The Important of Company Culture and Core Values
Company Culture and Its Core Values
What Is Company Culture?
Company culture is the shared values, attributes, and characteristics of an organization. Company culture refers to the attitudes and behaviours of a company and its employees. It is evident in the way an organization's people interact with each other, the values they hold, and the decisions they make. Company culture encompasses a variety of elements, including work environment, company mission, leadership style, values, ethics, expectations, and goals.
A company's culture may be expressly and deliberately cultivated, or it may simply result from the accumulation of decisions made over time. With a strong company culture, employees understand the expected outcomes and behaviours and act accordingly.
Some companies have a team-based culture that emphasizes employee participation on all levels, while other businesses have a culture where formal, traditional, or hierarchical management is valued.
One example of company culture can be seen at Netflix, where it is encapsulated in their philosophy of "people over process." In its company culture document, Netflix spells out its company values: judgment, communication, curiosity, courage, passion, selflessness, innovation, inclusion, integrity, and impact. These values are expected to be upheld by employees in every action and interaction, resulting in a creative, collaborative, and successful organization.
Let us start with Identifying the Company Values
Core values are what support the vision, shape the culture and reflect what a company value. They are the essence of the company’s identity – the principles, beliefs or philosophy of values. Many companies focus mostly on the technical competencies but often forget what are the underlying competencies that make their companies run smoothly — core values. Establishing strong core values provides both internal and external advantages to the company:
Core values help companies in the decision-making processes. For example, if one of your core values is to stand behind the quality of your products, any products not reaching the satisfactory standard are automatically eliminated.
Core values educate clients and potential customers about what the company is about and clarify the identity of the company. Especially in this competitive world, having a set of specific core values that speak to the public is definitely a competitive advantage.
Core values are becoming primary recruiting and retention tools. With the ease of researching companies, job seekers are doing their homework on the identities of the companies they are applying for and weighing whether or not these companies hold the values that the job seekers consider as important.
Some Examples of Core Values:
- Empowerment – Encouraging employees to take initiative and give the best. Adopting an error-embracing environment to empower employees to lead and make decisions.
- Innovation – Pursuing new creative ideas that have the potential to change the world.
- Integrity – Acting with honesty and honour without compromising the truth
Therefore, it is important to build your own company culture. Putting your culture into words that promote it to others via your company core values.
References:
https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/core-values-why-so-important-your-company-nicolas-schoenlaub/