70 Best Questions To Ask Leaders in 2024
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Ali Khan
Co-founder
Have you ever wondered what to say when someone asks you about the company culture you are in?
In today's article we will learn more on how to describe company culture in general? An organization's culture is defined as the way people interact, collaborate, and get along. Positive cultures are significant for various reasons, although they are hard to create. For example, it attracts talent, increases engagement, and employees are happier and more productive and plan to stay.
Your company culture is more than a nice-to-have - it is essential to build a workplace that your employees want to be a part of. To create a great company culture, you need to know what values you would like to instill and how you would describe your organization's identity.
You should be able to describe within a word or short sentence your company culture. Whether negative or positive, culture sets the tone for what's to come for your organization and defines the environment where your employees work. Defining your company's culture is the first step toward creating a workplace that employees love, and hopefully, these positive and negative words are an excellent place to start.
“In our company culture is where we all come together, especially with the same shared values, to achieve the company’s mission and vision.”
As we discussed in a previous post on how to define culture for your business, every organization has its own unique culture that represents the type of work that is done and how it is done. For example, a company culture could be all about teamwork and collaboration.
Or, a company can have a culture where the sole focus is on pushing the boundaries of innovation and technology. If you have a clear picture of what your company culture is, it’s much easier to describe it to candidates. To come up with a basic understanding of how to describe your company culture, try asking yourself questions such as:
- What do people like about working here?
- What makes this company stand out from others?
- What are our main values or beliefs?
- How do we make decisions?
- What personality traits do we value the most?
Try answering the following three questions:
1 - Is our company culture formal or informal?
2 - Is there an emphasis on teamwork or personal achievement?
3 - Are we an open-plan workplace or do we keep teams separate?
From there, you can start working up more specific answers to describe your company culture. For example, you could say that you’re an international corporation with a large global workforce of 15,000 people who work collaboratively and achieve high productivity levels in an open office space.
As always, it’s important to bear your industry in mind when answering these questions and coming up with a description.
As we mentioned, you can use two ways to describe your company culture, negative or positive. To make it easier for you, we have collected some examples you can use in the future.
There are many ways to describe company culture. You can talk about how your company is laid out, what it values, what its principles are, and how it operates.
Layouts
If you have an open floor plan and a lot of open space, you might choose to explain it as such. If your employees are spread out in cubes, you could say that your culture is more like a home than a cliche high-rise office. If the people at the head of the organization work in the same city as the rest of the employees, say that your company is more collaborative than others. These are all very concrete examples of space that can be used to describe company culture.The layout of your office might reflect your values, but there are other aspects of your space that can too. You might also see things like plants or comfortable chairs. These are all concrete things that reflect your values.
Values
Your company’s values are an easy way to describe company culture. You can also define them in your employee handbook if they aren’t already. Do you offer vacation time? Do you encourage team projects? What is your communication style? Whether you’re building the values from the ground up or modifying the ones that you already have, this is a great way to describe culture (especially if you don’t want to use cliche words like “team player”). If you find that your values aren’t matching up with your actions, here’s how to address them.
Principles
Principles are similar to values in that they usually come from the top down, but they can also come from team collaboration too. Your principles might be more concrete concepts like “no gossiping at work” or “we are one team and celebrate success together." If you find that your principles aren’t matching up with your actions, here’s how to address them.Executive leadership and their teams should be able to meet within three days by following these best practices. The art of teamwork is key to success no matter what business industry you're in.
In a good company culture employees are more energized and motivated to achieve business and performance goals in the right environment.
Every employee feels valued, accepted, and belongs in united company culture. The employees of united company culture can share ideas quickly and work together efficiently. A united culture leads to engaged employees who share common goals.
An organization that encourages its employees works with each individual to set professional development goals and to help them grow. The company culture does help with that.
A happy employee isn't enough-you want them to find their work satisfying so they won't leave. The company culture does impact in that too.
It is no longer acceptable for employees to live the 9-5 "cubicle lifestyle" that was once the norm in the workplace. The life-work balance is essential for one's well-being. A good company culture does impact that one. Avoid at all costs those kind of toxic workplaces.
Excellent ideas are born from successful coordinated collaborations. The success of already recognized businesses is based on cooperation. Such companies have a strong emphasis on working together to achieve goals. The organizational culture is important. The employee engagement being in alignment with the status quo and company cultures.
Appreciating employees who go above and beyond expectations signifies a thriving company culture.
You can put some of these terms together to describe your company culture in full:
The company culture where I work is very appreciative and inspiring. The slightest improvement we make never goes unnoticed. It does inspire us as a team to improve and work harder.
Where I work, we are united and coordinated; we get to overcome all the daily obstacles we face together. The coordination that we have within the team helps on keeping things flowing on the right path.
The company where I work has a great culture of flexibility, they make the team's well-being under consideration no matter what. They believe in our productivity and make it a point to avoid burnout.
One important thing to consider when having a negative approach to a past or current work relationship is always to be polite. Keep the balance between sharing offensive, sometimes false, arguments toward that workplace. We have gathered some negative ways to describe your company culture to avoid that. The mission statement impact employee retention.
Each of us has experienced working for a company where every issue is handled as if it were a fire drill. And let's face it, nobody wants to spend every day in that kind of environment. When you cannot find words to describe the technology company.
Every employee feels pressured when the leader or manager micromanages. Employees tend to leave such places because of the pressure and stress caused by micromanaging. People who usually comment on employees style, them seeking an casual dress code.
This is a pretty big issue when it comes to boosting employee development and productivity. The turnover rates from your business are rising because of the disengagement.
Overly competitive hostile work conditions can harm employees' mental and physical well-being.
Bias, whether intentional or unintentional, is never acceptable in work. It's essential for companies not to base the interpretation of something based on their own culture. Technology companies can be affected by this as well as the other ones. This does affect employees risk taking courage. It lowers the employee morale by not being able to share new ideas with the team. This can make the hiring process hiring harder.
Some businesses continue to be quite siloed despite technological improvements that help close the gap. In addition, there is a lack of communication between departments, which is annoying and ineffective. It has a bad impact to employee happiness too. Human resources can pay attention to this too. The innovative ideas may be left unsaid because of the lack of communication.
This does affect the employees negatively, and they tend to leave such workplaces.
Other ways you can describe your unpleasant workplace culture are as follows:
The company where I work is very biased and is not open to something slightly different from what they traditionally are used to seeing. This leads to a lot of disengagement, causing many issues within the workplace.
The company I used to work for was very micromanaging and hostile; they would obsess over tiny details and make unfair comparisons within the workplace. This was a significant issue that affected the relationship between co-workers.
The company I currently am working for is becoming very stressful and challenging to handle. The overwork we have to complete within a day is becoming unbearable and is harming my co-workers and my well-being.
What are your thoughts in this article?
