“Company Culture” is a confusing word. It can mean background, personality, environment, behaviour and all of the above. Even in a room of a hundred HR leaders we recently established that no two people had the same definition of company culture. This leaves us with a really big problem which is how do we hire for culture when we can’t agree on what it is?

Fortunately at TalentRocket we have the answer. Not a universally accepted definition of company culture; that we’ll probably never gain consensus on, but a universally accepted definition of culture fit. Which is an environment in which someone thrives. And by thrive we mean they do their best work because the environment they are working in supports it.

On board? I hope so. Because culture fit is the main reason that new employees don’t work out and why your people aren’t unleashing their full potential. Bad culture fit is like hiring Usain Bolt to run the 100 metres in 9.7 seconds and giving him a pair of high heels to run it in.

Culture fit happens at a team level

At TalentRocket we know that culture, by this definition, is dependent on the team; not just the company as a whole. Sure companies have shared values, manifestos, missions but culture really starts at a team level not an organisational one. If you can show me a finance team that works the same way as a sales team then I’ll eat my hat, but in a decade of recruitment I’ve not seen it yet.

Let’s get some definitions:

Company Values

A moral/aspirational framework within which we make decisions... the company we want to be, set at a company level for everyone to aspire to.

Company Manifesto

Specific statements based on our values that explain how we treat each other and our customers, and giving each individual a clear understanding of what our values mean in practice.

Team Culture

A measure of each team’s culture as assessed by the individuals that work there. This ensures we create and maintain environments where individuals can thrive, and attract talent that is suited to the environment they’re going to work in.

Fitting it all together

Let’s fit that all together and see how it works.

As the diagram illustrates, our values surround everything we do. We aspire at all times to live up to these values, and if we aren’t then we should either do something differently or reassess our values.

Our manifesto is a set of statements on how we act, taken from our values. If we find a situation not covered by the manifesto, then we still need to act within our values. We can also consider adding to our manifesto to help future decisions.

Finally, our team cultures are silos of culture representing environments within which individuals are thriving. These  cultures must still fit within our values and manifesto, but they should be based on what talent doing those roles would want to work in.

Hiring with intuition

Hiring by gut feeling alone leads to poor decision making. Problems with unconscious bias, confirmation bias and personality tests can lead to huge amounts of inconsistency, subjectivity in the selection process leading to a lack of team diversity.

With ThriveMap?  we’ve made it something we can objectively measure, understand and explain to hiring managers. It’s different because it focuses on one simple goal, to put people into teams which work in ways that brings out the best in them.

You can see the type of work environment that a candidate will thrive in and how that sits in relation to the team they’re due to join. So you can make better hiring decisions, increase the chances of fit on both sides and unleash your people's full potential.

If you were able to get 2, 3 maybe even 10% more out of your people because you understood what team cultures they’d do their best work in then imagine the upside for your company’s productivity. And if you could prevent that bad hire from coming in and poisoning team culture then imagine the headaches it would save everyone.

If you’d like early access to ThriveMap? click here.