Why It is Important to Have a Clear Company Culture

The Importance of a Clear Company Culture

Our organizational alignment research found that an aligned and clear company culture — how work gets done — accounts for 40% of the difference between high and low performing companies.  Recent research by Deloitte reported that 94% of executives and 88% of employees believe a clear company culture is vital to a business’ success.

There is no doubt that something once considered so “soft” has a hard effect on the bottom line.

Why Company Culture Matters
You only need to consider some of the advantages of a positive corporate culture to understand why the way work gets done matters to your business and your people. Here are some of the bottom-line benefits. A healthy, high-performing, and aligned company culture supports:

• Recruiting Top Talent
  It should come as no surprise that it’s easier to attract top talent into a company with a healthy, high-performing, and aligned culture than into one that is toxic and misaligned. High performers are attracted to a company that has earned a reputation as a great place to do meaningful work with other A Players.

  Unfortunately, the majority of new hires report that what they see on their company’s career sites and social channels, or what they hear from recruiters, is often inconsistent with what they experience when they start work.  This disconnect is a driving factor behind almost 1-in-3 new hires leaving voluntarily within the first six months in their new job.

  To attract top talent and to decrease new hire attrition, ensure that your employee value proposition aligns with your true day-to-day workplace culture.

• Retaining Top Talent
  When an employee fits in with the corporate culture, they are more likely to be engaged in their work and with their teammates. Employees who are highly engaged at work are more likely to stay.

  When there is cultural misalignment and turmoil, employees’ motivation and loyalty are at risk and workers are tempted to look elsewhere for job satisfaction.

  To retain top talent, ensure that you have a clear company culture that helps to drive your people and your business strategies forward.

• Creating Higher Performance
  We believe that people change when their environmental circumstances change. We also believe it is a leader’s job to create the circumstances to consistently get the most out of their people in a way that fits with the organization’s core values, behaviors, and strategies.

  A clear company culture provides crystal clear direction as to where people should focus their efforts, transparency about how success will be measured and rewarded, and motivation for what is expected on a day-to-day basis.

• Promoting Better Teamwork
  When an organization’s cultural is fully aligned with the strategic priorities, it is easier for employees to collaborate across boundaries and come together as a team because they know what the company expects. And companies that promote collaborative ways of working are 5 times as likely to be high performing.

  In today’s highly matrixed work environments, better teamwork is certainly worth it.  A study at Yale found that the performance level between a working group of employees versus a great team is higher by a factor of ten.

The Bottom Line
Not all workplace cultures are a fit for all people; nor do they complement all business strategies.  The best leaders consistently assess their organizational culture and then purposefully shape, align, live, and promote their corporate culture to move the people and business strategies forward.  Cultural clarity and alignment allow certain companies to outperform their peers.

To learn more about how to clarify and align your corporate culture, download The 3 Research-Backed Levels of Corporate Culture to Measure and Align