What Is Organizational Culture, and Why Does It Matter?

Discover how Dovetail can scale your ability to keep the customer at the center of every decision. An on-site gym, for instance, shows your company’s commitment to health and wellness. Alternatively, unlimited vacation makes sense if your company values autonomy.

The importance of company culture

Subsequently, each new hire had the effect of naturally reinforcing and improving company culture. Leaders may tell employees they want their what is corporate culture organization to be innovative and offer cutting-edge products and services to its customers. But if they don’t take action to support that claim, misalignment occurs and culture suffers.

1. It also determines how the organization reacts to change, evolution and crises and affects the organization’s ability to innovate and succeed.
2. This type of work environment is highly structured, and senior employees have high levels of control over the employees they manage.
3. Employees, for example, might be attracted to companies whose cultures they identify with, which in turn can drive employee retention and new talent acquisition.
4. Mentoring programs are a great way to help employees feel both connected and supported in their work.

How to Improve Corporate Culture?

Finally, a standard organizational culture survey compares company culture with external benchmarks rather than the leadership’s own aspirations and goals. While such a benchmark might reveal how an organization compares with a generic standard, it fails to highlight what is most fundamentally unique and valuable within an organization’s culture. Furthermore, these surveys do not approach culture functionally — that is, culture as an organization’s unique purpose and brand brought to life.

Culture brings your company purpose and brand to life. How does work get done around here?

It’s the big-picture view, made up of the values, principles, and working environment you and all your employees will hold fast to. Global culture is typically identified and championed by leadership, but ideally lived out by every individual employee. Its resiliency should be based on firm core principles or company values that will help the culture remain true to what’s most important even as it changes. Overall company culture is also influenced by other more tangible factors, such as operations, office layouts, and customer support. It’s a subtle and complex mix that’s about more than just who you hire and the perks and benefits you offer. It’s a system of shared beliefs and the behaviors that determine how an organization’s members interact and make decisions.

Most Unethical Behavior Goes Unreported and Unresolved

Culture is shaped by communication; leaders who take it seriously will learn how to describe their company culture and communicate it to the entire organization. You can think of company culture as the set of beliefs, values, goals, and attitudes shared by an organization. This is sometimes called the “shared ethos” of a workplace or the “company personality.” Company culture guides the activity of an organization and the way goals are expressed through values and beliefs.

In the second phase, we evaluate areas of alignment and misalignment between leaders’ desired culture and the culture that employees experience. Recognizing work that highlights specific values communicates an organization’s desired identity to employees, fostering a culture focused on what matters most to the company. For example, if an organization’s identity includes a commitment to innovation, leaders should use companywide meetings to recognize workers who excel in new product development.

Hold regular feedback and performance review sessions to support these expectations and enable ongoing adjustment and improvement. A company that prioritizes teamwork will encourage a culture of training employees to work together toward common goals. This can include concrete actions, such as managers assigning work to teams of employees rather than individuals or creating mentorship programs. It can also include non-work activities that build trust and comeraderie, such as scheduling shared lunch breaks or volunteer activities that a whole division participates in.