Company Culture is Your Key to Business Resilience

If you are a human resource or other operations manager, your goal is to maximize opportunities for achieving appropriate matches between your company's business needs and job candidate qualifications (as well as those of current employees). A company that takes active steps to identify, assess, articulate, cultivate and communicate a culture that supports its business performance goals has tremendous power to build resilience for long-term success. Communication of your culture (and its critical role in your ultimate success) in all aspects of employee engagement - recruitment, hiring, orientation/training, job responsibilities and accountabilities, and performance management - helps to reinforce positive behaviors and create a collective mindset for collaborative work around common goals and objectives.

As an anthropologist, I view companies as individual ‘societies’, each with a distinct culture, an ‘organizational glue’ that binds its members through shared vision, knowledge and experiences. The culture defines how a business sees itself and others, its relationship to others (customers, prospects, strategic partners), and how a company conducts its activities on a day-to-day basis. If someone asked you to describe your company’s culture, what would you say? What images come to mind? What does it feel like to work there? What words would you use? These are not questions for idle contemplation. The answers have serious implications for employee recruitment and retention, brand identity and marketing, and daily operations.

A company identifies and communicates what it expects – financial and operational results, as well as the employee behaviors and attitudes necessary to achieve those results - within the context of its unique business culture. The same behaviors in different companies may yield different results. Employee recruitment is a huge upfront investment of time and resources. High turnover drains productivity, diverts resources, and can be a distraction from a company’s business plan.

Stephanie Leibowitz, MA, Anthropologist At Work