Your company culture is important. It is what defines your company, including beliefs and values. It’s also what helps keep your team together. A strong company culture helps sync the actions of employees and management. With a strong culture, everyone is on the same page and working towards fulfilling the company’s goals. What’s more, employees might initially be driven to your company because of pay, but they stay for your culture. Even though company culture is essential, it’s not always easy to capture.
Start Defining Your Company Culture
One way to start defining your company culture is by answering three questions: What do you do? Why do you do it? And how do you do it?
What do you do?
Your mission statement should answer the question about what you do. According to SHRM, a mission statement is a concise explanation of your company’s reason for existence. It should describe your purpose and overall intention. It should also support your vision (see below) and communicate to employees, customers, partners, vendors, etc., your company’s purpose and direction.
To build a mission statement, SHRM advises asking:
- What is your company’s purpose?
- Why does your company exist?
Why do you do it?
The question of why you do what you do is tied to your company’s vision. A vision statement looks forward and sets out an “ideal” state you want your company to achieve. That means it is inspirational and aspirational and should challenge employees. If your company ever achieved your vision, there’d be no reason to continue to exist.
SHRM suggests using the following questions to craft a vision statement:
- What problem are you seeking to solve?
- Where are you headed?
- If you achieved all strategic goals, what would you look like 10 years from now?
How do you do it?
How your company does what it does can be tied to its values, or the core principles that guide and direct your company and how it does business, according to SHRM. Your company’s values are like a moral compass that support your decision-making, standards and policies. Those standards and policies are at the core of how your company operates and how you treat your employees.
- Outcomes: Emphasizing achievements and results.
- People: Insisting on fairness, tolerance and respect for the individual.
- Teams: Emphasizing and rewarding collaboration.
- Attention to detail: Valuing precision and approaching situations and problems analytically.
- Stability: Providing security and following a predictable course.
- Innovation: Encouraging experimentation and risk-taking.
- Aggressiveness: Stimulating a fiercely competitive spirit.
Once you define what your company culture is at the core, then you can set goals to achieve it. Defining and creating a culture that your employees will love will provide major benefits, like improved performance, retention and recruitment.
- Better Performance: Employees who know what’s expected of them, work as a team and whose decisions are supported by management are happier. Happier employees are more productive. You want employees who look forward to coming to work.
- Better Retention: Company culture directly affects retention and year-after-year is one of the biggest reasons people leave. Pew Research found many people quit their jobs during the Great Resignation due to lack of opportunities and feeling disrespected at work, with directly relate to company culture and how companies treat their employees. A strong company culture keeps your employees invested and loyal.
- Better Recruiting: Promoting a strong company culture can help bring workers to your door. According to Recruiting Daily, attracting the right candidates means showing them you have cultural elements they connect with.
Arcoro provides HR solutions that allow companies to hire, manage and grow their employees. Arcoro’s solutions provide HR departments with the tools they need to promote company culture in every step of the recruiting and talent management process and beyond.
Contact our team to see how our solutions work or ask questions about Arcoro can be your bridge to better HR.
