Today, I want talk to you about company culture. Now, this is a hot topic, and I’ve been getting a lot of enquiries about this recently. I’ve got a couple of clients and prospective clients all calling me asking me for some help around establishing and identifying their company culture, specifically, things to do with:
- The culture for the organisation
- What goes on in their company
- How people perceive the company and how they interact with everyone else in the company
- What the visions and goals are for the company
All these kinds of things make up your company’s culture.
And nowadays, I find, or in my experience at least, there’s been a lot of toxic company culture out there, and it’s sabotaging the success of the company and also the individuals that work within the company. So, I’m going to share with you twelve characteristics and behaviours that can destroy an organisation’s culture.
1. Not Knowing What Your Culture Is
Most organisations, as I see, don’t actually have or identify what the cultures are within their organisations. They just run day to day. They operate, and they may have a vision and they may have a mission, but they don’t actually identify what the culture of their organisation is.
How do they do things? How do people within the company interact with each other? How do they interact with external parties, their customers and other stakeholders as well? These things are quite important. You need to identify and you need to know what your company culture is and what it is all about.
2. Having Absent or Unresponsive Management
(especially in times of trouble or turmoil)
A classic example of this is when you’ve got colleagues that are at each other or there might be conflict within the organisation between different divisions or different areas within your company. Your management team, however, is nowhere to be found, or rather, they don’t actually know what the culture is, and they don’t know how to respond to these kinds of things. Or there’s a third issue – they don’t have the skill set to be able to manage these challenges within an organisation. This includes identifying what the culture is, the different personality traits of different members of their team, the strengths of each individual person, and then also, how to be able to manage them and have them work together cohesively.
So, that becomes a major problem, which is, in my experience, the number one issue in most companies—not having management with the necessary skills or the resources to be able to tackle cultural issues within the company.
3. Taking Credit for Others’ Work
Where you’ve got colleagues taking credit for others’ work, it creates resentment and problems. You’ve got one person taking credit for someone else’s work and he/she could be doing that in two ways. It could be:
1- Where he/she might be bullying the other person and taking the credit for the work that the other person is doing.
2- They’re doing it without the other person even knowing it.
So, person A does all the work. Person B takes the work and then goes and reports that in a meeting of some sort to management or to other stakeholders within the organisation, and person A doesn’t even know that person B has taken the work and passed it off as their own. Once person A finds out, it’s going to create that resentment. It’s going to create problems and a number of challenges. And then, that obviously affects the culture when that happens because these things might be happening, not only with person A and B, but it could be person C and D, and other people as well. That might just be the culture within the organisation—others taking credit for work that is not theirs.
4. Working in Silos
When teams or divisions work in silos, this destroys a company’s culture. Let’s say Division A or the Accounting/Finance division might be working on stuff but they don’t share anything with everyone else, or the Marketing division is working on a particular campaign but then, they don’t go and share that with the Fulfillment or Delivery teams. That creates issues. It creates problems between them, and this is where there are these challenges, and it affects the company culture as well.
5. Communication Breakdown
This works hand in hand with companies working in silos. You’ve got various different divisions or individuals not speaking to the other divisions or not sharing information with the other divisions. So, in that example, the Marketing division creates a campaign but then, they don’t share that with the Sales or the Delivery or the Fulfillment teams/divisions. There is that communication breakdown. All of a sudden, they’ve got an influx or a demand for a particular product or service that the Marketing team was promoting and advertising but they don’t know anything about it. They don’t know anything about the costing. They don’t know anything about what is involved and what services they need to deliver on. That creates this breakdown in communication, and of course then, team culture and organisational culture is affected in that way.
6. Demanding Too Much from Employees and Micromanaging
The sixth characteristic or challenge that creates obstacles and a breakdown in company culture is when a leader, manager or the owners of the company start demanding too much of their employees, and vice versa. They also start to micromanage them. This creates this culture in the organisation where you’ve got managers demanding too much or micromanaging their team members. That creates conflict. It creates issues, and the team culture and the organisation’s culture is affected as well.
7. No Recognition of Great Work and Effort
Characteristic number seven is not recognising the good work and effort that your employees and those that you manage and lead are producing. Everyone out there, leaders, managers, and even the people that you manage, i.e. your staff members, are walking around every day with a sign on their forehead saying, Please recognise my work, please say something good about me, give me a compliment.
Everyone is walking around like that. It’s just human nature. Now, if you don’t recognise the people in your organisation for the work and the effort that they put in, then they’re not going to be motivated to want to do better. That affects the overall culture of the company, and it also affects the overall performance of the organisation and the company.
