What is corporate culture?
Corporate culture can be defined as, “The behaviors, motivators, values, and work styles of a team, a group of teams and/or an organization as a whole.”
Why is culture important and what impact does culture have on your organization?
Culture is important to the success of your organization because it exerts strong influence over issues such as employee engagement, retention, productivity and profitability. In addition, it shapes your employer brand, affects recruitment and retention, helps drive customer satisfaction, and influences relationships with suppliers.
How important is culture?
Four-fifths (80%) of HR professionals that participated in a recent HR.com survey think corporate culture is either very important or important.
Why does HR view culture as crucial?
The Harvard Business Review article, “The Leader’s Guide to Corporate Culture” notes that culture is key to a number of other performance-determining factors:
Selecting and developing successful leaders
Ensuring the success of mergers and acquisitions
Prioritizing learning to promote agility and innovation
Aligning with strategy
Creating a shared sense of purpose
Common culture misconceptions:
Most organizations fail to evaluate culture as it pertains to the majority of employees or individual preferences, the inter-workings of teams and bringing new talent into the organization. Some experts argue that culture management is typically a top-down approach, with “culture” being defined by a narrow group of executives at the top and then “communicated down” the hierarchy to the organization.
Some typical culture misconceptions are:
Culture is formed from the top down from executives.
Every company has only one culture.
How do you measure culture?
The problem is, most organizations do not know how to measure culture well, and HR is not very familiar with culture across different departments. Many companies also lack a formal definition/description of the primary culture. It is also possible that a lack of cultural measurement tools is impeding HR’s understanding of subcultures. Without definitions and metrics, culture may be viewed as an amorphous “intuitive feeling” that HR professionals and executives have about their organizations. You won’t know what your org culture and team subcultures are, and how they’re impacting your company until you measure it.
Our solution
To measure your culture, at both the team and org level, we utilize a scientifically proven 12 min self-assessment and analytics platform, that leverages behavioral science and data analytics. Measuring and analyzing culture will improve engagement across your entire workforce and helps you to “recruit for culture fit” and predictive success.
Additional benefits:
Align your culture to strategy at every level
Increase team productivity
Proven ROI: Lower employee turnover
Streamline your interview process
Take the subjectivity out of your hiring process
Hire for predictable performance and culture fit
Only when you measure your culture at every level of your organization will you uncover talent insights and culture analytics, that can be leveraged to improve performance, engagement, and hiring. By measuring your culture you’ll also gain insights about each individual’s behaviors, motivators and ideal work styles and can then apply those insights to every aspect of the employee lifecycle and help make faster and more effective hiring decisions.