Every management team talks about culture. However, while the subject is relatively easy to discuss, putting it into effect represents a much more difficult task. Creating an amazing company culture requires a detailed plan, with concrete programs designed to achieve your goals.

To put it another way, there's a big difference between words and actions. It's not enough to announce your commitment to culture. You have to turn that inspiration into definite policies.

With that in mind, here are four steps you can take to nurture a meaningful corporate culture:

Define Your Core Beliefs

Achieving a wide-reaching cultural presence is all about crafting actionable policies. Without a concrete game plan, any mission will remain little more than a vague wish. This danger can become especially relevant to something like culture, which can often seem hard to pin down.

Your first goal, then, should be to come up with a definition of what your culture should represent. Before taking any additional steps, clearly articulate your core beliefs. This will represent your starting point as you work out additional details.

Recognize Employee Contributions

Culture can’t just exist as a top-down phenomenon. It has to become a living, breathing thing, part of the everyday life of your company.

Employees make this possible. Your workers live your corporate culture day in and day out. To entrench your core beliefs, you need to incentivize employees to develop culture on an ongoing basis.

Achieve this by recognizing their contributions. Highlight actions above and beyond the call of duty, whether it involves going the extra mile to help a customer or succeeding in outside charity work. The spotlight you give to these achievements will cement your values and encourage others to follow the same course.

Offer Rewards

You likely have incentive structures in place, at least as it comes to production. Your goal is to encourage strong performances, as defined by high output and maximum efficiency. Why not use the same concept to encourage strong cultural engagement?

Enact rewards programs for achieving cultural goals. The exact nature of these will be defined by your specific objectives. But a process for incentivizing your workers will help you extend and solidify your culture.

Care about Your Workers

Consider it in these terms: culture is like a glue. It exists in the relationship among your team members. This, in turn, informs the way your staff interacts with customers and with the outside world in general.

This dynamic means that the way you treat your workers is ultimately the attitude you broadcast to the outside world. If you only view your workers as cogs in a corporate machine, your customers and the public at large will feel that vibe as well.

For that reason, you have to care about your workers, not just as instruments of your success, but as individuals and people. You have to build relationships with your workers and encourage them to form bonds with each other. These will eventually pay significant cultural dividends.

As we’ve seen, a vibrant corporate culture comes from your workers. Having the right people in place makes nurturing a strong culture that much easier. Finding these team members can pose a challenge, though. A strong recruiting partner, like United Personnel, can help.

Contact United Personnel today to learn how we can help you find the perfect workers for the kind of business you are building.