Organizational culture has a direct impact on employee satisfaction and performance, and therefore on your company’s financial health – employees that are well cared for are more likely to provide better products and services to your customers.

Below are tips on how to create a positive and high-functioning organizational culture in order to have satisfied employees and, in return, customers.

Build a focused and unique culture for your organization

If you’re an entrepreneur who’s starting a new business, you’re at the ground level of building your culture. Since you’re starting new, you get to create and build the culture you want for your company. Given that organizational culture is critical to the success of your business, it’s important to put thought into it. What makes your brand different? How would you want the culture to be known amongst employees and job applicants? What can your company deliver that sets it apart from other companies? What are the core ideas that started the company and that should drive it? Brainstorming around these prompts will give you a starting point to determine what values, mission, and vision are going to frame your company culture.

If you’re trying to change an existing company culture, there are additional steps. Change can be difficult for people, so it’s important to assess every employee’s perception and reality of the current company culture using assessment tools, such as a survey. Equally important is incorporating their ideas and feedback into forming the new culture. You can gather their feedback through mediums such as forums or surveys. If people at every level of the organization have input into the new culture being formed, people are more likely to adopt the change than if they didn’t have input.

Communicate honestly and transparently

Honest and transparent communication goes a long way with employees because employees want to know they are valuable partners in the company, which is important for a positive company culture, and keeping everyone looped in can make them feel valued and included. Honest and transparent communication can start from the formation of the company culture, and extend to every aspect of your organization that isn’t required to be confidential by law. For example, when forming the organizational culture, talk openly and honestly about what the shortfalls are, what improvements you’re hoping to make, and where you want to go moving forward. Remember to leave room for employees to contribute their ideas to the direction of the company.

Transparency is also important in things such as processes, policies, and workplace opportunities. For example, being transparent about salaries and how raises are decided keeps the company accountable to offering fair salaries and raises, and allows employees to understand the process.

Work towards shared goals together

A critical element in a positive work environment is knowing and feeling that you are working towards a shared goal. Communicate shared goals to everyone in the company, and provide opportunities for people to come together and talk about the progress they’ve made towards that shared goal. For example, hold a meeting in which people from multiple departments and varying levels of positions come together to discuss what contributions they’ve made. Show genuine interest and implement employees’ ideas when possible to show their ideas matter. When employees feel connected to the company’s mission and see that their contributions have an impact, their satisfaction, involvement and performance are likely to increase.

Shared goals don’t only have to be about business. It can be a good morale and culture boost to work on fun shared goals together. For example, if you want to encourage wellbeing at your company and a sense of community, consider apps that track wellbeing and with which employees can share their progress or data with colleagues. They could form teams, accountability partners, or lunchtime walking buddies to work on health together.

There are many elements to creating a winning company culture, but ensure you incorporate the basics of building a focused culture, being transparent with employees, and creating a common goal to ensure a successful company culture.

Lindsey Patterson is a freelance writer and entrepreneur based in the US who specialises in business technology, customer relationship management and lead management. She also writes about the latest social trends, specifically involving social media.