Business owners and company leaders know that company culture is not just another fancy phrase. It’s one of the key elements that affect a company’s productivity in more ways than one. In this article, we’re taking a closer look at the definition of company culture and the many ways it can affect productivity levels.

If you look at teams that are happy, engaged, and doing their best work, they typically have one thing in common—they work in a healthy and supportive work environment. But the opposite is also true, and a toxic work culture can not only cause serious issues for your team—but serious issues for your business.

Leaders from Monzo Bank, Octopus Energy and Slack on how getting corporate culture right allows teams to thrive

No matter where your team works, whether remotely or all together in an office, building a culture of accountability is key to hitting your goals and keeping projects on track. Teammates want to know that they can rely on each other to jump in and collaborate on projects, and managers want to know that individual contributors can meet deadlines and expectations without being micromanaged. At the heart of accountability is communication and transparency.

Shadow IT – tech used in an organization that is not administered by that organization’s IT department – accounts for the majority of the cloud tech at most companies. Understandably, the risk this implies might keep a security pro up at night; Gartner estimated in 2016 that by 2020, a third of successful attacks experienced by enterprises will be on their shadow IT resources.