Has Your Company Culture Turned Sour?
Perks and policies can help enchant and retain employees. While you can easily measure a job based on its job description, the salary, the medical benefits, or how long the commute is, there is still one aspect of a great job that can’t be as easily measured—company culture.
What constitutes a good or bad company culture is largely subjective. But, with the help of an article from the Forbes Leadership Forum, here is a run-down of some of the red flags that may indicate the culture at your company is turning (or has turned) sour.
First, take a look around. Do people look happy? Do they look bored or stressed? If the average employee doesn’t seem to be agreeable at least most of the time, then something is off.
Furthermore, if everyone is buried in work at five o’clock, then it is easy to see that there isn’t a great work-life balance and employees are resentful about it.
If there are company values or initiatives posted on the wall or accompanying emails, or the desire for excellence is brought up in every meeting, then there is a problem. Constantly announcing the need to give 110 percent is not only mathematically wrong, it is also an indication that the organization's expectations are unrealistic and the focus of the jobs aren’t on producing quality results but producing the appearance of quality results.
The place looks awful. There is only so much the sanitation crew can do to help keep an office looking good. Most of it falls on the staff. If there is trash lying around, grime here and there, and the entire place looks generally disheveled, then you can bet that the employees don’t care about the place, and the culture is as dirty and unattended to as their surroundings.
There is a clear delineation between management and employees. The easiest way to tell if there is a divide is if management is given more or better things than the employees. Managers are the only ones with new chairs, new computers, or are the only ones with offices. It’s not hard to imagine that an "us-versus-them" mentality is bad for company culture.
It makes sense that negative speech about company culture indicates bad company culture. But what about when there is no conversation about it? No one talking about the company culture can mean a couple of things. It could follow the old adage that "no news is good news" or it could follow mother’s advice to "not say anything if you don’t have anything nice to say."
If you are reading this and sitting in discomfort because your company waves some of these red flags, don’t panic just yet. Every company, like everything in life, has its high and low points.
Secondly, know that these are blanket-statement indicators. Good company culture can still exist, although rare, even if the company shows some of these traits.
Lastly, understand that there are things you can do if your company has bad culture—and it doesn't always mean you'll need to leave for greener pastures.
