by David Pinto
What is company culture?
Company culture is the sum of how individuals in a company interact and collaborate.
Culture, in a societal sense, is a group's cumulative knowledge and achievements displayed via things like behaviour, art, music, food, religion, and language. Company culture is comparable to culture in that it establishes the framework for a society's values and ideas. It is a collection of views, values, attitudes, standards, goals, and actions that everyone shares.
It is how “I” as a person identify to the organisation. What does working here say about me?
An organization's culture is like a collection of miniature societies within a larger civilization. Its cultures are expressions of the job they do, the values they hold, and the collective behaviours of its employees.
Let's take a look at a multinational software company with thousands of employees to understand how company culture develops.
Our international software company employs people in more than a dozen nations around the world. Thousands of different views and behaviours are whirling about in its enormous personnel base. Regardless of their physical distance, they're all working in the same field, ostensibly for the same objective, and a firm of this size has likely articulated some set of values to all of its employees, even if they don't feel personally bound by them.
Company Culture: Weak vs. Strong
However, what makes company culture so intriguing is that it is not a single notion. Company culture is a combination of two concepts: the publicly broadcasted or declared culture of an organisation, and the actual culture of the organization—how its employees really act and treat one another.
In some circumstances, these two principles converge, resulting in what may be described as a strong culture: executives and employees who understand and embrace the company's stated values as a result of purposeful training and decision-making at every level.
However, in an organisation with a weak culture, there is a mismatch between the stated and actual cultures, either because there is no stated culture at all, or because the claimed culture isn't understood, maintained, or perpetuated by the employees or those in charge of culture.
Weak cultures are frequently an afterthought, with businesses realising the necessity for a stated culture after ignoring their employees' experiences. Instead of putting up the work to support genuine cultural shifts, they write a mission statement, display it on a bulletin board, and hope that enough publicity will persuade their staff and the general public.