Creating a Culture of Sharing

Workplace culture is an extremely influential and motivating factor for employees. Gaining a strong standard of internal communication and a culture of sharing is important, but unfortunately, not everyone has it.

In this day and age, knowledge and data are key for getting ahead and accomplishing goals. A workplace culture where employees feel completely comfortable collaborating and sharing knowledge with one another only helps them get ahead. It’s the old saying of two heads are better than one. Knowledge sharing and working together makes for a better team environment.

In a culture of sharing, each individual employee has the freedom to share their own ideas to contribute to their organization's initiatives. They also know what’s going on with the company, as opposed to management hiding information from employees.

Management plays a key role in this process. Employees need to always be able to talk to and trust their bosses. It’s important to maintain an open-door environment so employees feel like their ideas and feedback are heard at every level. Regularly scheduled one-to-one meetings with managers where both sides can speak freely are also a great way to make sure communication doesn’t fall off.

Holding larger department-wide and company-wide meetings where you update and acknowledge employees by sharing their success stories is a great way to cultivate sharing. If an employee’s methodology is a great example of how others should complete a task, share that story with the rest of the department or company so they can learn. Having employees present these stories themselves is even better.

Another practice you can implement is team-building exercises. Organize events where multiple departments go together, do activities together, and more. This way, people across departments will get to know each other and be comfortable working with each other and sharing what’s going on with their departments.

Sharing outside the organization

For any employee to be comfortable promoting their organization publicly, they need to be in the right work environment. At many organizations, there are employees who don’t feel comfortable promoting their brand’s initiatives to their network of family and friends. This is because of a combination of reasons.

Many employees don’t feel comfortable sharing, but even those who do oftentimes don’t fully grasp their company’s mission, what the organization wants to promote, or even how their position directly impacts the company’s bottom line. Encouraging internal communication among your employees can greatly improve this. Creating and enabling this culture is extremely important, but not hard to do.

Improving culture through employee advocacy

Having an employee advocacy program allows employees to easily see what the organization wants to promote, how it wants them to promote it, and allows them to pick and choose which promotions they want to follow through on.

By steering employees towards what and how you want them to promote your brand externally, you’re informing them of your brand’s initiatives. This gives employees a great understanding of your brand’s mission and how you’re driving towards your goals.  

When employees have this better understanding, they’ll be willing to share their ideas in your established culture of sharing, and they’ll be enabled to improve your organization's work processes, promotion initiatives and more.   

Your employees were hired for a reason. They’re smart and talented people. Let their voices be heard by creating a culture of sharing.