A company culture impacts the bottom line in surprising ways
Updated on August 28, 2018
Company culture is everything.
It determines how long people work, how productive those hours are, and how much they enjoy doing it. Company culture dictates the amount of creativity workers are allowed to put into their work. It says how long meetings are, how many are scheduled, and whether or not they start on time and involve preparation.
So much what a company does and is involves this intangible, difficult-to-define thing we call culture.
Culture is set from the top by CEOs and their first five hires. At this point is ingrained, difficult to change without some real intervention from this group of founders. The reason is every subsequent hire will model his or her behavior after them. That list of behavior will have broad impacts on the future of the business. Again, that list is:
Meetings
Work hours
Non-work hours
There are no right or wrong answers to these questions. It all depends on what the founders' goals are. A company determined to win at all costs would probably shun the informal behavior. It might be run more like a boot camp. A lifestyle business without external investors and no pressure to win the market might be far more casual.
Do the founders want to win at all costs or do they want to have fun? It's matter of preference. A word of caution, though. Usually the two don't mix very well. Cultures that try to do both end up doing neither very well and it can cause burnout to be both work hard and play hard all the time.
Culture matters because it answers these questions and sets the expectations of the employees at the company. Employees will look for the queues whether they're written down and spoken about or not, so it's best to be explicit. The CEO should set the rules, embody them, and be true to him or herself in order to prevent confusing among the ranks.
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