Every company culture has a profound effect on your employee’s ethical behavior and the productivity of your company. A positive company culture enhances the team collaboration and productivity with it resulting in a happy workplace. On the other side, negative culture promotes unethical behavior causing more problems. When negative culture starts creeping into your business the attrition rate goes high; employees lose faith in their company eventually affecting the business to go down. Desiderius Erasmus once said, “Prevention is better than cure”.  Here are the top signs that say negative culture is lurking into your business-

Poor Discipline

A relaxed corporate culture allows the unethical behaviour to prosper. If your company doesn’t take instant action against an unethical employee, they will run the rampant over ethical employees. You can take the right course of action against the employee who is not following company norms.

Few examples of poor discipline include-

• Arrive for work late, take long lunch hours and go home early
• Do private chores during working hours
• Have no pride in their work
• Spend hours chatting on the phone
• Fail to work according to quality standards
• Miss deadlines
• Waste production materials

 Lack of Enthusiasm-

One of the most common reason for the lack of enthusiasm is that when employees think that their voices are not heard by the higher-ups. A lazy work culture also nourishes the negative work culture.

There are some ways where you can bring back the lost motivation of your employees such as

• Find some new challenges for them. Employees might be bored of doing the same thing over and over again maybe that could be the reason the have no enthusiasm left
• Do employee relationship building activity. Keep in mind that the relations among the colleagues can have great impact on employee’s motivation and behaviour for work
• Give them a short leave. Giving them a long holiday will refresh their mind. This may allow them to gain back the enthusiasm that they have lost in work.  

More Sick leaves-

When your employees are more often asking for sick leaves that one sign of negative company culture. Sick leave is nothing but an excuse to avoid work and go for an interview somewhere else. This is the time when you need to pay attention what’s wrong with the culture and try to fix it.  

Employees call in sick just because employers cannot refuse that leave. In such cases here’s what employers can do-

• Start with keeping the sick leave records
• Take a look at employee’s history if he/she is taking many sick leaves
• Standardize a policy for sick leaves
• Let the employee know that you’ve noticed the absence  

Office Cold-wars-

Unhappy teams do not bond well with each other thus leading to the conflicts among co-workers. This often results in employees teaming up against another individual group. It’s a red sign to know that something is wrong with your company culture.Cold wars lurk in almost every office, so how can we stop them and build a successful team?

• When you know something is wrong between your employees you need to intervene and talk to them, solve the issues as soon as possible.
• Focus on team norms. Talk to them about previous incidents about what the team can, or has already, agreed on. If you haven’t talked to them then it’s time you should talk to them.
• Set up conflict management procedures before a conflict arises
• Get the team working together again as soon as possible

Why So Serious?-

A positive company culture encourages a positive environment in the company: smiling employees and a happy workplace. Everyone should be serious about their work but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t smile and laugh over silly jokes. Every employer should make sure that they maintain a healthy and positive work culture for that they can organize some events or go out for a lunch. A new Cornell University study suggests employers may see a boost in productivity if they encourage their employees to eat meals together.

Failure to communicate with each other-

When employees think that they are unheard by their managers they simply avoid being a part of any discussions. A lack of communication among coworkers can lead to conflict and stress. For example, one worker may be waiting for a colleague to deliver key information so he can complete a task on time. If the colleague does not respond to the worker’s request for a status report or the colleague neglects to keep the worker “in the loop”, the worker may begin to worry that the colleague will not deliver in a timely manner. As a result, a conflict between the two may occur.  Some part of this problem is related with kind of employees hired in an organization.

Final Thoughts-

Sometimes no matter how hard you try there will always be someone who will not like working with your company, it’s fine. If you hire right culture-fit candidates in the first place then you don’t need to worry about the negative culture at all. It’s not difficult to find culture-fit candidates, today the technology has made everything possible. There are many online hiring tools that can help you in finding the right culture-fit candidate. instaTalent is the most promising talent acquisition software that can get you, culture-fit candidates. All you have to do is upload your job details and this tool recommends you the best culture-fit candidates. 

[This blog originally appeared on CareersUnbound.com]