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How exactly do you establish a winning company culture for your MSP? These 5 traits will help you get there.

Key Takeaways:

• What is company culture and why is it important?
• 5 things you need to start doing right now to establish your company culture:
  1. Collect customer feedback
  2. Set goals around shared priority
  3. Recognize teams that are living up to the core values daily
  4. Reward your team for a job well done
  5. Follow the 4Ps of recognition and reward
• How to promote company culture with documentation

No matter what company you look at, if they have a great company culture, they are probably doing certain things correctly. In this article, we will identify what those things are and how you can adopt those practices for your MSP.

What is company culture and why is it important?

Your company culture can be described as a set of shared goals, values, attitudes, practices, and mindset that characterizes your organization. It pertains to the way your MSP’s employees feel about the work they do day-to-day as well as the direction they see the company headed and what they are doing to help it get there.

Your culture sets you apart from every other company out there, even from those doing the same thing you do. It should be counted among your core selling points when trying to compete with other businesses in the marketplace.

The most productive and successful teams thrive because of their work culture. When this culture is merged with a culture of documentation and gamification, it encourages business growth by lending employees a voice, fostering positive daily attitudes, and instilling a good work ethic.

MSPs that invest the time and effort into establishing, developing, and documenting a good office culture will see benefits like employees that feel more empowered, more engaged, and filled with a sense of purpose. This leads to high confidence among teams and greater achievement and business growth.

5 things you need to start doing right now to establish your company culture

There are a few things that set companies with winning cultures apart from the rest. None of these are necessarily great on their own, but when implemented together on a consistent basis it can result in extraordinary benefits for the business concerned and its stakeholders like employees and customers.

Your company culture defines how your company does business and interacts with customers. It represents your ideals, values, and how you think a company ought to be run. As such, company culture can never be considered a static thing that exists in a vacuum.  It is a living concept that constantly leaves an impression on everyone who comes into contact with your company.

Hence, the only way to assess the culture of your MSP and its impact is by asking for feedback from those who have to deal with your company regularly — in other words, customers!

Send surveys to your customers for honest feedback on what the experience was like after a transaction with your company. Specify a set of parameters they can use to describe the experience and the employees they dealt with. You could also leave room for more detailed answers for those who want to give in-depth feedback.

The purpose of the exercise is not to rub your ego and feel good about yourself but instead to assess how well your company is living up to the values it espouses. In this case, even negative feedback is far better for building the culture than no feedback at all.

Establishing and nurturing a culture for your company requires more than pasting a few buzzwords on the office wall. Employees must understand the specific things they need to do in order to live up to your culture.

This is where establishing metrics and having a documentation culture are important. Establish and document benchmarks that employees and teams can strive for and against to measure their success. These are your culture KPIs (key performance indicators).

Secure buy-in throughout the organization by explaining the benefits of the culture KPIs to the business. Appoint one or two people who are savvy with documentation processes to supervise and ensure that everyone is committed to meeting these metrics. Appoint others to observe and measure the impact those metrics have on the company’s bottom line.

Not only does this secure commitment across the entire organization, but it also rallies the team behind common goals and sets the stage for accurate measurement of the impact the culture change has on your business.

Nobody likes a game they can’t win. Teams need to know how to win and when they are winning. Once you establish and document the KPIs that ensure your company culture is fulfilled, it becomes easy to identify those who live to the standard on a daily basis. 

You can establish badges for each of the benchmarks that you set, so teams get awarded every time they meet your culture KPIs over a set period.

Have a plan for rewarding teams that promote and live up to the demands of the company culture. Every business has its own way of doing this, so try to come up with yours. Just ensure to make it attractive enough for it to work as an incentive. Culture KPI incentives should be worth striving for and hard enough to achieve with proper effort, but not so hard they leave employees dealing with burnout.

Not everybody knows how to win at the game of employee engagement. In fact, the No. 1 reason these programs fail is poor execution. However, your MSP can do better by applying the 4Ps of recognition and reward:

• Prompt
• Personal
• Public
• Proportionate

Companies that master how to endow employee rewards that meet these four criteria will boost employee engagement and reap the rewards of having a great company culture.

Crewhu can help

Crewhu offers employee recognition and customer satisfaction software that is uniquely built for MSPs. This is the very first platform built for that purpose, and our main aim is to help MSPs like yours build the company culture that your business and customers deserve. To learn more, book a demo with Crewhu today.