With hundreds of thousands of different employers and industries operating all at once, different personalities come together from all walks of life in the name of productivity. So what’s the culture of your company like? Top Applicant is going beyond the blue jeans on Friday and the occasional pizza party from
HR to show the true meaning and power of your workplace culture.
The Framework of Workplace Culture
To define your workplace culture, Top Applicant’s team is breaking down 4 core cultures we see in companies every day. The Competing Values Framework, developed by Kim Cameron and Robert Quinn, gives us a look into each culture type. See if you identify with one or more of the following structures.
Family Culture
A warm, inviting, small company can easily feel like a family. Highly people-oriented organizations that emphasize teamwork, collaboration, and employee input bear the classic hallmarks of a family-oriented culture. These cultures often foster a strong sense of loyalty and tradition.
Keep in mind, every family faces difficulties and personality clashes from time to time. In these roles, you may have similar dynamics with your co-workers as you would at home. This can lead to a tricky relationship with work if you don’t fit well in this environment.
Adhocracy Culture
If you find yourself in a dynamic, entrepreneurial, and innovative environment, you’re likely in an adhocracy culture. With fluid guidance and new developments every day, the company places different ad hoc (or randomized) teams on every project.
This subset of culture values risk-taking, creativity, and being on the cutting edge. Most startups, tech companies, and trading organizations thrive on change and new ideas and structure their teams this way for maximum productivity.
Hierarchy Culture
Formal and structured teams that emphasize efficiency and stability often have natural hierarchy. This means that daily work relies on a set of clear lines of authority, rules, and procedures.
Large, established corporations and government agencies where consistency and control keep things running make up the majority of companies that resemble a hierarchy culture structure.
Market Culture
The final structure we’re focusing on is highly results-oriented and competitive. This workplace culture focuses on achieving goals, expanding market share, and increasing profitability.
These environments often have little bandwidth for pleasantries. Instead, employees have a strong drive for individual success and share a collective drive to serve external stakeholders like customers and shareholders. Sales and service-oriented industries typically breed companies with a strong market culture focus.
Defining Qualities of Culture
Now that we’ve established the 4 basic definitions of workplace cultures in the US, it’s important to understand the different parts that make up a complete workplace. With all these qualities balanced and accounted for, businesses can embrace a truly healthy, sustainable culture!
1. Leadership
Leaders define the tone of a company by articulating the company’s core values, acceptable standards, and overall vision. Their words—and, more importantly, their actions—heavily influence what is considered acceptable and valued within the organization.
If leaders consistently demonstrate certain behaviors (e.g., collaboration, innovation, customer focus), those behaviors more easily become part of the culture.
On the other hand, if leadership shows signs of insecurity, doubt, or unwillingness to change, these behaviors can negatively impact the growth and morale of their team. Who’s in control matters for any business just as much as how they act and feel.
Whether leaders are autocratic, democratic, laissez-faire, or absent-minded significantly impacts communication styles, decision-making processes, and employee autonomy. All of those processes contribute to the culture and productivity of a business. To measure your company’s culture index, Top Applicant’s experts recommend asking yourself the following questions:
- Do leaders foster a learning environment where mistakes are seen as growth opportunities, or is there a blame-oriented culture?
- How do leaders celebrate and recognize successes?
2. Core Values
While many companies have espoused values (values they share publicly and state explicitly), their enacted values (behaviors and attitudes actually rewarded and reinforced) truly define the workplace culture.
Blatant conflicts between stated and enacted values can lead to cynicism and a weak culture. No matter how you slice it, every member of your organization needs to adhere to the core values of your organization the same way. So when determining how your company carries out its values, you need to ask yourself one key question:
“How consistently are the core values integrated into our daily operations, decision-making, and employee interactions?”
Any interaction and positive outcome in the workplace needs consistent reinforcement.
3. Communication:
Communication is the greatest tool at your disposal for shaping a healthy company culture. But just like any tool, it can be under-used and over-used just the same.
