Why Culture is Important for Business Success

Strong organizational culture is hard to find but easy to spot. Employees care intensely about the organizational values, which is noticed by a spike in business performance. Motivating employees and building behavior toward a shared vision and goals will benefit your company if done properly.

“Trust is like insurance—it’s an investment you need to make up front, before the need arises.”― Erin Meyer, Author of The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business

Culture Impacts Environment

The importance of a strong organizational culture is most often noticed when it is nowhere to be found. Keeping employees active and passionately engaged shows through your values and norms, and must be re-evaluated frequently. How you hire, assess performance, and maintain relationships between your current and future staff and customers will drive how others feel about your company. Mission-driven organizations can thrive in any environment because the baseline for their decision-making is rooted in a positive success framework.

How To Create Culture

A variety of factors influence cultural norms in your office environment. This includes the values of the founders, demands from the industry, and the assumptions others make about your goals and values. Easy wins to impact and create a thriving organizational culture come down to a bulletproof mission statement, success stories, an embracing office layout, and the rules and rituals that apply to those who work there. Organizational cultures are created by a variety of factors, including founders' values and preferences, industry demands, and early values, goals, and assumptions. Behavioral research on the topic has surfaced many questions, often with accompanying theories including orienting culture in terms of value drivers. One such example is the Competing Values Framework.

The Four Types of Organizational Culture

From the Competing Values Framework, four organizational culture types emerged: Clan culture, Adhocracy culture, Market culture, and Hierarchy culture. The culture you want should depend on your goals. Here are some common goals to keep in mind when building your organization’s culture

• Clan Culture - Commitment, Communication, Development
• Adhocracy Culture - Innovative outputs, Transformation, Agility
• Market Culture - Market Share, Goal achievement, Profitability
• Hierarchy Culture - Efficiency, Timeliness, Consistency & Uniformity

Regardless of how you slice it, the best ways to build culture into your workplace is to focus on the small steps. While vague qualities such as work-life balance are touted as key traits in trustworthy work environments, consider a more diverse approach to help your organization thrive. Action on your part will be noticed and may motivate your employees.

Ways to Measure and Compare Your Corporate Culture

• Innovation and risk-taking - What your company looks like now may change rapidly if you choose to focus on how recruitment agencies can supplement your staff.
• Attention to detail - Working in an industry category that requires secure information or health and human safety may significantly adjust how you should orient your culture.
• Outcome orientation - Mission-driven behavior will help you identify quality hires that will first and foremost impact the bottom line.
• People orientation - How much do you help retain a positive, safe environment focused on your full-time and contingent workforce?
• Team orientation - Does your company operate across multiple locations or broad service categories? Identify how much your team values community to see how you can accommodate their responses.
• Aggressiveness - Depending on your leadership style, this may require you to reflect on how management delivers critical feedback.
• Stability - Statistical fluctuations can model how operations performance creates dependencies in your business. Only when your company is stable can you take steps to majorly affect culture.

Premier Talent Partners can help you add new contract, temp-to-hire, and direct hire staff. Be sure to read through our service offerings from MSP/VMS to Payrolling when considering your staffing strategy and HR partner.

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