Having a carefully designed and well-defined corporate culture is essential for companies who hope to meet with success, as it is through their culture that companies define themselves, their motives, their goals, and their beliefs, without which no organization can ever be expected to meet with success. When a company is founded, unless that company’s leaders have made a conscious effort to sit down and take the time to design what they want their corporate culture to be beforehand – which few ever do – then that company’s culture will slowly come into being by itself and be defined by the people who work there, their ideas, practices, and beliefs. While this can be fine and dandy for some and may work out well, all too often this can leave the company more directionless and ambling than not. All it takes is a small lean in the wrong direction from an ill-developed culture and before they know it the company’s leaders may find themselves and their organization in undesirable circumstances that they never intended to be in. However, even if company leaders fail to effectively develop their culture from the start that is not to say that they can’t work to redefine it should they find themselves veering off course.
Executive search firms have a great deal of experience in watching the ways in which companies structure themselves around their corporate culture, and so have brought together this list of eight straightforward guidelines on how best to clearly define, or redefine as the case may be, a company’s culture.
1. Begin at the Beginning
One of the first things that any new company is supposed to do is develop a mission statement on which to found themselves. Unfortunately, all too often, many company leaders will miss the point of this exercise, and filling their mission statement with trivial objectives that will neither serve to guide the company nor motivate its employees. An effective mission statement should do both. This should be a statement about where the company wants to go, something the their employees can see and which should give them a grasp on why they are doing the work they are and feel some sense of motivation from this understanding.
2. What Do You Stand For
A company’s code of ethics is their guiding moral compass. This is the set of values and beliefs that they have set themselves up to follow, that it may lead them in every decision they make and keep their efforts fixed firmly on the goals they have set before them. Companies lacking such a defined list will often find their ethical background becoming an unfocused patchwork of the values of their employees, while a company that has successfully set out this list will use it in their executive search and hiring processes to find candidates who share their values and beliefs and therefore fit comfortably within the company culture when hired.
3. Lay the Way
Now that the company know where they are going and what values will lead them there, next a roadmap must be drawn out defining the various steps they will take to guide them to success and ultimately to reach the goals outlined in their mission statement. This guide can include everything from team building exercises, community defining events, and physical resources as well.
Find five more tips for building a solid corporate culture in the conclusion to this article.
Published by Conselium Executive Search, the global leader in compliance search.
