What are some things a company can do to make its culture nicer?

There are many initiatives that can be taken to make the company culture nicer and thereby the team works more efficiently:

Transparency: Transparency is the single most important things an organization has to undertake to make the work environment friendly, fair and efficient . It's giving employees unfiltered insight into a company's operations and future. thereby giving equal opportunity / fairness to all employees and gaining their TRUST.

Participate Management: Management should encourage suggestions from all employees for improvement and these suggestions should not be restricted only to an employees field/ department  of work. periodically reviews these suggestions and reward the employee whose suggestions that the company will implement. this not only brings in new ideas and makes the employees feel important but the management will also be aware of issues or problems that it was not aware of earlier. 

Recognize valuable contributions: recognize and reward valuable contributions. Employee recognition doesn't have to come only from the top. It's more impact-ful when recognition comes from all around -- from leaders and  from peers. 

Employee Autonomy: No employee likes to be micro-managed. It is ineffective and inefficient and mostly counter-productive. assign responsibility and you may be surprised how innovatively some employees fulfill it. in the case where the employee is unable to complete the task identify training needs and rightly train the employee.

Reward Programs: The purpose of any reward program ( can be incentives, commissions, bonus etc.) should be to give and managers should not find ways/ excuses not to give rewards but at the same time the reward programs should be fair.

Flexibility: The policies and rules of the organization are to achieve the set business objectives, however organizations must be flexible to accommodate individual needs but without be partial a a select few.

360degree appraisal: Performance appraisal should not be a one-sided activity i.e. that manager appraises and  the employee has no say in it. an employee should self appraise and also all other departments/ personnel/ thirds party that officially interact with the employee should also appraise the performance of an employee and these appraisals should be aggregated based on appropriate weightages. The reason for this is that and employee may be good with his boss and can be a pain for others to work with. Only with his boss appraising him, it may not portray the right image of the employee and therefore the team environment may be negatively effected.