4 ms·

Ask HN: Is company 'culture' bullshit?

• dozzie 10y ago
  > Is company culture, just company policies? No. Policies are just a way of trying to influence the culture. They're about the only official way company as an entity has for this task. I would say that the culture is what people in the company "reward" for doing. If you admire others for their friendly attitude, you'll get more of that. If you praise others for their smirky remarks, you'll get that more. It's very hard to plan and design this deliberately.
• taprun 10y ago
  If it's dictated, it's not culture - it's fiat.
  • sportanova 10y ago
    It's funny (in an office space sort of way) when a company that's been around for a while comes out with a "values" statement. "Grown adults, these are now your reasons for living!"
• cauterized 10y ago
  Culture is about unspoken expectations and what people do that they're not specifically told to do. When people finish a project 10 minutes before they planned to grab lunch, do they leave for lunch early? Do more of their own work? Sit down and help out a colleague? Chat about Game of Thrones by the water cooler? Play ping pong? Speaking of lunch, do people eat at their desks? Together in the kitchen or a conference room? Alone outside the office? Together outside the office? At the end of a hard day, what do people do? Stick in their chairs and surf Facebook so the boss thinks they're putting in lots of hours? Go home to their kids? Get into nerf gun wars? Play video games together? Have a beer together in the office? Go out to a bar? How competitive is your culture? Do people default to collaborative modes instead? Where there is competition, is it friendly and constructive or vicious and inclined to sabotage? How much autonomy do people really have? How much hierarchy? How much process and bureaucracy? What do you look for on a resume and in an interview? How do your managers identify good work and how do they recognize and reward it? Do certain roles get more appreciation than others? Do people speak out loud in your open office, or whisper out of consideration for the people around them or take their discussions to a conference room? Do people actually take vacations or does that unlimited vacation policy just make them afraid because they don't know how much they're expected to take? These questions and a thousand more define the cultural differences between companies. They're the reason I might consider working at a large company (Google? IBM?) but certainly wouldn't work at Amazon or Goldman Sachs. They're why I like the small startup-minded company I'm at now but not the culture at most Kool-aid drinking startups. They'll affect what sorts of people you retain and what sort of results you get out of them. They affect morale and (via morale and burnout, among other things) productivity. Now here's the crux, and this is very important: Culture is introduced from above AND from below. From above, you're responsible for what personalities you hire and what skills and personal values they bring. You're responsible for what work behaviors you reward. You set the example for how rigid hierarchy is, for how much vacation people take, and for whether people are expected to spend 7 hours in the office or 11. But you can't force-feed culture either. Culture is set from below by the personalities and personal values of the people you hire. How well they get along. What they like to do when they have 10 minutes free or after work. If your employees are more into knitting or WoW, buying a ping pong table won't suddenly make them ping pong players. Taking everyone to a bar and forcing them to socialize won't make them friends, but it might make some people resentful. All you can do is avoid hiring (and quickly fire) poisonous personalities, and offer encouragement and support (in the form of money or time) to activities that people already express interest in as a group and that you see as constructive.
• seren 10y ago
  I am not sure you can define a culture, it already exists and is developing "naturally" in your team. What you can try is to find out what are the motivating trait of your existing culture by talking with your peers, and formalize / identify the top one and put in a poster ? For example, is your team good at solving hard problems, deliver on time, have great customer satisfaction, etc ? (I don't believe you could say yes to all answers if you are totally honest..) Identify the 3 keys aspects that actually exist in the company and support/encourage those behavior.
• penguinlinux 10y ago
  I work for a company here in New York and company culture is very important. We define company culture with our brand, and also the people that work here. Everyone is nice and everyone is engaged and you could say that we make an effort to hire really nice people. Everyone here is respectful and you feel like you are coming to see your friends are work. We celebrate work anniversaries and the company is always streaming social media pictures, tweets about what is going on at headquarters. Today for example one person here does a snapchat takeover and we record ourselves and post what life is like at HQ. I am a shy person so it is a little difficult for me to be this open and social but the people here are nice and mean well so it is ok. I love this place and it is one of the best places i've ever worked. :) so in other words this place is only great because they built a culture here and it is working for them.
• sb8244 10y ago
  I work for a company that puts culture first. Our core values of positive, supportive, self starting have always existed since the early days at the company. These values have led the company in difficult situations and force individuals to look at things differently than otherwise. However, they are very realistic. For example, positive is about finding the path out of trying situations with a level head. Not "everything is great" when it's really on fire. I think it's very important because I've seen the difference it makes. It is also why we're at nearly 5 stars on Glassdoor with 100% CEO approval. We've grown so much and putting them at the forefront is key. Nothing to do with ping pong.