8. Inflexibility and Reluctance to Change
There are consultants out there that work predominantly in the space called Change Management and that’s to help organisations change and also move away from the old way of doing things and into a new and possibly improved way of doing things.
But, many managers, leaders and company owners might be inflexible and have this reluctance to change. What a lot of them say is, If it ain’t broken, don’t change it. You can’t use that. To compete in today’s economy, you need to be flexible. You need to be able to change and make a move towards new systems, new ways of operating, and doing things differently because what you did before may not be able to get you where you want to in the future. So, you’ve got to have that flexibility and also be open to change.
9. Lack of Transparency and Not Being Open and Allowing Your Employees to Provide Their Input
Two major things that definitely affect workplace and company culture are if things are not transparent and if different divisions or managers hide things from their employees. If they’re not transparent and open about what’s going on within the organisation or if they’re not transparent when there are major issues such as finance issues, and so on, these things create problems when it comes to company culture because team members might talk to each other and say:
You know what? Leaders do things behind our backs and we don’t know what’s going on.
Or: They don’t tell us about how well the company is performing.
Or: They don’t tell us that the company is performing badly and in a few months time, we might be out of our job.
That’s that lack of transparency. And, the second part of that is when leaders and managers are not open to input from their employees. Employees, a lot of times, come with experience. They might bring that from different organisations that they’ve worked with. If you are not open to that, then employees are not going to want to share these things with you, and they’re going to say, Look, the leaders and managers don’t care about what I have to say.
It’s a poor reflection on the managers, and also then, it creates this culture within the organisation where employees think, The leaders and managers aren’t interested in what I have to say. I’m just a number to them or just one of the staff members.
10. Poor Work-Life Balance
Work-life balance is basically something that we all, even leaders, try and promote and say, Our organisation gives you a great work-life balance. But, what does that actually mean? What is a work-life balance? To everyone, it could be something different. You get those people that enjoy working in the shop every day and that’s their meaning, their purpose to come in and give 100 percent. Then, there are those who come in and they want to work their nine-to-five. They’ve got their lunch break, they’ve got their morning tea break, they’ve got their afternoon tea break, and that’s it for them. That’s the perfect work-life balance, being able to fit everything in within that nine-to-five window and around the breaks in between.
I had a number of staff members in my previous company. I had some staff members that showed up before nine o’clock, got to work, got started, and their day started basically before nine o’clock. They were there after five, and when they finished their project or the items that they were working on, that’s when they clocked off, and away they went. And, that’s what they enjoyed doing.
On the flip side, in the same company, the same organisation, a staff member that sat directly across that other team member showed up at work. Yes, on time, but did not turn on their computer until it hit 9 AM. At 4:55 PM, they started to wind down and get everything wrapped up. At five o’clock, they were out the door.
Two different people. Two different perspectives on what their work-life balance was. So, it means different things to everyone. But in an organisation, you need to be able to identify who in your organisation fits the first style and who fits the second style. And, you need to be able to tweak and provide them with that flexibility there as well, and that helps the culture within the organisation.
11. Office Gossip
Now, this is a major problem and it obviously affects the company culture. If you’ve got bickering and you’ve got people talking behind each other’s backs, telling tales, sometimes, it can become nasty. So, this is a straightforward issue and problem that affects a company’s culture.
12. Unfriendly Employee Competition
Then finally, you’ve got unfriendly employee competition. This is where you’ve got colleagues and team members pitted against each other competing in a company, maybe for a particular position, role, or project. Now, competition is good, but when it comes to the point where they’re sabotaging another person’s work or they’re stealing the work that another person was doing and making it difficult for others to do their jobs, then again, that affects the company culture. It’s not gonna be a place where people want to work, and they’re not going to want to stay there for very long.
I’ve shared with you twelve different characteristics or behavioural traits that affect company culture. Company culture is important to establish within your organisation at the earliest point. It doesn’t mean right at the beginning when you start your company that you’ve got to set it up. It’s evolving; It changes because the dynamics change. The people that you bring on board have different personalities. So, it’s important for you to be able to constantly be working on the culture within your organisation.
What I’m doing with a lot of my clients is establishing Culture Committees as part of our ongoing work with them and getting input from the leaders, managers as well as the employees and making sure that there’s a nice balance between how many managers and how many employees sit on the Culture Committee to be able to ensure that everyone is represented equally as well. So, it’s about ensuring different people from different ethnic backgrounds, different cultural backgrounds, different experience backgrounds are represented within the company’s Culture Committee so that we can identify and make sure that we don’t make any of these mistakes that I shared with you here today.
