiency and limits the potential for micromanaging.

Another way we practice trust: we offer flexible vacation time. We know our team can manage their own projects and time, and no one does their best work when they’re burnt out.

Your culture is inextricably tied to your people — and vice versa.

Make Room for Good Ideas

At Kin, we structure the workplace around the understanding that the best ideas can come from anywhere. All employees have access to executives and department leaders so they can share ideas, provide feedback, and improve our processes.

Between weekly all-hands meetings, team huddles, learning lunches, and ask-me-anything sessions with our founders, our employees have ample opportunities to develop skills, seek mentorship, and have their voices heard.

Reevaluate What Failure Actually Is

We strongly believe in a culture of continuous learning. Think about it this way: if you’re building a company that’s unlike anything that’s come before, you need to be able to try out big ideas and see what works. That doesn’t mean we run our startup like the Wild West, but we do encourage our employees to “run through walls,” as we like to say. And it does mean we dedicate resources and time to experimenting and seeing what succeeds — and what fails.

When we view failure as an opportunity to learn and grow, we are better equipped to handle what comes our way next.

If you create a culture that values wonder and experimentation, your talented team will dream up things no one has considered. By contrast, if you cultivate a culture where employees are terrified to take risks or ask questions, your company will stagnate.

Encourage Collaboration, Not Competition

High-pressure companies take a toll on their employees. Studies show:

• Health care costs are 50 percent higher.
• Workplace stress leads to disengagement.
• Disengaged employees are absent 37 percent more often, make 60 percent more errors, and are 18 percent less productive.

So instead of cultivating an environment of fierce competition, encourage employees to collaborate. A study from Stanford found that participants working collectively on a task worked 64 percent longer than solo peers. It also increases engagement, lowers fatigue, and increases task success rates.

Remember that Bad Workplace Culture Is Bad for the Bottom Line

If you need more stick than carrot, remember that a bad work environment leads to high voluntary turnover — and that cost can be significant. Some studies found losing one employee will cost a company 33 percent of the employee’s salary.

Company culture isn’t just about ping pong tables and nap pods. It’s about the attitude your company has toward its employees. Create policies that center respect and gratitude, and a good environment will naturally start to take root.