Description: In a work environment with positive organizational culture, there are shared values of trust, honesty, fairness and accountability.
Our free workshop materials help your team learn how they can impact organizational culture.
Build a culture of trust.
- Trust means believing our leaders and colleagues have our best interests at heart. This is especially true even when we disagree with their perspectives or opinions.
- Employees trust leaders who have emotional intelligence and are consistent in their management style. Building trust for leaders can help with this.
- Make sure that leaders at all levels support psychological health and safety. The Psychologically Safe Leader Assessment can help identify and support this.
- Host a leadership meeting to discuss organizational culture. This can help guide your actions.
- Refer to Leadership skills to help improve emotional intelligence, communication and collaboration. It can also help to improve fairness, integrity and social intelligence.
- Develop a vision, mission and values in collaboration with all employees.
- Make sure to communicate the value to everyone.
- Encourage everyone to adhere and be accountable to align with these values daily.
- Create values-based procedures to guide decision-making.
- For example, “How might this choice impact psychological health and safety in our workplace?”
- For unionized workplaces, you may also want to review Union and management cooperation.
- Explain and communicate decisions with respect and empathy, especially when the outcomes of decisions might feel negative for some employees.
Train all leaders in effective conflict resolution.
- Make sure all employees know who to turn to when they’re dealing with a difficult situation. especially if it relates to their supervisor.
- Encourage face-to-face communication, particularly for difficult issues.
- Hold all members of the organization accountable for their actions. Make sure to hold managers and leaders to the same or higher standard.
- Conflict response for leaders helps to resolve conflict in a psychologically safe way.
Ensure inclusivity for every employee.
- Inclusion strategies for leaders has many practical ideas.
- Help employees be part of a community through mentorship and peer coaching. Mentoring can help set this up.
- Introduce new workers to employees at all levels. Psychologically safe orientation strategies has more ideas.
- New Canadians bring many benefits to the workplace. But we can lose them when they aren’t supported in areas like integration and communication. Leader support for newcomers gives strategies to help them adapt at work.
- Indigenous engagement planning shares strategies to attract candidates from other communities and groups not currently represented in your workplace.
- Workplace discrimination, even when unintentional, can seriously impact employees’ psychological well-being.
- Discrimination prevention and inclusion can help you start conversations and make effective change.
Additional actions and resources
- Review Psychological health and safety policy recommendations to see where you can improve psychological health and safety.
- Learn how psychological health and safety has a positive impact on business objectives with Evidence for psychological health and safety.
Discuss Putting organizational culture on the agenda and how to support policy review and development.
Adapted from Guarding Minds at Work™
Guarding Minds at Work was commissioned by Canada Life and additional resources are supported by Workplace Strategies for Mental Health.