A Culture Embracing Differences

A couple years ago, the world became fascinated with the ping pong tables and free lunches that had become so synonymous with giant tech firms. Many HR professionals saw these “fun” work environments as the gateway to recruiting millennials. While some young adults embraced the new trend, many refuted the implications it had on the workplace. Fellow LinkedIn Campus Editor, Suneil Kamath, penned his strong opinion “Your job description sucks. And I don’t care about your ping-pong tables and snacks.” While I am certainly grateful for these additions to the workplace, my ideal work environment focuses on the people before the perks.

You don’t need me to tell you the importance of organizational culture.  Although, I once heard an executive say,

“ Culture is more important to the organization’s success than vision or mission.  You rarely find a bad mission statement; but organizations will fail with a bad culture.” 

For me, the organization’s culture should incorporate collaboration, diversity, and be customer-centric.  While pool tables are fun to use on break, I often wonder if that money would have been more wisely invested in education and tools for productivity or improving customer service quality.  If so, I would be happy to find another way to spend my break.  Now, when I see a job description dominated by employee perks such as a pool table, it raises some culture concerns.  Is this an organization with a healthy balance between employee satisfaction and quality customer service?

I grew up in a mostly Caucasian neighborhood, and, as expected, ran into a few life lessons once I got to college. The largest and most important lesson I encountered was an acceptance of different cultures and lifestyles. For the first year of college, I attended the University of California at Irvine which has an over 50% Asian/ Asian-American population. While it was certainly a culture shock at first, I now notice the diversity sitting in the boardroom. It wasn’t until I took time to understand the difference in demographics between my industry and our customers that I realized the importance and value of having people on your team with different ethnicities, genders, and identities.

The ideal workplace has evolved overtime.  Today, it is an organization with a strong culture that embraces the differences and the likeness among various ethnicities, genders, and identities.  A workplace that not only embraces, but places value and respect on these differences.  And, if culture is more important to success than vision or mission, we should all be open-minded to building a strong organizational culture of collaboration and diversity while being customer-centric. 

This post was written as part of the #WhereIWork series, which is tied to LinkedIn’s student editorial calendar. Follow the stories here or write your own. #StudentVoices