Company culture is the shared values, behaviors, and practices that shape how your team works together. As your remodeling business grows, that culture shifts whether you manage it or not, so the goal is to steer those changes instead of letting them happen by accident. Here are five ways to improve company culture and keep it strong at any size.

And culture is not a soft concern. Gallup has found that more than half of employees say workplace culture is a deciding factor in whether they stay, and studies consistently put the cost of replacing an employee at roughly half to two times their annual salary. When you are in a growth spurt and hiring fast, protecting your culture is protecting your team and your bottom line.

1. Lead from the top

Your company had a culture when it was just you, and as you added a person or two, it became something else, often by accident. Take control of it now. Define your core values and build systems and practices that reinforce them, from how you handle customer service to how people talk to each other internally.

A strong culture depends on every employee understanding your mission and vision, and they will look to you to model it. If it is not authentic, they will know. If you say you value a healthy work/life balance but never take time off yourself, you send a bad message. If you take time off but are resentful when others do, that is worse. This is why leadership is the foundation of culture: Gallup attributes the large majority of voluntary turnover to management rather than pay, and it starts with strong leadership.

2. Run weekly all-hands meetings

Clear communication is always central to a healthy culture, and it gets harder as you grow. You have people in the office and out in the field, you cannot be everywhere at once, and everyone is heads-down on their slice of the work. A short weekly meeting for the whole company fixes that. It sounds simple, but it keeps everyone from operating in a vacuum, and the larger you get, the more it matters.

Keep it tight. A 15-minute all-hands agenda might look like this:

• Wins since last week (2 min): a quick recognition round.
• The numbers that matter (3 min): leads in, sales closed, jobs in production.
• Department updates (5 min): one or two sentences from each area, even a one-person department.
• What’s coming and handoffs (3 min): what each team should expect next.
• Blockers (2 min): anything stuck that needs help.

Run it the same day and time every week so it becomes a rhythm, not an interruption.

3. Tie goals to values

A healthy culture is tied to your values, but also to clear goals and objectives. As you grow, refine and detail those goals down to each department so everyone knows what they are responsible for and how it connects to the whole.

Make those connections explicit. When a new marketing initiative is bringing in leads and sales is closing them at a good rate, design and production know they will be busy soon. When people see how their work ties into everyone else’s, they stop operating as silos and start operating as a company.

4. Celebrate small wins

Do not save recognition for the big milestones like a finished project. Celebrate the smaller, incremental wins too: a lead qualified, a sale made, a design completed for a client. These moments are frequent, and acknowledging them keeps momentum and morale high.

Recognition is one of the cheapest, highest-return culture tools you have. Research from Workhuman and Gallup found that employees who are regularly recognized are far more likely to feel they belong at their company, and belonging is what keeps good people from drifting toward the next offer.

5. Trim cultural misfits early

As your company grows and your culture changes, you may find some employees are not growing with you. Put in real effort to bring them up to speed first. But if that does not work, you will have to let them go for the good of the company. This is hard with a longtime employee, but a grumbling old-timer can quickly turn new hires sour or send them out the door to a better fit elsewhere.

The cleanest way to avoid this is to hire for culture fit in the first place, so the people you bring on already share your values. (For the mechanics of bringing on a strong team member, see how to hire for your remodeling business.)

Frequently asked questions

How do you maintain company culture as you grow? 

Maintain it deliberately. Define your core values and let them shape your systems, model those values yourself, communicate constantly (a weekly all-hands is the single highest-leverage habit), recognize progress big and small, and address poor-fit employees before they pull the team down. Culture drifts on its own as you add people, so the work is making the changes intentional instead of accidental.

What is the most important factor in company culture? 

Leadership. Your team takes its cues from the owner, and culture is ultimately what you model and what you tolerate, not what you write on a wall. Gallup attributes the large majority of voluntary turnover to management rather than pay, which is why “lead from the top” is the first and most important of these five ways.

Build a culture that grows with you

If you are in growth mode, you know how hard it was to get here. Creating or resetting a strong culture, living your values and demonstrating them to your team, is how you find and keep great people who want to do great work with you. Company culture is a constant topic inside Roundtables, where remodeling owners compare what is actually working as they scale.