Don’t Leave Company Culture Up To Chance

Here’s our definition of ‘company culture’

Your company culture is the set of behaviours and attitudes that are encouraged or discouraged in your team.

And it’s actually one of the most important things you have to worry about as a CEO.

It’s something that should be

i) agreed as a team
ii) defined explicitly
iii) and then acted on consistently

If you’ve agreed that mutual respect is important to your company culture and then you let your superstar sales person get away with bullying your interns you haven’t really got a culture of mutual respect.

Having a company culture means more than spouting pretty sounding company mottos.

So what does it mean? And how do you go about creating a better culture in practice?

Here are the kind of things we’re concerned about when we talk about culture.

• Communication, respect, honesty, ethics
• Productivity, performance, focus
• Mission and purpose
• Priorities, goals and decision making
• Promotions, pay and recruitment
• Working hours, sick days, holidays
• Discipline

You might not have a clearly agreed culture around each of these things and you might think “we don’t have a culture around decision making”. Whether you like it or not, you do – and what’s worse is that if you leave it to chance your culture is almost certainly not good.

When you leave it up to chance people default to the lazy, selfish parts of their human nature. That’s how the kind of workplace cultures you see in Dilbert comics emerge.

You often hear the term cult-like used to describe companies who are famous for their company culture (Zappos, Southwest Airlines and Apple spring to mind). But that’s not a bad thing because, when it comes to company culture, being different and a bit weird is better than reverting to the status quo.

Want some concrete examples to see how it’s done in the real world?

Here are some company culture statements that don’t leave things up to chance: