What Exactly is ‘Company Culture’?

There has been a lot of buzz recently around building a great company culture.  But what really is meant by “company culture?” Is it the football field located in the middle of our offices or our core philosophy proudly displayed on banners above the football field?  Is company culture even tangible?

Well, like every other Internet-savvy individual, I Googled for “company culture.”  There are many ways of saying it, but here is the gist … company culture is the “character” of the organization that makes it unique.  Okay, hold on, “character”… Wikipedia, don’t fail me now … “Character:  a psychological system of personal traits.”  Huh? So I continued exploring the other terms including character structure, which really led me nowhere for understanding.

Now, I like to think of myself as a notch above average intelligence so I certainly should have no problem understanding what I just read…NOT! And if it’s so difficult to grasp even when the definition is spelled out right there on the screen, imagine how difficult it is to describe when I’m asked about our culture here at Infusionsoft.

Here’s what I do know.

Each individual comes with a personality and their inherent and learned strengths (in my book, no one has weaknesses, just strengths they haven’t honed yet). Celebrating each person’s individuality and giving them opportunities to be creative and grow enables each person to shine in their own way. Take that energy and channel it towards a common goal and you create enough “shine” to light up the planet.

Infusionsoft creates an environment of people focused on one common goal … empowering entrepreneurs to grow their businesses. But in order for that to truly happen in our company culture, we have to empower the employees to want to make that happen. And that is where “culture” fits in.

Soda now costs $0.25 to keep the benefit for all employees.

One common mistake is to confuse “culture” with “benefits.” Recently, we made the move to begin charging 25 cents for soda instead of affording to subsidize it as a company benefit. A few employees viewed this as a disruption to our culture.  Did we really change our culture?  Our employees can still be empowered and thrive in our corporate environment despite a significant change to the status-quo of free soda. Is free soda our culture? It’s so much more than that!

Making a change to a norm can potentially affect the culture and could inflict harm on the behavior or attitude of employees. Inside and outside influences can change a culture and if not careful, can destroy it.  We all work hard to build it, nurture it and protect it whenever possible.

The one ingredient in any good culture is communications. It’s imperative to create an environment where information is easily communicated and everyone’s voice is heard. How we “feel” about our environment and how we perceive our importance in the environment is what ultimately creates company culture.

Let’s take the pretty picture I illustrated above a step deeper.

I didn’t share with you that a majority of our employees wanted us to begin to charge a quarter to help curb expenses.  In this economy, everyone is looking for ways to become lean and this was the employee’s way of helping out their family. Does knowing this new information change how those employees above felt about the soda no longer being free? Did it improve or take away from the culture?

It’s not the soda that represents our culture; it was the employees coming forth and offering their assistance and help – the spirit of company culture — that represents our culture and our great employees. Their intuitive sense of community helped preserve this benefit for everyone.

Do you have an interesting company culture story to share?

[Photo of Jared Kimball on our football field on Flickr]