And How and Why Should You Define it?
Management is not just payroll, HR policies and time sheets. When it comes to managing a large or small number of people in a company, company culture can make or break institutions. Do you know what your company culture is?
A Company Culture is basically the values and practices shared by members of your company’s employees. It is a combination of your mission statement, company purpose and employees’ purpose plus the overall environment of trust, continued learning paths.
Now that we have defined your company culture, why do you need to define it and how do you define it?
Why Define Company Culture
Because while employees’ character traits and preferences and set of values differ from one to the other, your company is one entity with ONE set of values, ONE mission and ONE goal, therefore, clarifying your company’s culture will help you do the following:
1- Reach Goals as a collective entity
2- Streamline operations more efficiently
3- Map out your Talent Profile for future and current recruitment ventures
4- Unify the team in the state of unforeseen crisis
5- Define Core Values for the team regardless of their personal beliefs
How to Define Company Culture
Firstly, write down your company’s values from your own perspective. See Jobzella’s Core Values as an example.
Then, discuss with the team and get their feedback, you will find things to add or remove or improve, listen to them, your team is your backbone. Always!
When you sit down with your team to refine your company culture’s definition keep the following items in mind:
- Clarity of Mission
- Employee commitment
- Employee Empowerment
- Integrity and Ethics
- Trustful two way communication
- Effective Leadership
- Effective processes
- Compensation and reward programs solely based on performance
- Customer/Client/User Focus
- Commitment/Desire to continuously learn
- Importance of recruiting and retaining only the best employees
- Flexibility
- Accountability
- Team Support and Team Spirit
These pointers can and should be used as a guideline for a complete company culture map, if you were to be asked about any of the above points, would you have an answer? If you don’t, ask the team for help and suggestions.
Write it down again after refining it using the above points and ask the team again, do they agree? Do they have requests? Are any of the values against their professional ethics? Use their answers to refine it again.
Slowly, you will begin to discover and map out your company culture and your employees will be more relaxed knowing there is an official constitution for their work lives that they have personally helped map out with you.
You may find yourself with a 20,000 words manual on your company’s culture and that is perfectly fine. Keep it for continuous reviewing but take out the basic values and have them always visible to current and future employees and watch the changes unfold and always for the better.
Tell us about your company culture, especially your favorite parts. We love reading from you on Facebook, Twitter or even, comment below!