Company culture can be hard to define: Here’s a framework

A recent study from MIT/Sloan found that a toxic culture is by far the strongest predictor of employee attrition and is ten times more important than compensation in predicting turnover. Employees themselves have never been as clear as they are now about the importance of their individual and collective experiences at work to their commitment to their employers. In short, culture matters. 

Any group of people that comes together to solve a problem or achieve a goal starts forming the ways that they collectively do things. Some of those ways are about the task at hand: how they break down the work, who does what, how fast they work. But other “ways we do things” are about how employees interact with the other people in their group. 

• Do they interact frequently? 
• Do they listen to each other? 
• Do they take breaks? If so, do they still interact while they are pausing? 
• Do they collaborate when they face challenges? 
• Do they ask for input? 
• How do managers and leaders interact with the rest of the team? 

The questions can go on and on. There are accepted ways in which employees learn to behave with the group of people they work with, and these behaviors can become so accepted that people don’t even realize that they are doing them. 

But aren’t these just typical human ways of interacting? Like making eye contact or smiling when greeting someone? Sure, many of those basic ways of interacting with humans are part of an organization’s culture. But there are other aspects of behavior that can vary widely from organization to organization. 

Take, for example, how employees interact with people in positions of power. In one organization, employees who cross paths with a leader may say “Hi” and have a quick chat, whereas in another organization that doesn’t happen — employees look down when the leader walks by. As you can imagine, the ripple effects of these different styles of leadership interaction will make themselves felt in other ways, such as compliance, speaking up and taking risks. 

Think back to how you felt when you started the job you are in now or your previous job. Do you remember how you felt on your first day? Your first week? Were there any culture “Ah-has” that clearly said to you: This is how we do it here? An organization’s culture is often crystal clear when you first join an organization, but over time it becomes murky, almost unseeable. 

Business theorist and psychologist Edgar Schein was one of the foremost experts on culture, and developed much of our understanding of what culture is and why it is so difficult to understand. For Schein, organizational culture is defined as: 

a pattern of shared tacit assumptions that was learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal regulation, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think and feel in relation to those problems. 

In simpler terms, culture is the collective set of reasons why employees behave the way they do within an organization. It is the backdrop for everything that happens there. 

Think of the sum of what employees collectively believe about the organization as a shared mindset. This mindset incorporates how people feel about the organization and what they believe is valued, and it comes to life through behavioral norms. These norms are how people who are part of the organization typically behave. How people think, feel and behave are all important aspects of understanding culture. 

Sometimes this shared mindset is influenced by formal rules, like an employee handbook, policies or standards formally communicated by a manager. Employees also observe the existing systems and structures to learn about what is valued and what is not: for example, who are in leadership positions, how the organization is structured, how performance is appraised. More often than not, though, the formation of the shared mindset is informal, unwritten and even unclear. Employees learn about it over time through a learning and adapting cycle. 

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This shared mindset becomes a set of guideposts for behavior, defining what is accepted and what isn’t. It becomes so ingrained and accepted that employees no longer even question it; it becomes automatic and unconscious. It’s even been called an organization’s “silent language”. An analogy is thinking about culture like the water a fish swims in. Water is so fundamental to fish — so critical and core to their existence — that we can wonder whether they even have an awareness of it. That’s how culture works too. 

This shared mindset helps employees understand what is expected. Human beings seek predictability and understanding. They want the complex to be understood, and the cultural rules and norms that form this shared mindset help us make sense of this complexity. 

It can be helpful to think about organizational culture as the “personality” of an organization. An individual’s personality can be described in words like being extravert or introvert, quiet or loud, involved or standoffish, for example. A person doesn’t demonstrate these qualities all the time, but for the most part they do. They aren’t one or the other (e.g. involved or standoffish) but may be a little more or a little less of each. And personalities are multifaceted, too; you can’t adequately describe someone’s personality in just one word. 

Organizations are similar. Multiple cultural descriptors can be true. They might not be consistently demonstrated by everyone, but they tend to be, and they aren’t always one thing or another. This organizational “personality” helps us get to know the organization, to understand what it is like. And before long, as employees adapt to it, they start to become part of it. What was once so easy to spot becomes a given, a shared mindset that is no longer in question. 

The very nature of culture is what makes it so interesting and so challenging. It’s because of these characteristics that so many of us struggle to understand it. But by understanding these natural characteristics better, you can start to work “with” culture and not against it. 

• First, culture is abstract. It is difficult to pin down, difficult to describe and has multiple components. 
• Culture, by definition, is also shared. It exists only at the group level and more than one person is required for it to be experienced. 
• Culture is dynamic and pervasive. It flows through an organization like a river, resulting in common behaviors, symbols, rituals, mindsets and approaches. 
• Culture is relative. For the most part, it’s not accurate to say that culture is absolutely good or bad — culture is only relatively good or bad, according to how much it is helping your company achieve its goals. 
• Culture is enduring. It carries on consistently over time and is self-fulfilling because it attracts people who behave consistently with the culture and repels those who do not.  
• Culture is powerful because it guides the behavior of everyone in your organization.
• Finally and most importantly, culture is a fundamentally human idea. All culture work must involve the humans that are part of it. It is not about plans, processes or workflows (though these can be impacted by culture); it’s about how human beings feel clarity, connection and inspiration.