4 Essential Strategies to Start Your New Year with a Strong Workplace

It’s that time of the year when we reflect on our experiences and accomplishments to create new goals, life-changing habits, promises, and resolutions that will inspire growth and make us feel renewed. It’s when we make intentional decisions with the hope of improving outcomes in our lives, both personally and professionally. One of the most important decisions you can make is starting the year off strong with a positive work culture. Here are 4 essential strategies for hiring and retaining the right talent. 

1. Communicate and model your core values. From your website and employee handbook to informal conversations with colleagues, transparent organizational beliefs are key. This informs joyful culture, clarifies expectations, and creates buy-in to the work. Effectively communicating and living your core values, from upper-level management down, will minimize assumptions, thereby building a unified and aligned work community. This is especially critical during expansion and change in organizational direction, as it helps establish norms.   

2. Create a comprehensive interview process and execute it with fidelity. Now that you’ve communicated your core values, assess these non-negotiable traits in every step of your interview process. Like most interviews, the process should evaluate mindset, skills, and culture. However, maintaining a consistent candidate experience is a priority and an equitable process. Involving and training interviewers (colleagues and stakeholders) to have specific roles is essential in the evaluation process. This practice will help you make a fair and credible hiring decision, eliminating biases.   

3. Conduct a culture audit. One best practice for employee retention is to examine your culture closely and consider how it affects performance and innovation. This assessment is challenging, but necessary. It will help you identify and solve cultural challenges to keep employees vested and engaged. Through deliberate interviews, surveys, and observations, you can create a plan with intentional actions that will influence attitudes and create a more expansive work environment.    

4. Invest in your team. The most important asset of an organization is its employees. They are the exceptional individuals who make your dream a reality, so why not invest in building their capacity through professional development and creating career pathways? The more you invest in them, coupled with a strong culture, the higher their engagement and performance.