How to Improve Your Company's Culture

TAMPA (MainStreet) -- There's so much talk about company "culture," it's easy to be cynical. But it does exist, and it is important to your business, says Bobby Harris, CEO of BlueGrace Logistics.

BlueGrace is a freight and logistics service provider founded in 2007. Given the strong growth expectations for the freight and logistics industry, the company began franchising in January 2011. It currently has 20 franchised locations and four company stores in 12 states.

Warren Buffett, chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, with Bill Gates at Berkshire's annual meeting, the corporate world's "cultural" event of the year.

Harris is a big proponent of good company culture. He believes it fosters positive work environments, which leads to employee retention and, of course, increased sales. BlueGrace even has a full-time culture coordinator who plans company events, potluck lunches and other initiatives as well as a community manager that manages all of its social media efforts. Combined they assist to keep a strong positive company culture, Harris says.

How do you define culture?

Harris: Culture means something different for everybody. Is it a family-run business? Is it a corporate-run business? For me, having culture doesn't mean it's a good thing because you can have a bad culture. Culture is almost interchangeable with the word spirit. We believe the way the world's evolving so quickly, especially in our industry, at the end of the day we can count on two things: our brand and our culture.

We invest in culture as much as anything we do. The way we measure our success is how much we enjoy coming to work so that's why we spend a lot of effort and time to make sure that we're at a happy place.

We do a lot of different things here even though we're growing very fast. We try and keep a small company feel. As CEO I try and know everybody intimately. We feel that social media has been a big boon for us in allowing us to have a little insight into everybody's lives and vice versa.