To effectively define this aspect of your company culture, start by looking into how freely and openly information your organization and its employees share information. A transparent culture clearly fosters trust and collaboration in both public and private channels.
Clearly define if your regular communications have a formal or informal style. Do you communicate top-down/bottom-up? The prevailing communication styles impact how employees interact and build relationships.
Building in feedback mechanisms through internal meetings also generates a clear and respectful communication channel for the employee/employer relationship.
4. Human Resource Practices
From the onboarding process to daily tasks, standard HR practices play a crucial role in shaping the culture by bringing in a variety of people who align with a set of desired values and socializing them into the company norms. That’s a daunting task for even the most seasoned HR professional! Getting everyone onboarded and keeping them in the same boat both indicate a successful HR office.
HR offices can influence a company culture in 3 other ways.
- Regular performance evaluations help management regularly reward hard work and address employee needs. Maintaining regular check-ins, even despite a busy schedule, shows a strong devotion to ethical employee relations.
- Offering regular opportunities for growth and development also helps foster a culture of continuous improvement. This employee investment pays dividends far beyond what these programs cost to implement! Cross-training, upskilling, and further formal education are all possibilities on the table in the top places to work today.
- Competitive compensation packages include equitable pay and benefits to suit the needs of employees from all walks of life and levels of experience. This not only reflects the company’s investment in its employees, it controls the level of commitment employees have to their position. Adequate pay, time off, health insurance, and other options all affect company culture.
5. Organizational Structure and Processes
To fully understand your company’s internal environment, our experts suggest getting to know a detailed blueprint of the organizational structure and standard operating procedures (SOPs).
- Leadership should have open documentation regarding the following aspects of everyday operations.
- Hierarchy: This determines the level of communication that influences people throughout the decision-making process, and it specifies channels for employee empowerment.
- Processes: The degree of formal and informal procedures can create a more rigid or flexible culture depending on how the processes are agreed upon and carried out.
Collaboration: How easily and effectively different teams work together impacts the level of innovation and shared information within a team.
6. Employee Characteristics and Interactions
For many employees, their experience at a company is written all over their face. Negative side effects like insomnia, fatigue, and poor diet can all infect a collective workplace culture like a pandemic.
Companies can focus on these 3 things to improve their employee characteristics and interactions and their overall culture!
- Inclusivity: A workforce with a welcoming environment brings unique perspectives and experiences together to enrich the entire culture.
- Engagement: The overall morale and engagement levels of employees both result from and contribute to the company culture.
- Socialization: The rules of engagement and quality of relationships between co-workers directly shape everyday experiences and in turn, the complete culture.
Related Read: 3 Questions to Define Your Company Culture
7. External Environment
Our final and best way to improve a company’s culture is to learn what it looks like from the outside in.
You may know the view from 1,000 feet up, but modern companies require top managers to understand how a company looks from 10,000 feet up—or from anywhere else in the world. How every company looks through the lens of social media and review after review left by employees can be greatly distorted from person to person. To focus on what’s really important to the culture of your company, consider these external factors.
Your Industry: The very nature of your industry can directly influence the need for innovation, risk management, and employee relations. In turn, this directly affects culture.
The Market: Competitive pressures and economic shifts can influence companies to change their cultures to survive and thrive.
Trends: Instead of keeping up with the latest fads on social media, we suggest looking deeper into the societal values and expectations influencing employee needs, and, by extension, the culture of your company.
Location, Location, Location: Where your employees live and the physical location of your business also impact your company culture. For example, if your wages don’t align with standards for the region where your business operates, your employees will likely have a longer commute! Just one more thing to think about when defining your ideal workplace culture!
Put It All Together With Top Applicant
So many factors go into defining your company culture. So wouldn’t it be nice to have a platform that has already thought of ways to put these important aspects on display for your company? Now there is!
Top Applicant includes all the features businesses need to put their brand out there on a more professional level than ever before! We include pre-screening questionnaires, in-depth culture indexing, and near-infinite customization options all built into your free profile.
Put your best foot forward, and post your positions absolutely free with the human way to hire!
