Company Culture

Introduction

Generally, culture is defined as representing all the ways of life of a population that are passed down from generation to generation. It has been called “the way of life for an entire society”. Culture includes codes of manners, dress, language, rituals, games, norms of behavior and systems of belief. But what should “culture” mean when we talk about a company?

This paper proposes to explain what company culture means and what role plays it in the management and the organisation of a company. Starting from the idea that “as long as you have a business, you have a company culture”, I have explained here how a strong company culture equals a powerful leader by motivating people to work hard and stay in the business, bringing along with loyalty and motivation.

Because a company’s culture affects the entire environment in the business, including profits, culture is the real bottom line. The content of this paper will show how a company with a well-developed culture, open to all its members want to bring, easily outperforms competitors.

What is company culture?

When we talk about people, we talk is if a person has a personality. The same thing happens with companies, but we talk is if they have culture. The culture represents the distinctive personality of the company.

For a company, culture deals with the values and practices shared by the members of the group. It determines how they act, how they contribute to teamwork, problem solving, innovation, productivity and quality.

Company culture is important because it can make or break the company; it contains everything that makes up the organization and how its parts work together, being the answer of people-related problems such as motivation, communications, teamwork, morale, absenteeism, injuries and insurance claims. Company culture is a state of mind, a feeling, a collective consciousness that's infused in a business and its employees. It makes it easier for everybody involved in the company to deal with stressful situations, long hours, and other work life pain.

For an enterprise, a business discipline is not enough. It is very important for a business to have knowledge about how important is to have a coherent company culture because your neglect can be reflected in its employees’ behavior. They may begin working shorter days, taking longer lunches or even asking for more compensation. Business discipline is closely related with the emotional health of the team that sustains it.

When having a business is very important to understand that employees are its greatest assets and when the business experiences a growth surge, it needs the united front of employees to support the company’s efforts “in mind, body and spirit”. This means having a strong culture of the company and it foster better overall efforts at beating the competition. It's more fun if everybody feels like WE are winning, not just "the guy in the corner office seems to be happy that he is winning" or even worse, "look at that loser in the corner office, he thinks he's winning!”