Business Success: Company Culture
Starting a business involves numerous steps. One of those steps is recruitment because one person is not enough to manage an entire business. Recruitment is a critical step that can make or break a business’s success. Indeed, you need to hire competent people, but above all, you need to hire people who have ideals aligned with the ones the company pursues. While you want diversity in your team, you also want people passionate about the company’s concept and who believe in the business’s future success. Even when the business and the number of employees grow, this mindset must be maintained. How can you ensure that this passion does not fickle out as the team grows? The answer lies in the company culture.
What is a Company Culture?
According to builtin, company culture is the shared set of values, goals, attitudes and practices that make up an organization.
It means that the culture represents how people feel about their work and work environment, together with the values they believe are identical for the whole organization, where they see the company going and how.
Some people misinterpret the company culture as the core values or the perks offered.
While core values are definitely part of the culture, it is not THE culture. Core values need to be implemented and all the actions accompanying the core values’ implementation are also in the company culture.
Of course, the environment where the employees work is crucial to forming the company’s culture; if people are unhappy with their environment, they will inevitably feel dejected with the whole organization. However, having a table tennis table or a movie theatre inside your company’s building is not part of the culture if people do not actually believe it is what the company stands for.
Google is a perfect instance: employees benefit from plenty of perks which back up what the company stands for!
They have all sorts of eccentric stuff in their buildings to boost creativity such as promoting their employees’ well-being by offering free meals.
Company culture is enacted on the core values; it is the values that all employees believe in and use throughout their work with the company.
What is a Good Company Culture?
Since every business is different, there is no one best organization culture.
Indeed, each business has a company culture that evolves through time due to all the individuals shaping the organization.
However, we can give three characteristics to make your corporate culture a successful one:
Be Transparent
Favour an open approach to sharing information. It will help foster engaged and happy employees who are crucial for success.
Being transparent means that you communicate regularly with your employees about what is going on in the corporation; you have to keep them in the loop.
Make it strong
It should be evident by now; that for a company culture to work, it has to be solid. It means that all employees must understand the culture and adhere to it.
A weak culture, where employees disregard the values for which the company stands for, in the end, disappears.
Diversity and Inclusion
Everyone wants to belong. More specifically, nobody likes to feel left out of a group.
Promote diversity and inclusion in your culture so that all employees truly feel part of the organization. It will ensure that they adhere to the corporate culture, which is crucial for the strength of the culture.
Avoid creating a work environment where only a specific group is included whereas the rest of the employees are outcasts.
What else?
Designing and implementing a robust corporate culture is crucial for various reasons.
It is no exaggeration to say that the corporate culture can make or break the business. It is critical to spend considerable resources to design a fitting company culture and implement it accordingly.