What Defines a Company’s Culture?

I’ve had a lot of jobs over the years — tossing pizzas, servicing fire extinguishers, telemarketing (yep, I was that guy). My real career began about 20 years ago when I joined a private investigative agency. Since then I have exclusively worked in the employment screening background check industry.

Looking back what strikes me as interesting is that, even without knowing it, each company I have been at has its own culture — be it deliberate or just by plain default. My experience leads me to believe that the type of culture a company has can be grouped into three (3) types of buckets;

1. Organic — typical of SMBs where there is no concerted effort by individual contributors, managers or executives to have a recognized culture. Rather, it just sort of happens by the collective actions and demonstrated values of its people.
2. Dictated — usually found at more traditional, well-established corporations. During orientation new hires are prescribed their Mission Statement and are told to memorize their Core Values which can be found etched in cursive on glass frames hanging from the building’s corridors.
3. Developed with Purpose — these organizations experience an organic genesis of its culture at the company’s start which is then recognized and developed by its leadership. It is not solely left up to the employees nor decided by the executive team, but is instead created by individual contributors, managers and executives alike.

It is this last bucket, the Developed with Purpose culture, that seems to have the most positive impact of the three. For about two years I have been with a startup called Checkr. It is here that I have finally come to learn about what I am writing in this piece. Checkr adopted the Zappos model of collectively creating our company’s Core Values. In doing so each employee has contributed to the eight Core Values Checkr currently recognizes. I say ‘currently’ because our Core Values are a living, breathing document that will be modified over time. As we hire more and more people we want them to contribute as well.

A company’s core values are just one component to its culture, however. The people making up the company are truly its greatest asset. After all, the people build and sell the product, deliver the services, support its customers, etc. Like most companies Checkr seeks to hire the best talent available. Our hiring criteria has historically considered;

• Can this person do the job?
• Are they a good culture fit?
• Are they an absolute rock star?

We’ve now added another criterion — ‘Do they sync with our Core Values?’, which is really an extension of our ‘culture fit’ question we’ve had all along. I have had the pleasure of interviewing candidates for several positions at Checkr and when someone meets all four of these marks it’s exhilarating. What amazing finds we’ve had with people in Quality Assurance, People Ops, Customer Success and other departments. If only we could clone them!

Finally, to get to where a company truly has a Developed with Purpose culture there must be fully engaged participation from individual contributors, managers and executives. From the inception of our company’s first stated Core Values about a year ago, Checkr’s executive team has been closely involved and even developed our company’s vision statement — again in a most democratic way by allowing the employee base to critique and vote for the final version. Participation in our company’s culture also includes employees involved in various committees: Core Values Committee (of which I am a member), Diversity Committee, Bounce Back 2 Work (helping those convicted of crimes re-enter the workforce) and Women of Checkr. The culture at Checkr is, in fact, Developed with Purpose and includes a mosaic of people that share common Core Values and a mission, which is something I firmly stand behind and am proud to be a part of.