3 Ways To Learn About A Company's Culture

In the last few months, friends and former colleagues have asked me how I evaluate a company’s culture. Specifically, they were considering transitioning out of their current roles and looking for advice on ensuring their next manager and workplace have a better culture than their current one.?

I have thought about this topic extensively in the last year for personal and professional reasons. Research suggests that people evaluate their workplace culture on three levels:?

1. Organization
2. Manager
3. Team

At the organization level, employees consider the resources, policies, and practices senior leadership puts in place to support the culture. At the manager level, employees pay attention to cultural norms the manager endorses versus condemns, cultural values the manager upholds and exhibits, and their translation of company policies into day-to-day actions. Finally, at the team level, employees look at daily interactions, communications, and behaviors to evaluate whether they are treated with respect and fairly and can bring their true unique selves to work.?

If you believe this framework to be reasonable, you can use it to evaluate an organization when job searching:

Organization?

Two critical values of an open learning culture are accountability and transparency. Organizations investing in culture understand that it is advantageous to advertise their resources and progress.?

What are valuable signals?

1. I first look at a company's website, looking for signs of a culture-caring company. Such signals can include (but are not limited to):? diversity and inclusion progress reports, career frameworks and compensation philosophy, and the make-up of the team, executive leadership, board members, and investors.?
2. Next, l look for employee feedback on platforms like comparably or fairygodboss . However, as with any self-reported data, I take it as another input to my learning process, knowing its limitations and advantages.?
3. I look for signs of attrition. Most companies don’t report attrition metrics, which are valuable in assessing a company’s culture. People stay in companies that care about them. So when you see people leaving, you should start asking questions.??
4. Finally, suppose I have an opportunity to meet with senior leaders. In that case, I ask them questions about their company’s culture. For example, do they know their current attrition rates across different social groups, what are the significant initiatives they have around culture development, and how often they communicate about culture-related topics??

What are less valuable signals?

1. I pay less attention to mission, vision, and value statements because what a company says it cares about versus how it behaves can be (unfortunately) very different. So I’ll read through it, but I downweigh the importance of this information.
2. The list of benefits a company offer is essential, but as a signal that correlates with a great culture, I find it less valuable. Many companies offer more or less the same benefits these days. Although there are rare exceptions, some smaller companies have adopted a 4-week-day policy which means they are open to new concepts in workforce management.?
3. Culture Awards that companies got from various platforms. Many of these platforms get paid by companies to get promoted, so this signal is relatively biased. Most of these platforms also use external indicators such as benefits to determine if a company’s culture is good, and as mentioned above, that is a weak indicator.?

Manager

A manager relationship with you can make your work experience amazing or horrible. They carry a lot of weight on how you perceive the value and contribution you make to the company.?

What are valuable signals?

1. Empathy is a critical leadership skill. Empathetic leaders can relate to people better and be resilient in challenging times. It's hard to assess this skill during an interview. If you have good thoughts, please share them.?
2. Knowing how the manager perceives their role is essential. I ask the manager what they think their part is on the team. I compliment that question on how they spend a typical day. I believe perception versus reality is vital in assessing how a manager functions.? A friend of mine had a manager who once described their role as the person who sets up a bowling alley, and my friend's role was just to roll the ball. My friend quit within a couple of weeks.?
3. Leaders should also hold accountability and transparency as core values in the culture. Therefore, I ask them about their knowledge of the team’s culture. For example, what team-building activities have they prioritized in the last quarter? What are the top three core values they hold? How many people have left the team in the previous year? How many people did they let go of in the last year? Evaluating what behaviors the manager tolerated versus not can reveal their values.??
4. Managers are the key to your career progression. How the manager evaluates your work and impact is essential to understand. Do they use a skill framework to assess and determine your skills and gaps? What is a typical career progression in the team? How much is career mobility available in the team/company? When was the last time someone on the team got promoted? How often are evaluations performed in the company? How often does the manager converse about skills and careers with their direct employees???
5. Lastly, I pay attention to what questions the manager asks me during our interview. Specifically, how they ask it and the content can reveal what they care about and how they assess it.??

Team

Team members are people you interact with daily. Their communication and behavior dynamics can make you feel connected, comfortable and engaged. Unfortunately, the sad reality is a single team member can sabotage an entire team dynamic and make everyone feel uncomfortable and disengaged.?

What are valuable signals?

1. My first signal is who is on the team and their backgrounds. Team members' past experiences and roles define the team's current state. Next, I explore their Linkedin profiles to understand better what they have already accomplished in their career.?
2. Next, to understand what team members care about, I ask about the most critical problem they think I should solve if I join their team. I also follow up with the question of what new skill set I need to succeed in the role.
3. I pay attention to the interview process and the structure of the interviews. These two elements allow me to see if the team has adopted best practices for making interviews more inclusive. For example, do they introduce themselves and their role on the team, or do they ensure I have ample time to ask questions??
4. Throughout the process, I also pay attention to their questions and answers. I once spent an hour-long interview with two people interviewing me for a team leader position. They asked a lot of technical questions. In the last 5 minutes, they allowed me to ask a question. I asked: “what is the most pressing issue I should tackle when I join the team, and what skill do you think you are missing today that I should have?”. Their answer had nothing to do with my statistical or engineering skills. I felt we wasted an hour where they evaluated the wrong abilities ultimately.?
5. Last, I ask questions to assess transparency and accountability on the team. For example, when was their last retrospective discussion about culture-related topics? What were the action items from that discussion? How often do they have open conversations about what works in their team versus what needs to be improved??

Ultimately culture is a tricky element to assess when you are an outsider. Therefore, I continue to learn how to interview companies about their cultures throughout my career.? The nice thing about this learning process is that when I am a hiring manager, I always think about how the outsider candidate assesses us and push myself and my team to improve continuously.

If you have any more thoughts about how to assess a company's culture please feel free to share in the comments.

#liveandlearn #culturematters #interviewpreparation