The best corporate cultures aren’t decided by executives in boardrooms; they’re cultivated by employees and their feelings toward the company. This makes building a better culture almost paradoxical; business leaders can and should be the core of enacting change, but they need to sometimes let the business run its course when it comes to culture. In this way, they should provide the resources to empower employees to foster better performance across teams.

At first glance, it can be hard to pin down why exactly corporate culture is so important. It is frequently associated with companies such as Google and Amazon providing arcade machines and beer on tap to employees—but what works for one company doesn’t work for all others.

Whatever culture looks like, its benefits are universal across all manner of companies. Performance spikes in companies with solid culture, as does employee retention, product quality, and recruitment efforts. 

There are very few jobs, if any, that are perfect. However, even if employees don’t see their job as their one true calling, that doesn’t mean that they can’t feel like the work they do is meaningful. This comes with establishing a vision for the company that guides the purpose of every single employee, top to bottom. While many companies have a mission statement, abiding by it can be difficult. Working a purpose into a company’s operations and standing by its stated values makes employees trust a company more.

Similarly, people looking to work at a company should be evaluated on more than just their resume. Evaluating potential candidates on their culture fit can help to mitigate turnover and ensure that any new employees share values with their coworkers. This is one of the best ways to organically build culture on a team, as it is self-enforcing and requires little input from a business’s management.

In fact, not hiring candidates that are cultural fits can be draining to the company and to their coworkers, even if their performance is solid. Negative or toxic individuals can detract from culture and drive others away from what otherwise may be a great working environment.

It’s easy for employees to feel lost, especially in a large company. Similar to my earlier points about purpose, employees are happier when they feel that they have the power to make a meaningful contribution to a company. While every business has something of a hierarchy associated with it, not letting that structure interfere with ideas from all levels of an organization is important for fostering culture. What makes Google so visionary isn’t the popcorn machine in the breakroom but the company’s willingness to give employees freedom to influence their company and make themselves known.

This approach also allows star players to rise to the top. Autonomy fosters new ideas and can attract talent from those that are looking to make a difference.

Creating an excellent corporate culture should start with company leaders, though they should understand that they will never have full control over how it happens. Instead, leaders should focus on creating the circumstances and infrastructure for good culture among employees and let them develop it as they see fit.