Where Does Company Culture Come From?

Creating culture at a company is one of many items in a very long list of abstract aspirations that are much easier said than done. 

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For one, whose responsibility is fostering culture in the first place? Leadership seems the obvious place, but top-down culture-building without the buy-in of non-managers runs the risk of coming across as an inauthentic astroturfing operation and can do more to stifle organic cultural growth than to promote it.

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In an effort to answer these kinds of questions and to distill some insights on how best to encourage the promulgation of productive company culture in the modern place of business, just as the dust was settling and the outline of the new post-peak-pandemic workplace was emerging into view, the Human Resources Council at Forbes collected some valuable insights and best practice recommendations from thought leaders in the space that we think are worth revisiting now that the picture has become that much more clear.

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It likely won’t be a groundbreaking surprise to anyone reading posts of this nature that communication is probably the overarching theme best encapsulating the 16 responses from HR professionals that were compiled for the piece, and one of the key aspects of communication is taking in new information. According to LinkedIn’s 2023 Workplace Learning Report, 83% of organizations want a more people-centric culture, in which case hearing from the people would seem an advisable first step. 

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To that end, conducting frequent polls and exit interviews are two specific tactics recommended by the contributors to help human resources managers and business leaders keep a better pulse on changing employee sentiment. Using video is another idea that’s offered up to increase engagement and ensure that communications are accurately delivered and received, if not absorbed.

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Communication, of course, is often most effective when it is a two-way street, so collecting information has limited utility without taking meaningful action in response to the new information gathered. With regard to polling and exit interviews, these kinds of feedback-collecting efforts should first catalyze the creation of and later shape the evolution of employee-led initiatives implemented to address the very problems workers are consistently reporting with their workplace, for example. 

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Further, in order to establish and optimize the value derived from a two-way line of communication between employees and managers, providing the necessary means and/or mechanisms for productive, collaborative discourse is an essential prerequisite. 

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Much of the groundwork that must be laid in order to create such an environment needs to come from management successfully establishing a sufficient baseline level of trust. While engendering that kind of trust is another item on the previously mentioned long list of easier-said-than-done things, several of the HR professionals touched on the importance of leading by example and communicating in ways that are open, transparent, and forthright.

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Beyond role-modeling good communications behavior, there are also a number of more concrete actions that company leaders can undertake to provide an atmosphere more conducive to productive communication and culture building. Some of those potential actions include hosting cultural calibration sessions and team-building exercises, as well as DEI events and initiatives, all of which have the ability to break down barriers between various groups into which people are sometimes subdivided and between which miscommunications can result in a lot of good ideas that go unspoken and mutual understandings that are never reached. 

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Perhaps the ultimate goal in building a foundation that enables communication on these levels is really to ensure that each employee feels that their voice is being heard and that they are seen not just as a worker, but as a person, which is a humanization effort that should be undertaken every day, whether in small ways through office snacks and other little perks or on a much larger scale through the provision of comprehensive mental health offerings that show the company is invested and cares, both literally and figuratively.

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Indeed, when it comes to developing culture, creating an environment that enables better communication among all of the people who make up the company seems to be the consensus best place to start among the majority of the contributing HR leaders, which makes sense because where could the culture of a place possible come from if it doesn’t start with the thoughts and ideas of the people who inhabit that place, freely expressed.

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Of course, if all else fails, one of the 16 contributors did provide a helpful minority report that recommends shaping culture through the integration of bots and machine algorithms into employees’ daily processes, which we’d have to agree will almost certainly lead to changes in company culture, although the question remains as to exactly what that culture will eventually look like, which is an experiment currently in progress in hundreds of thousands of iterations across the globe. 

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