How to Build a Successful Company Culture Committee

Left to develop of its own accord, it's easy for a company's culture to go awry. 

Focused solely on the bottom line, business leaders can lose sight of the very traits that make a business attractive and valuable to customers and a workplace attractive and valuable to employees: company culture. 

By definition, company culture is a set of values, processes, traits, activities, and philosophies that define how you do business ^[1]. 

Culture helps you set behavior and performance expectations for your employees, standards for your services/products, and ensures your employees understand what success looks like in their jobs roles.

Company culture can also be broken down into a set of social values, material values, and ideological values.

• Social values define your company's hierarchy, distribution of power, everyone's roles and responsibilities, and how people in your business should interact. 
• Material values define how people within your workplace work together to provide a service or produce a product with the exchange of ideas and goods. 
• Ideological values define the intellectual and emotional ideals that you and your employees strive to achieve each day. These include your business's fundamental beliefs and values.  

With increasingly remote workplaces and disbursed offices, company culture becomes more difficult to uphold and maintain. As a result, it has become necessary for most businesses to create cultural committees with the responsibility of helping to spread and strengthen culture throughout a company. 

What Is a Cultural Committee?

A cultural committee in a workplace is a group of individuals appointed to help maintain a positive and consistent company culture throughout your business – whether you're a small business with one office, a workplace of mostly remote workers, or a corporation operating with offices around the world.

The primary cultural committee responsibilities include: 

• Helping to maintain and uphold your business's values
• Understanding, defining, and communicating those values
• Brainstorming ideas that can help strengthen workplace culture
• Creating cohesion across different departments and offices
• Discussing, strategizing, planning, and executing all things related to company culture
• Preventing corporate stagnancy with fresh ideas

Read More:​​ How To Build A (High Performing!) Remote Workplace Culture

The Importance of a Culture Committee in the Workplace

Cultural committees in the workplace have become essential to boosting and maintaining a sound workplace culture that has the power to super-charge your employees and fuel business success.

Business leaders can do a lot to create corporate culture as a result of leading by example and establishing policies, human capital management strategies, hiring procedures, and onboarding protocols to promote the kind of culture they want to cultivate. However, this type of cultural leadership can only go so far. The perspectives and experiences of business leaders are limited and they also cannot foster the same kind of organic employee buy-in that employees from multiple levels and departments in the organization can. 

Read More: Invest In Your Middle Managers: They Can Make or Break Your Business

So, when properly curated, cultural committees can work from within an organization to drive cultural success, buy-in, and consistency with ideas that have been birthed from a variety of perspectives, experiences, and departments. 

5 Cultural Committee Ideas to Drive Success Via Workplace Culture

The most successful cultural committees share some common ingredients.

Consider the following ideas when forming and starting a culture committee in your business. 

1. Focus on Diversity

For the best chances of creating a successful cultural committee, the members of yours should be an equal representation of your organization including employees at different levels from different departments with different backgrounds. 

Creating a more diverse team will ensure your team generates a great wealth of ideas that are rooted in a variety of backgrounds and intended to infuse a variety of aspects of your company with improved culture. 

2. Ask for Volunteers

While it's important to strive for a committee that's filled with a diverse selection of employees, it's just as important that the members of your cultural committee all want to participate in it. Appointing individuals who might be a great fit but who don't feel they have the time or bandwidth to participate will create a challenge for members who are fully invested in the committee. 

3. Define a Purpose

Do not make the mistake of creating a cultural committee without providing clear guidelines that define the group's purpose and how they are supposed to function. 

Also, just as you provide the committee with a purpose of driving and maintaining company culture, your committee needs to define specific purposes and plans for each of their initiatives, not implementing new ideas until they have been thoroughly thought through and well planned.

Putting the mission and vision of the company at the center: This business owner's journey to building a $40 million business.

 4. Leadership Support

Support from leadership is absolutely essential. While your committee will get buy-in, your people won't know how to respond to the committee's efforts until you show them by example, participating yourself.

In addition to verbally promoting the committee and physically showing up for them, it's also essential that you provide them with the resources they need to carry out their function. Be prepared to give your committee a budget and implement an efficient process for the committee to propose, submit, and have expenditures approved. 

5. Build It Into Your Operating Framework

Your business should be running according to a well-defined operating framework, like the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS). 

Read More: Why The Most Successful Businesses Run On Operating Frameworks

Establishing your cultural committee as a part of the operating framework and running the committee according to the same standards with regards to meetings, goals, and strategy will keep your whole organization moving in the same direction and ensure success all around. 

See the Impact of Your Cultural Committee in Your Triple Bottom Line

When you begin to intentionally, and actively strengthen your workplace culture with a cultural committee, you should not only be able to see the difference in a happier, more motivated, highly unified workforce in your financial bottom line but also in your triple bottom line. 

Read More: Triple Bottom Line: What Is It & Why Is It Important for My Business?

The triple bottom line looks not only at a business's responsibility to drive profits (the traditional bottom line) but also its responsibility to improve the bottom line in terms of people and the planet. With the power of your workplace culture, you can find ways to line up your business's short and long-term goals with parallel tracks. These adjacent goals can help strengthen your community through volunteer efforts or simply by driving your local economy in addition to making the world a better place by maintaining responsible and ethical business practices or even by supporting global charities with your company's success.

However, you and your cultural committee choose to boost your triple bottom line, be sure it aligns with your company's overall culture and values to ensure you continue fueling your business's success from within.