7 ways to improve culture with no budget

Many leaders will tell you that culture matters. Yet, far fewer are willing to spend anything on it, preferring to wait for a quarter (or year!) when the budget looks healthier. That quarter never quite arrives. 

And yet culture is still the biggest differentiator between organisations that thrive and those that just about cope. Disengagement is now costing the world economy around $10 trillion - 9% of global GDP - with engagement down to 20%, the lowest in years. 

In an ideal world you’d bring in a proven facilitator to help you turn things around, however, when money is tight or non-existent, that shouldn’t stop the culture work.

The good news is that you don't need a big budget to improve the way you work. Here are seven things you can start with:

1. Rebuild relationships in January. Open the year with empathy and conversations, not targets. People deliver for colleagues they actually know, not strangers.

2. Agree how you'll communicate. Decide - together - what's an email, what's a Teams message and what warrants a conversation. The overwhelm often isn't the tools, it's the absence of rules.

3. Run a culture retrospective. Don’t wait for the annual engagement survey, have honest conversations about what helped, what hindered, what you'll change. Fifteen minutes, every month.

4. Replace meetings with short written updates. Very few managers have had any training on chairing a meeting and even fewer people have the time for them. Instead, ask for 250-character written updates and publish them weekly, to prevent time and energy wastage.

5. Make recognition specific. ‘Thanks’ is cheap, yet so effective. Recognising when someone has gone the extra mile or else shown kindness to another is a simple way to maintain the goodwill and morale in your team.

6. Hold stay interviews, not just exit ones. Ask your best people why they stay, before they tell you why they left. Then keep doing the things that they stay for and eradicate the things they’d like to change.

7. Role-model it. Behaviour travels downhill faster than almost anything in nature. If you want it on the floor, you need to show it from the top. Your culture will only ever be as good as the behaviour of its leaders.

What have you done for free that you can share with others?