If you want your company to have any type of long-term success, you will need to institute an overarching corporate culture and have everyone buy into it. The culture that you set will establish what your brand does and hopes to achieve. It will also help employees, clients and vendors live those values in everything that they do. What are some good ways to create and establish a corporate culture that you can be proud of?

Lead by Example

G&S explained in a recent article that you cannot establish rules that you would not follow yourself. If your employees or customers find that you aren't abiding by the sexual harassment policy or the nondiscrimination policy that you have created, you will look like nothing more than a hypocrite. Remember, a lot of companies have policies that look good on paper, but it doesn't mean anything if you are not willing to follow through and stand up for your beliefs each day.

Let Your People Have Input In the Creation of the Culture

Your people should have a vested interest in what goes on each day at work. In fact, according to Shapiro Negotiations Institute, the key to getting what you want out of an employee if giving the employee what he or she wants.

Therefore, you are more likely to get total or close to total buy in by allowing your people to create the culture that they want to see. Of course, you will have final say as to the values you expect employees to live by and other expectations that you have for them.

Allowing the employees to help create the culture could save on labor costs both now and in the future. You save money today because you have people who are already a fit for your culture and who don't need to be replaced. Going forward, you know what your culture is and who your ideal employee looks like. This makes it more likely that you will make the right decision the first time on future hires.

Training Should Be Continuous

Your people should be trained on an ongoing basis as it relates to your company culture and living those values. At the very least, you should have a yearly training meeting highlighting the good things that your people have done. It should also provide updates regarding changes to employment and other relevant areas of the law.

This ensures that your people are recognized for following corporate policies and are aware of what could happen if they don't follow them without making any sort of direct or any other type of threat. In addition to a yearly meeting, new employees should be trained for several days or weeks before they go live interacting with customers or others on the job.

A common practice in today’s technology-driven business world is to create a system or workflow that maps out the entire training process. PNMsoft defines a workflow as the ‘definition, execution and automation of business processes where tasks, information or documents are passed from one participant to another for action, according to a set of procedural rules’. Having a drawn out process in place ensures that training is uniform and comprehensive. It also guarantees that each employee is trained in the exact same manner, no matter who they receive the training from.

Make Sure There Are Mechanisms for Resolving Conflicts Fairly

According to Find Law, the worst thing that you can do to an employee is retaliate against that person for alleging that something illegal has occurred. Whether that action violates a company policy or the law itself, employees generally have a right to report those incidents without fear of being fired or otherwise reprimanded.

Ideally, you will work with the employee to find out what caused the allegation and hold whoever engaged in the illegal activity responsible for his or her actions. If allegations are made against you, there should be a neutral party responsible for investigating those claims. What this does is allows for a culture of trust and accountability the keeps employee morale as well as respect for your brand high.

Your corporate culture is something that you need to establish as soon as possible. This will help you determine how to handle conflicts, who to bring aboard as you expand and how you will balance the need to grow with the need to do so in an ethical and responsible manner.