Cultural Values
Understanding your organizational culture can help you build a business which supports the ideas and vision of your people. An organization which is fundamentally built from the ground up by its employees who all share a common vision is one which can adapt to the challenges of an ever changing world. Identifying and developing company cultural values early on can be essential to the later success of your company.
Understanding Cultural Values
Organizational culture is a term which is thrown around in business classes and meeting rooms. However, most times, people confuse culture with personality. When you ask someone, “What is the culture like at your job?”, most will respond with something like, “Oh it’s great! Everyone is motivated, engaged and takes the initiative to get the job done.”
That is a really refreshing thing to hear- but that is missing the point of the question. Motivated, engaged and strong initiative is not your company culture, rather those are general terms that describe the work environment and caliber of the people at the job. Those personality traits are absolutely a function of your culture, but it does not define it. You can use your culture to develop a positive environment and business personality but it does not work the other way around. Therefore it is important to define what your organization’s cultural values are from the start.
Let’s dive into that a bit.
What is Culture?
In an anthropology sense, culture can be defined as the beliefs, social forms and material traits of a racial, religious or social group. The business equivalent of the term is much in the same. However, the focus is more around the employees of the workplace.
Rather than attempting to create my own choppy explanation of the concept, I will leave the academic thought to the actual professionals: according to the Society for Human Resource Management (
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