To a lot of people, corporate culture is an oxymoron. As far as they’re concerned, companies are simply the unfeeling, uncaring sum of the villains who inhabit them. This means financial firms are frenzied vampires eagerly sucking money from hapless investors, big corporations are raging executive tyrants cutting corners and employees at will, and startups are wild-eyed kids playing with toys and frolicking in huge troughs of money.
But human resources experts say that no, every company actually does have a culture. You may think it starts in the employee refrigerator and creeps along the penicillin-green walls until every area is covered. In reality, it begins with the people who founded the company and continues as these leaders hire people who share the same values and outlook as they do. It keeps going when the newly hired bring on people with these same values and outlook. Conversely, if someone does not share these characteristics, they either aren’t hired in the first place or if they are, they soon leave, of their own accord or someone else’s.
Put another way, company culture is organic. It’s created, maintained, and modified by the leaders and employees. Officially, it could be defined as “the generally accepted type and style of behavior in a company concerning what is valued and what is not.” It changes slightly with each new hire since people have their own interpretation of standards, but it remains basically the same unless something dramatic happens, such as a someone new in the top spot or a deliberate top-down effort to change the culture.
Some places value teamwork, some praise long hours and hard work, some care only about your results, not how you got them. Sometimes these values are obvious, sometimes the culture is subtle and has more to do with things like integrity and how much employee input is valued.
The “so what” of all this if you are working in a place where you aren’t right for the culture (and vice versa), you should think about looking for another job before your stress reaches astronomical levels.
How do you find out what the culture is in a company you’re interested in working for?
- Check out online sites like Glass Door to see what employees have to say.
- Look up references to the company on news outlets and periodicals.
- Find out who works there through personal contacts or networks and ask them.
- If all of the above fails, sneak in and scrape the walls for fungus and microbes and send them out for analysis.