Company culture is like a flower garden. When you invest time and energy into nurturing the seeds, you’re bound to create a place where beautiful flowers will grow and thrive.
You can also plant seeds and leave them to their own devices. You may grow some flowers, but you’ll also grow weeds that will likely take over.
Like the garden, company culture exists whether the organization is intentional about it or not. When organizations don’t make culture a part of their strategic initiatives, a negative culture can grow.
Culture manifests through a multitude of things that go on in your organization. Through day-to-day interactions, processes, procedures and more, your cultural norms are established, and send messages to employees on how they are expected to behave.
Over the years of executing climate assessments and defining company culture, we’ve found that culture can be broken down into five key dimensions, each with their own set of dichotomies: Job satisfaction, employee engagement, internal communication, inclusion and relationships.
From manufacturing plants to hospitals to nonprofits and more, these five dimensions and their corresponding dichotomies are key to understanding your organization’s culture.
Take a look at our list and mark where on each spectrum, or dichotomy, your organization falls.
This exercise can tell you a lot about the team or company culture you’ve fostered, either intentionally or unintentionally.
We also suggest taking the Five Dimensions of Culture to your team for discussion, as it provides some vernacular to lean on as you discuss culture and what it looks like in your team and organization as a whole.
And, use these buzzwords to communicate company culture in everything you do – recruiting, for example. Job candidates want to know what it’s like to work for you and how the culture can be described, and now you can deliver a clear and concise answer. After all, a 2022 Deloitte Global Gen Z and Millennial survey found that “Gen Zs and millennials are willing to turn down jobs and assignments which don’t align with their values.”
The more you ingrain company culture into everything you do, the more likely you’ll be to attract and retain employees that make your organization successful.
