Building An Exceptional Workplace Culture: What Are The Determining Factors? Increasingly, employers and employees are both realizing the importance of a healthy workplace culture.

Increasingly, employers and employees are both realizing the importance of a healthy workplace culture. It's not just the salary, perks and job profile that prospective employees research on when applying for a job, but also its culture. How is the office atmosphere? Are the co-workers friendly? Is there too much politics? These are questions that are thrown around when finding out about the overall feel that a new job might have.

Workplace culture is an integral factor that leads to organizational trust, which ultimately leads to a better society and a global shift in the way businesses function. Around the same subject, there are several conversations that are taking place and companies that help steer an organization in the correct direction as far as culture is concerned.

Aditya Gupta, founder of The Rug Republic, finds it inspiring to see so many people who are doing such a wonderful job in creating a great workplace culture and the thought leaders around it. His approach to the same focusses on the basics, as any business which is running to a certain scale is not going to be able to function if people are not doing their jobs right. "With just marginal improvements, the quantification can be massive which lead to long term gains, creating a positive loop cycle. This feeds back into a better performance, environment, recognition and overall improvement in the vibe of the place, which is why when I started this journey I knew it was important that we should also be a fun place to work," he says.

Bacardi India's Managing Director, Vinay Rammohan Golikeri, says that for his company, the purpose is to make moments matter and talking specifically, their values- the three F's. 1) Family, 2) Fearlessness, and 3) Founders mentality or entrepreneurial spirit help form the bedrock for building their culture.

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Whatever culture you try to build in an organizations, pride and trust are two factors that automatically make employees perform better and give more of themselves to the company. In the last few years, Quaker Chemical India have built on these aspects, and Tridib Majumder, the Managing Director, believes that the recognition they have got in the current scenario shows that they have moved in the right direction and will carry on doing the same going forward.

However, as far as the overall expert on this subject is concerned, Yeshasvini Ramaswamy would be an ideal choice. She is the CEO at Great Place to Work® India, the global authority on building, sustaining and recognizing high-trust, high-performance culture at workplaces. The company has crafted their perspective by learning from great leaders, surveying millions of employees, and examining thousands of the best workplaces around the globe. Serving businesses, non-profits, and government agencies in more than 60 countries, across all six continents, they help organizations around the world, build, sustain and scale their great culture.

"We have a five dimension model and what measures the outcome of these dimensions is something called the Trust Index. We strongly believe that workplace cultures which promote trust, become a catalyst to high performance. Camaraderie, respect, pride are integral in any organization, and the outcomes of all of these is trust," Ramaswamy explained.

But where do organizations struggle?

Fairness, Ramaswamy answers. But how does one know if it is being practiced in the correct manner? In their parlance, the CEO uses the acronym 'I to I' for this, which is 'intent to intensive action'. A lot of organizations may have the intent, but intensive action is needed to follow through. Promotions, sharing of profit, shares, sharing of wealth- all these are dimensions that are used to record the fairness scale.

Among the various practices that an organization has, if there is one which they do really well, it is submitted to Great Place To Work, which becomes a collective of best practices, depending on the culture audit that they do. Ultimately, of course, going down to the bare basics, if employees trust the people they work for, have pride in what they do and enjoy the people they work with, then the culture of that workplace is a solid one.

The author can be reached at bkabir@entrepreneurindia.com and Instagram.com/kabirsinghbhandari