Understanding Your Current Company Culture

A successful organization must have a culture founded on a set of deeply held and broadly shared ideas backed up by strategy and structure. Successful businesses have a common denominator: a strong culture. All have agreed on cultural priorities at the top, and these principles are centered on the institution and its goals rather than on individuals. Successful business leaders embody their cultures every day and go out of their way to communicate their identities to employees and potential new hires. However, an ineffective culture can bring the organization and its leadership down. Employee disengagement, high turnover, poor customer relations, and decreased earnings are examples of how a bad culture may hurt the bottom line.

Why Culture Holds Value for Having a Successful Organisation?

You must understand that when an organisation has a strong culture, three things occur:

1. Employees know how top management expects them to respond in each situation. 

2. They know that the expected answer is the correct one. 

3. They are aware that showing the organisation’s values will be rewarded.

Since employers play a critical role in maintaining a strong culture, from recruiting and selecting candidates to developing orientation, performance management programs and training them, each step holds equal significance.

How to Understand Your Current Company Culture?

Your company’s culture will most likely alter as it develops and evolves. Even so, it’s critical to have a clear idea of what you want your company’s culture to be from the outset; this will help drive your vision.

Following are some ways to assess your company’s culture:

Recognise that your firm does own a culture.

Every firm, whether consciously or unintentionally created, has a culture. Simply said, when it comes to organisational culture, there is no clean slate. It’s not enough to merely declare that you want something of a certain kind. To build a plan to achieve those changes, you must first figure out what (and how) present habits need to shift. 

Take a culture walk and look for physical signs of culture.

When observing and assessing your organisation’s culture, these are just a few of the questions to consider.

• What is the process for allocating space?

• How much room is allotted, and to whom is it allotted?

• What’s on bulletin boards and hung on the walls?

• What are the different ways that common places are used?

• What do people say to one another in their letters?

• What is the tone of messages sent through official chat platforms or email? 

• What percentage of the time do people communicate with one another?

• During the interactions, how much emotion is expressed? 

Finally, you’ll get to a point where you can detect and feel minor alterations over time.

Conduct culture interviews in small groups.

Ask questions like:

• How would you describe your organisation to a friend?

• What is the one thing about this organisation that you would most like to change?

• Who is a hero in this town? Why?

• Which of your company’s characteristics do you admire the most?

• In your company, what kind of employees fail?

• What is your favourite question to ask a job applicant at your firm?

Look to your leaders for guidance.

While every employee contributes to the firm’s culture, leaders have a greater influence and impact. Examine the signals your leadership team sends out and whether they are followed up with action. Leadership may preach ideals and a mission that inspire employees, but if they don’t “talk the talk,” their actions can contribute to a distrustful and disengaged culture.

After you’ve examined your corporate culture using the four keys above, you’ll be able to tell where you think it needs a tune-up—or if a major cultural revolution is required. One way to ensure a healthy, conducive work environment is to conduct culture assessments while hiring new employees. With the right cultural assessment test, you can not build a workforce that fits the existing culture but also positively impacts the overall performance and organisational success. With culture assessments platforms like Discover Assessments, you can take your hiring process to newer heights and transform the organisational culture effectively. Visit their website for more details.