Building A Culture Of Kindness

Corporate culture is one of those squishy, amorphous terms that’s hard to nail down and even harder to quantify.  Your company, and by extension, your company’s culture is a living organism, and while everyone plays a role in developing and nurturing it, it’s something that starts at the top.  Your employees will take their cues from you.  If you’re prone to angry outbursts, then you encourage the same behavior in your employees.

Thus, if you want to encourage and slowly build a culture of kindness, that too, starts with you.  Here are a few things you can do right now, starting today, that will slowly and steadily move the needle and transform your business into a kinder place to work.

It Starts With Taking The Time

The best place to begin is to simply take the time to be kind.  Pay attention.  Sure, you’re busy, and you probably wear a number of hats during the course of any given day, but it only takes a moment to acknowledge those around you with a smile and a nod.

You can take it even further by taking the time to learn your employees’ names and a few details about them, then be sure to call them by name or ask about their friends and family, or something you know to be important to that person.

Even if you have dozens of employees, this is not much of a burden and again, it only takes a moment, but those small things can bring about tremendous changes in your company if applied steadily and consistently over time.

See Past The Task, To The Person Doing It

Yes, the work your people are doing for you is important.  That’s undoubtedly true.  It’s also true though, that the real, living, breathing people in your office are important.  If you’re a very task-oriented person, it can be easy to forget the needs, desires and feelings of those who work for you.  Ultimately, this comes down to increased mindfulness on your part, which your employees will echo and replicate when they see you doing it.

See The Good

Sometimes, especially when your business is going through a period of transition and uncertainty, it’s easy to see the bad.  The innumerable problems you face on a daily basis and the challenges those problems bring with them.

There’s also a great deal of good about your company, and it pays to spend time reflecting on that and acknowledging it.  If you only focus on the negatives, then you will, over time, become a more negative person and that will badly damage whatever culture of kindness exists in your office.

Give Each Other The Benefit Of The Doubt

Everyone misses a deadline or makes a mistake now and again.  While it’s important to acknowledge mistakes when they happen and to take corrective action, it’s also important to give each other the benefit of the doubt.  That goes for you as well, by the way.  Cut yourself a little slack.  Even though you may want your employees to see you as near-perfect, the simple truth is, you’re not, and that’s okay.

If you take the advice offered above, it will have a positive, transformative impact on your place of business, and that’s a very good thing.