Creating a positive corporate culture and delivering better meetings are key objectives for many business leaders, but the two ideas go hand-in-hand. Your meetings have a major influence on company culture while creating a positive culture can help to improve perceptions of meetings too.

Continue reading to find out four useful strategies for creating a positive work culture. You can also take a look at ViewSonic’s range of tools and software to encourage collaborations for stronger company culture in meetings. 

One of the big reasons why many business leaders are eager to deliver better meetings is because they can help to create a positive corporate culture. Conversely, a major concern with bad or unproductive business meetings is that they have the potential to reflect poorly on corporate culture and adversely affect morale.

In this article, we provide four strategies that can help you to improve your meetings and your corporate culture.

Creating a Positive Corporate Culture at Work

Before getting to the strategies for using meetings to create a positive corporate culture, it is worth explaining why culture is so important. According to research from Glassdoor, 77 percent of workers consider corporate culture before applying for a job, while more than half consider culture to be more important than salary.

Your corporate culture is essentially a distillation of your business’s beliefs, behaviors, values, standards, and a general sense of the way things are done. Taking the time to design, create and promote a positive culture can help employees to enjoy their jobs more and can help to persuade customers or clients to do business with you too.

Four Corporate Culture Strategies for Better Meetings

The following four strategies will help you to deliver better meetings while also promoting a positive culture.

Make Sure Your Culture is Reflected in Meetings

Once you have a clear idea about what your corporate culture is – or what you would like it to become – you need to make sure the same ideas are visible to your employees and not just ideas in your head. You need to think carefully about whether the defining features of your culture are reflected in your business meetings.

In a blog post for Culture Amp, Tai Tsao makes the point that if a business cites transparency as one of the cornerstones of its culture, this needs to be reflected in meetings. Therefore, people need to know what meetings are about and what they are intended to achieve, and people need to have access to outcomes and decisions afterward.

This same principle applies to your other values too. For instance, you cannot credibly claim your corporate culture is based on empathy or friendliness if your meetings are hostile and argumentative. Think carefully about your core values and the way your business meetings tend to play out, then take the time to make sure the two are aligned.

Deal With the Modern Reality of Remote Working

Recent years have seen a large increase in the number of companies allowing employees to work remotely. While remote work offers several benefits, it provides challenges too, and corporate culture is one of these.

Meetings can play a valuable role here because they keep remote workers in touch with their colleagues and with leaders in the organization. However, meetings still need to have a clear purpose, or you risk negatively impacting your corporate culture by wasting time and preventing actual work from being done.

The balancing act is ensuring meetings have a purpose while avoiding instances where certain remote workers have very little contact with colleagues. Simple catch-up or status update meetings can be unproductive, but onboarding meetings for new recruits, innovation meetings for sharing ideas, and one-to-one coaching all have their place.

Embrace Modern Trends for Your Meeting Spaces

Physical meeting spaces still have an important role to play, especially when it comes to collaborative spaces, so you need to be up-to-date with the latest trends in this area. For example, there is now a strong focus on comfort, with sofas often replacing more traditional office chairs in spaces designed to encourage creativity and idea-sharing.

If flexibility is a key part of your work culture, you might want to consider ‘huddle rooms’, where people can get together in smaller groups for impromptu meetings without needing to reserve the room. However, you may need to embrace some more modern technology trends in these spaces, whether they are intimate huddle rooms or more traditional boardrooms.

Collaborative devices such as interactive displays and portable touch monitors can help to modernize your meeting spaces and provide visual information. Digital screens also potentially allow for some remote workers to participate in more traditional meetings.

Try to Promote Sustainability in Your Meetings

According to statistics compiled by Fast Company from various surveys, sustainability is important to your current and future employees, so this should form part of your positive corporate culture. In fact, 64 percent of millennials say they would not take a job at a company that was not socially responsible, 70 percent say they are more likely to work for a company that has a strong environmental agenda, and younger generations are likely to follow suit.

There are many ways you can promote sustainability through your meetings and help ensure your business is doing its part, with a simple option being avoiding unnecessary paper handouts. Instead, make use of intuitive software to share and cast content during meetings so as to reduce the need for printouts.

Going further, making intelligent use of advanced telecommuting equipment and investing in this area can help you to avoid situations where you are calling in remote workers for one-off meetings or where staff are expected to travel long distances for meetings elsewhere. This can then reduce their carbon emissions in the process.

Final Thoughts

The four strategies outlined can help to improve the quality of your meetings while ensuring they reflect well on corporate culture. This is especially important as more and more meetings move online, meaning there is a greater need to try to capture some of the usual on-site energy and introduce it to virtual settings.

Strong company culture can also affect employee engagement and satisfaction, which impacts how meetings can be carried out in the organization. Hence, it is essential to ensure that positive elements of your company’s culture are captured when meetings are taking place. One of the ways is to make sure that your meetings are worth having, thus saving your employees’ precious time and effort. Or take a look at ViewSonic’s devices and solutions for building a meeting space that promotes positive corporate culture.