The Importance Of Building A Corporate Culture

When starting a business, the owner will first focus on anything to boost the profits. However, if they want to develop their business firmly, along with business activities, the owner has to learn that the importance of culture in a company and how it can increase employee morale, encourage equitable workplaces. This article aims to get a better understanding of corporate culture as well as the importance of building a culture for businesses.

1. What Is Corporate Culture?

Corporate culture refers to the set of beliefs and behaviors that determine how a company’s employees and management interact and handle outside business transactions. Often, corporate culture can be observed within a company — which includes its policies, procedures, ethics, values, employee behaviors and attitudes, goals and code of conduct, v.v. It also makes up the “personality” of a company and defines the work environment

Individuals taking on a job position will bring with them an ego. But when working with other employees in an environment with corporate culture, their thoughts will be the same way, their activities will support each other and the energy fields they release are also remarkably similar. 

Why Culture Is Important in Business?

2. Why Culture Is Important in Business?

Lower staff turnover

One of the main reasons why employees leave a company is because they don’t enjoy their work environment. The work environment can refer to the social aspects of a workplace, the atmosphere, the way people treat each other and the space for work. Since company culture is often closely connected to the work environment, having a positive culture can reduce turnover.

Attracts more applicants

Job seekers prefer to apply to companies that have a good working environment and outstanding business to companies that have high paying jobs

According to an Indeed survey, 72% of job seekers say it’s extremely or very important to see details about company culture in job descriptions.

Improves credibility and public image

Thanks to good company culture, employees are more likely to tell their friends, family and personal networks about their positive experience. Therefore, Customers, clients and business partners can easily trust and make deals with this kind of company

3. The feature of corporate culture

Corporate culture plays an important role to develop a business and create its own achievement in the market. Because company culture is built on these following characteristics:

• Corporate culture associated with people: A company is an organization that gathers many individuals having the same purpose, ideal to work together, interact with each other and get a certain result. Therefore, habits and standards are formed and implemented by all members of the organization. Thus culture is derived from the employees of the business and is also implemented by them.
• Corporate culture is valuable: The essence of culture must have been the standards and habits that contribute to get good achievement in business or the thoughts and actions that show a professional and credible image of the business. That is the value of culture or the factor that makes a business different from other businesses.
• Corporate culture is stable: The basic premise of corporate culture is the activities and perceptions that have been formed since the beginning of the business’ existence. Through the process of development, the belief in those activities and perceptions will grow and accumulate to become a culture, so the stability of the corporate culture is undeniable

However, when the internal situation as well as the market has strong fluctuations that require businesses to change to adapt and survive, culture will also be a factor that needs to be changed.

4. The factor of corporate culture

In order to create a unique and deep culture, businesses must build the content of the culture according to the following two factors:

First, the company’s orientation and strategy (Mission and vision)

• These are specific goals set by the company, including goals throughout the operation process and specific goals in each stage. This will be the main direction to build work culture.
• Businesses always have a mission and vision that serves as their guiding principle when deciding what direction they want to take their business in. It also helps customers understand the purpose of the organization and guides employee behaviors.

Secondly, the core values ​​of the company:

Company values are the center of a company’s culture. It serves as behavioral guidelines and shapes the mindset of your employees, giving them a purpose.

These values ​​are displayed through a variety of factors, including both tangible and intangible. Such as:

• Human resources: Every business has a portrait of the staff they want to cooperate and work with. When a new employee joins the company, cultural integration is inevitable thing. The right person will be the person who quickly integrates into the working environment because they already have the same ideology and life values.
• Behavior, communication, and habits of people in the company: These are activities that occur daily and regularly in the working environment, which contributes to creating an open and pleasant environment for employees.
• How the company’s employees behave with business partners or customers:  This value is directly related to the image of the company in the market and the business results itself. 
• The method of working: It is the procedure to perform a task, get a goal in a job position. The rigorous and rational working procedure contributes to improving the employee’s work results and helps business owners easily check and monitor the working process of employees.
• Internal regulations of the company (about working hours, uniforms, salary and bonus, content and form of discipline, responsibility, etc.) create a corridor to ensure that the activities of the business always take place within a framework, that can be controlled.

Other elements that make up company culture include management style, expectations, company goals, local and national government policies, benefits/perks, opportunities to advance, the way employees feel about the work they do and disciplinary action methods your business uses.

5. How to build a corporate culture?

Step 1: Assess the current situation of culture in the company: What the business is applying and how it affects the future development of the business

Step 2: Determine what the business wants about the company’s culture: Change or remove inappropriate values or add new values.

Step 3: Drafting a plan to build a corporate culture

The plan includes: objectives, activities, completion time, contents (Regulations of the company); Vision; Mission; Core values; Business Philosophy that needs to be changed), what resources are needed. Who is responsible for specific tasks?

Step 4: Announce and analyze the culture to the whole member of the company.

Step 5: Measure the results after implementing the culture

• Conduct an annual survey, giving employees the opportunity to feedback on the company’s values, assessing their relevance to employees and their satisfaction level 
• Measured by indicators such as Employee turnover rate, employee engagement rate, employee satisfaction rate.

It is necessary to understand that the process of building corporate culture is not only the values that business owners desire ​​but also the contribution of ideas and coordination of actions of all employees in that business. That makes work culture has a strong influence on members of this company.