Debunking Common Company Culture Myths

Company culture refers to how your organization runs — from the management structure to the way that employees interact with each other. Company culture is something that tends to evolve naturally over time, rather than being a calculated and implemented set of rules.

In the past, company culture was seen as a bonus of the job, but is increasingly becoming one of the primary deciding factors for job hunters.

As a lot of traditional Human Resources roles are being transformed into People and Culture Managers, it seems like the importance of company culture will only become more and more prominent.

There’s a common misconception that to have a good company culture, you have to buy into trendy fads like having a beer fridge, remote work, or unlimited holidays for employees.

But company culture is more than surface-level perks. Employees want to feel valued and appreciated at all levels, and they want to work in a comfortable and supportive environment.

Now, these things are much harder to prove to external candidates, as you can’t exactly take a photo of ‘employees feeling valued’.

One way you can showcase your good company culture easily is through regular posting on social media.

LinkedIn can be used to provide updates about employee engagement , such as if you’re celebrating a birthday, or running a company costume contest.

Using Instagram to showcase your company is another great way to communicate your company culture. You can post stories from inside the office that function as small snapshots of what it’s like to work for your organization.

You can post memes, videos of the office dogs, or a delicious cake that somebody made and brought in to share.

But before you can showcase your excellent company culture, you need to build one.

Great company culture starts at the top. Companies run by CEOs with high approval ratings usually also have good company culture ratings.

Though it is not the job of the CEO alone: every single person in the company will either add to or detract from the culture of the company, so it’s important that the hiring manager takes this into account when interviewing potential employees.

Alongside the myth that good company culture is all about materialistic perks, people have a lot of preconceived notions about what company culture is.

Venngage set out to tackle 8 of the myths surrounding company culture and to either confirm or bust common conceptions about it.

Venngage used over 10,000 individual data points from Glassdoor company reviews over the space of a month alongside the Culture 500-a groundbreaking and first-ever online-interactive tool from MIT and Glassdoor that scientifically ranks the corporate cultures of more than 500 of the United States’ most powerful companies.

The combination of all of these data points gave a definitive answer to questions like ‘do tech companies have the best culture?’ and ‘do older companies have a better culture than new companies?’.

Check out the company culture myths infographic below with our full findings:

This is a guest post by Ryan McCready.

Ryan McCready went to the University of Arkansas and graduated with a degree in economics and international business. Now instead of studying the economy he writes about everything and enjoys stirring the pot.

Originally published at https://read.crowdfireapp.com on November 19, 2019.