Company culture

Corporate culture is about a pattern of norms, values, expectations and purposes within an organization. But what exactly does it mean? And what good is corporate culture, or understanding the culture within your company? Corporate culture influences corporate performance and results. Ideally, this influence is positive rather than negative. To know this for sure, it is important to map corporate culture.

Geert Hofstede describes culture as a group feeling between people with the same norms and values. A group feeling with which they distinguish themselves from others. This somewhat explains the term corporate culture. But then it is a group feeling that causes a department or the entire company to perform poorly or well.

Many business owners underestimate the phenomenon of "corporate culture." A negative corporate culture has a greater impact on performance than most business owners realize. This is mainly due to the fact that a culture is difficult to capture. It is a feeling, difficult to put into guidelines. A negative culture within a company can cause employees to be dissatisfied. This, in turn, can cause lower productivity or resignation from the company.

Improve corporate culture 

But how do you ensure a positive corporate culture? What can you pay attention to? To find out, it is important to first identify what the current culture is within the company. Does this culture meet the desired situation, results and motivation among employees? To understand the corporate culture, you can look at:

• Management: How connected are leaders and management to their departments? These are the individuals with whom employees interact. They lay the foundation of the prevailing company culture by setting a good or bad example
• The "WE" feeling: Is there talk as a team when a department is underperforming? Or is it only because of the employees within that department? It is important that there is a 'we' feeling, whether things are going well or badly
• The teams: Within a company, it is important that it feels like people are on the same team. Even if there are multiple teams within a company. Look at how much respect there is between team members. Clashing personalities should also be able to work together respectfully