The culture of a company is established at the founding. The culture defines the organization’s personality. Also, how it looks at its goals and its corporate environment. Empirical evidence points to the common-sense belief that employees are happiest when they are working in an environment which is sympathetic to their own values and goals.
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When the corporate culture is fuzzy or irrelevant to the contemporary scene or doesn’t exist, the workplace becomes shallow, deadpan. The work that employees do feels like it is being performed in a vacuum. Employees may become demanding, seeking extrinsic rewards to replace intrinsic satisfaction.
Square Pegs Round Holes
If an employee’s personality doesn’t align with the corporate culture, he or she may have a hard time fitting in. Even more, they may try to alter the company, perhaps pushing other employees into a shared discomfort. Supervisors may try to support the new employee. Yet, if the behavior comes from a basic disagreement, there may be limited success. In matters within fundamental perspectives, people can be rigid and very hard to change.
Jocelyn Greenky, who writes about corporate culture, describes the experience of one employee who didn’t like fluorescent lights. This was an office whose culture was built around conformity and compliance. When the employee dragged a floor-standing desk lamp into her cubicle, it did not go over well. She discovered that even the smallest acts can look like a rebellion in an office with a clear-cut culture. This one action did not instigate any kind of discipline, but it did create a sense of distance, lack of cooperation, disobedience, which colored her relationship with everyone.
Corporate culture doesn’t regulate behavior but suggests which kinds of behavior are most consistent with the way the organization likes people to be. If a new hire likes to chit-chat, he or she might not be able to function well in a silent office. If a new hire likes coming up with creative ideas and taking risks, he or she may not be happy in a top-down office that is rigidly hierarchical and does things the way they have always been done.
How to Hire People in Agreement
Of course, much of the responsibility for not being stuck in the wrong office belongs to the applicant. However, the company suffers from incongruent hiring as much or more than the new employee. The corporate culture should be visible in the company handbook and policy statements, policies about attitudes toward disciple in the company, inter-employee relationships, supervisory patterns, and the like.
It is important that the hiring process include some corporate culture screening. The interview should include content about the candidate’s attitudes toward office communication, supervision preferences, the kinds of office environment the candidate is accustomed to, attitudes toward work flexibility. The unfortunate thing is that many employee interviews focus on finding an abstractly ideal candidate. Many employee selection processes appear to favor creativity and team membership as ideals without looking at the realities in the office culture. The selection process has to be guided by reality. Management should examine the authentic corporate culture and tailor their selection based on who is likely to function best in the environment as it really is. Often this varies from department to department or seniority level.
A hiring and screening process should be based on empirically generated job descriptions. Job descriptions shouldn’t be designed for official and legal use for the newspaper. It is in the interest of all organizations to inform applicants of exactly what they would be getting into.
Intraway personnel culture strives to create a boundless open space that fosters innovation, and a comfortable environment that encourages teamwork. We focus on enhancing our company culture by empowering a talented team in a challenging and satisfying environment, characterized by continuous learning and commitment. Learn more here.
Working abroad is one of the most appealing benefits of a job. Intraway gives this opportunity. Read one of our employee’s experience working from Italy in our blog post Living The Dream: Working Abroad.
