What is Company Culture?
The term “company culture” has gotten thrown around so often that it’s become almost too ambiguous to understand. It’s really about a shared set of goals, values, attitudes, and practices that people inside an organization share. So we can see how easy it is for the idea of company culture to become vague. I liken it to the soul of the company. It’s about the belief systems and motivations within a business. This is a subject that’s come up so often lately that I started to write a LinkedIn post about it to share my experience with company culture (or lack thereof), touching on what we’ve done as a small business to build and strengthen our own. As I started typing, I realized this should be a blog post instead. No, it’s not going to be full of calls-to-action and links to other blogs, but sometimes a blog just needs to be about giving you the ideas and inspiration needed to strengthen your business.
A Quick Background Story
In my career, I’ve worked in a few diverse industries of different sizes and varying degrees of valuing company culture. Some businesses spend millions on customer-facing company culture smoke screens while others may value their employees’ well-being, but don’t back it up with any action. Then there are the businesses that really do care about their employees, but don’t know how to actually create a playbook to help guide them in ensuring their team is set up for success. It’s important to know just how simple creating and honoring a meaningful company culture is.
Where Company Culture Goes Wrong
Here’s the deal: without a realistic, thoughtful, sustainable plan in place, a company’s culture is worthless. First, let’s talk about what company culture isn’t, or shouldn’t be. In my experience, these are a few of the things that never work.
Pizza Days Aren’t Culture
When I talk about pizza days, I’m not just talking about pizza days. I’m talking about forced team lunches when the team is slammed with work, committees that employees are pressured to join even when they don’t have the time, work parties to celebrate every random holiday under the sun, etc. The culture of a company hinges on much more than these surface-level moments. In fact, these can have a negative impact. An hour-long commitment most people didn’t want to make isn’t worth the few social media posts you’ll get out of it. I promise.
Team-Building Activities That Come Back to Bite Us
You know those super-fun team-building activities like an afternoon softball game or a bags tournament in a local park? Often, employees are technically volunteering for these things because they won’t be paid, even though they’re usually during the workday (and if they are, it may not be worth the time it sets folks back). A line I heard often in my past life in corporate America was, “Your presence is not mandatory, but your absence will be noticed.” A more realistic line would’ve been, “We can’t make you do this because it’s not part of your job, but you will hear about it the next time you’re up for a promotion, even though it’s not part of your job.” I ignored those things 98% of the time and lived to tell the tale. Anyhow, I refer to this as being “voluntold.” Clearly, I have some eye-rolling left to do here. Long story short: if that’s the company’s culture, it’s not great.
Management Plays by Different Rules
Hypocrisy is a hell of a thing. Let’s say the leadership in a given company has a solid set of core values. That’s awesome! One hundred points to them. Oh, but leadership reserves the right to bend rules as they see fit or plays by a totally different set of rules than the rest of the team. Ooh, that sucks. Negative two thousand points. I consider myself lucky in this department. I’ve had far more awesome managers than terrible ones, but the terrible ones were truly awful. While those awful managers had different issues, they all shared one trait: the rules didn’t apply to them.
Company Culture in a Small Business
When we started Green Ivy Creative, we started talking about how we wanted our future team members to feel about the work they were doing, not just the work itself. Yes, even a small business like ours, with a team of two and a handful of skilled and passionate contract employees, needs to set clear company culture intentions. It sets a positive tone for how our Green Ivy team works with each other and with our clients. Here are some of the things we took into consideration that we feel are easily doable in any business:
People Over Process
The world of web development and digital marketing is largely process-driven, just like many businesses. While processes need to be in place as a guide and single source of truth, often there’s more than one way to successfully complete a task. By being flexible enough to find the ways that make the most sense for the team within processes, employees have more room to feel empowered. This also goes for the different preferences people have in how they actually do their jobs. While one person may work better on a team, another may be more productive (and happier) working independently. Of course, giving everyone what they want all the time isn’t realistic, but if it’s at all doable, acknowledging each person’s preference and working with them to find that middle ground can make a world of difference in how that employee feels about leadership.
Consistency in Goals
If the goals for the leadership team and employees are the same, everyone involved is probably going to be much happier, overall. Employees are more likely to respect leadership if they can see that leadership holds themselves to the same standards they hold the employees.
Be Transparent
It’s one thing to say you’re being transparent and honest with the team, but another to actually do the work to make sure that’s true. Obviously, employees don’t need (or want) to know every little thing going on behind the scenes. They don’t need to know why a certain decision was made if it doesn’t impact them. However, when it comes to anything that makes a difference in their lives in any way, that should be shared with them and it should be shared in an honest way. In my experience, if a decision was made that I didn’t like, it was easier to deal with if leadership explained why the decision was made and even better if they were honest about the fact that, yes, it might suck, but it had to happen. P.S. If you’re going to tell your team that something is in the works and then it doesn’t come to fruition, update them. Don’t simply hope they forgot. They didn’t forget.
Strengthen Your Company Culture
In short, company culture gets confused for things instead of feelings. Those feelings drive behaviors and build relationships within the organization and in the community. Put in the work by speaking with your team and allowing for open, honest conversations to happen without fear of repercussion. Ask them what pain points they have and what matters to them. It might get uncomfortable for you and for them, but growth rarely happens when we’re complacent. Another tip: do this regularly and not just when problems arise. Be an advocate for your employees by putting their needs at the top of your priority list. When your team is thriving, your clients will follow.