Enhancing your company’s culture

Maintaining great company culture is important for employee recruitment and retention, particularly at expansion stage companies, but what are you doing to enhance your company’s culture?

Since Google prides itself on maintaining their small company feel, and year after year is considered one of the best companies to work for, I thought I would check out some of their benefits to see how our expansion stage companies may be able to improve their own company culture by following Google’s lead.

According to Google’s corporate information site, a few things you might see in their workplace include:

• Local expressions of each location, from a mural in Buenos Aires to ski gondolas in Zurich, showcasing each office’s region and personality.
• Bicycles or scooters for efficient travel between meetings; dogs; lava lamps; massage chairs; large inflatable balls.
• Googlers sharing cubes, yurts and huddle rooms–and very few solo offices.
• Laptops everywhere–standard issue for mobile coding, email on the go and note-taking.
• Foosball, pool tables, volleyball courts, assorted video games, pianos, ping pong tables, and gyms that offer yoga and dance classes.
• Grassroots employee groups for all interest, like meditation, film, wine tasting and salsa dancing.
• Healthy lunches and dinners for all staff at a variety of cafes.
• Break rooms packed with a variety of snacks and drinks to keep Googlers going.

Once I finished reading this list, I thought it would be nice to live at a Google office… and I guess that’s the point. Making the office a place where your employees want to be will not only make them happier, but will likely increase their productivity as well (even if there is a pool table around).Although the above list doesn’t sound like something that is possible for a small company, I think that there are certainly things that a company of any size can take from Google’s lead in thinking outside of the box.

What do you want your company culture to look like in the future? Does it currently support your company’s mission, vision, and values? If not, your management teams will need to align them in order for your business growth strategies to succeed.