The term Corporate Culture can be defined as the way things work around in an organization. Corporate Culture also refers to the behaviors, beliefs determining how a company’s employees and management interact and handle outside business transactions.
Success or failure of an organization duly rests on the expression of its corporate culture. The term corporate culture was developed in the 1980s and became widely known by 1990s and thereafter.
Why do employees need to be aware of corporate culture?
Organizations should not ignore the fact that corporate culture is paving the way for Human Resource (HR) managers or leaders in making positive changes in both large and mid-sized organizations across the world.
Employees who are aware of their organization’s corporate culture can help in the overall success of their organization through the concerned employees’ level of commitment and productivity through which the quality of the company’s products or services would improve substantially.
An organization’s culture includes factors such as employee working hours per week, availability of options such as flextime and telecommunicating, how people interact with each other in the workplace, how people dress for work, benefits offered to employees, perks, etc, that forms part of the corporate culture.
Steps in attaining good corporate culture
Corporate culture is now emerging as a potential competitive advantage for companies with culture remaining a business issue not merely an HR issue.
Having a good corporate culture contributes to business success as corporate culture brings together the inherent reward systems that define how an organization works in practice irrespective of what it’s business strategy or corporate statement may say.
The following steps are necessary to attain a good corporate culture:
Have a clear picture of the organization’s mission & values.
Support those business practices that support the corporate culture.
Consider the behaviors that leaders should live up to.
Employee behaviors should be in tandem with the current values.
Be tangible in terms of continuous improvement activities.
How can job seekers uncover the corporate culture of a potential employer?
Job seekers or potential employees can uncover the corporate culture doing extensive research and observation about the company for which they are going to work.
For instance, before attending for an interview, the job seekers should spend some time searching for clues about the company’s culture by reviewing the company’s annual report, website and other informative material both by online or offline modes.
The job seeker can also find out how the current employees interact with each other, how they are dressed, their personal behavior and their level of professionalism.
Conclusion
In this era of technological advances, an organization’s culture is both transparent and directly tied to its employment brand. As such, today companies are consciously cultivating and managing their culture by turning it into a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
That is why one can see why some companies hire brilliant engineers, professional executives delivering endless innovations thereby generating consistent growth and the answer to this question is its corporate culture.
