Company culture.

Company culture is always there

Company culture isn't a set of values on the wall; it's how people behave when the boss isn't looking. It forms on its own: from what gets rewarded, what gets forgiven and what gets ignored.

So the question isn't whether to create it. It already exists - the question is whether you're happy with the one that has formed.

You can check by three signs. Whether bad news reaches you in time. What happens when someone makes a mistake. And whether what you say about the company matches what employees will say about it when talking to friends.

Values that don't turn into a poster

Values start working not when they're written down, but when an uncomfortable decision has been made on their basis. Until that happens, they're just words.

Phrasings like “professionalism”, “customer focus” and “growth” don't work - any company would sign up to them. A working value always contains a choice: what we do when two good options contradict each other.

The test is simple: try to imagine a company that declares the opposite. If such a company looks absurd, your phrasing means nothing. “We don't take on tasks we're not sure about” is a value, because the opposite approach also exists and has its own logic.

There should be three to five values. Nobody remembers a list of twelve, including the person who wrote it.

How culture becomes behaviour

Between a declared value and real behaviour stand three things: what the manager does themselves, what people are praised for and what people are let go for.

Personal example works more powerfully than any document. If the company declares respect for working hours while the manager sends tasks at midnight, employees read the second, not the first.

Rewards set the direction. When the bonus goes to whoever pushed the result through at any cost, everyone else draws a conclusion about what's really valued here.

Partings set the boundaries. A person who brings in revenue and destroys relationships inside is the most expensive test of a culture's strength. Everyone will remember the decision on them for a long time.

Rituals are a separate pillar. A shared review of the week's results, a meeting for new employees, marking closed deals: small things that turn a group of people into a team. How they relate to management is covered in our article on team management.

New employees and the first weeks

Culture is passed on in the first month of work. After that, the person has already settled in - into the environment they found, not the one you described at the interview.

So it makes sense to invest precisely in the beginning: explain not just the tasks but the accepted rules, introduce them to people from neighbouring departments, assign a mentor and, after two weeks, ask what surprised them. The answer to that last question is the most honest feedback about the company you can get.

The gap between what was promised at the interview and what was seen inside is the main reason for early departures. It's cheaper to describe the difficulties honestly at the start than to lose the person three months later.

Culture and the company's external image

How things are arranged inside sooner or later becomes visible outside. The tone in correspondence with a client, response speed, willingness to admit a mistake - all of these follow from internal rules, not from a communication manual.

Hence the practical conclusion: a brand can't be built separately from how the company actually works. Attractive styling that diverges from reality only speeds up the disappointment. On what makes up a company's image - in our article on building a brand.

A separate part of this image is the figure of the owner: in small companies they are perceived as an extension of the brand. More - in the article on personal branding.

The same applies to reviews. People write not only about the product but about the attitude - and attitude is culture in action. How to work with this is described in our article on reviews.

What doesn't work

Corporate events instead of solving problems. A team away day doesn't compensate for an unfair distribution of tasks; it only underlines it.

Values handed down from above without discussion. People accept rules they took part in formulating and ignore those they received as a mass email.

Copying someone else's culture. What works in a company from another industry, of another size and with another leader most often doesn't take root with you.

Measuring culture with surveys for the sake of surveys. If nothing changes after the questionnaire, the next one will be filled in perfunctorily - and you'll lose your only source of information.

Where to start

Write down the three to five rules you actually make decisions by - not the ones you'd like, but the ones that exist. That's the starting point.

Compare them with what you tell clients and candidates. The discrepancies are your task list for the coming months.

Pick one discrepancy and close it with an action, not an announcement. One kept promise changes the atmosphere more than ten declared values.

Once the internal rules are clear, it makes sense to carry them through to the external presentation - from the website to the corporate identity. That's what our design and branding practice does: it starts with what the company knows about itself, not with pictures.