These Culture Killers Can Torpedo Your Company's Personality

February 12, 2015 at 12:35 PM by Rob Stevenson

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Since you're a thoughtful, invested Recruiter with your mind on building a great workplace in addition to filling desks, the notion of company culture will have a
permament space in your mind. Building a great company culture starts with great recruitment, and your involvement with it's development shouldn't stop there. Even once new hires are fully onboarded, it's everyone's job to help them make the transition to engaged employee and in so doing propogate the emerging culture. In this pursuit, there are a variety of common culture killers that can torpedo your company's personality and leave it a dull, uninspiring workplace. Avoid these mistake when cultivating culture.

 

Top Down Culture

It sounds like an order, and it looks like a laminated "Values" poster. When cultural edicts come from the top down, employees aren't likely to relate or adopt them. The job of an exec team is not to mandate personality, but to observe the growing culture and make alterations to better encourage it's development. 

 

Employee Churn

If your employees are churning faster than a 16th century dutch farmer on milking day, you don't have a culture. Personality can't evolve if it's constantly changing. There's a million and one reasons why employee retention is so crucial, and employee morale is one of the most understated and important reasons. Every office has a handful of employees whose personalities bring out the best in others and make the office a fun place to work, so maybe spend some extra time thinking about playing defense on these employees. It's tricky to sniff out people who are about to leave, as they can't really be counted on to verbalize what would make the workplace better. Indeed, people are more likely to jump ship, and the first you hear of their malcontent is when they tell you they're leaving. To counter this, you'll need to put yourself in the shoes of top employees. Consider what they want out of the role, and compare it with what they're getting. 

 

Mission Improbable

Take a look back at your closing pitch. What do you tell candidates about your company to make them want to join up? Consciously or otherwise, this is what you've decided is compelling and unique about your organization. Here, you have the seed of your company culture. When it comes to disseminating this across an entire team, you've got to first find out what's the reason employees work with you and not somewhere else. Whatever the common denominators are amongst your employees, that's your fledgling culture.

 

What are some ways you go about clearing the road so culture can flourish? See you in the comments!

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