You Care about Company Culture Even if you Don't
"Drinking the kool-aid" of company culture isn't the empty concept you might think it is.
I recently had a back-and-forth with a client about "drinking the kool-aid," company culture, and "being a team player." They're very matter-of-fact, and after having spent their career in large organizations, they regarded most company culture talk as empty statements managers use to make themselves feel better. When working on their own application materials, how much should they be themselves vs. how much should they be a "team player" that says all the right things? They don't even care about stuff like "psychological safety," they just want to get in and work.
It was actually a fun conversation. I've spent most of my career explicitly tasked with matters of company culture and thus my interactions have been broadly tilted accordingly. It was interesting to hear the response of someone worlds away from that perspective, a "recipient" of all of that employee engagement talk.
Company culture is a lived experience, not just a list of values on the company website and it's easier to speak aspirationally about your company/team than it is to mold it accordingly. If that disconnect is too large or lasts for too long, then those words lose all meaning. The resulting cynicism can be mistaken as not caring about any of it but I don't think that's quite true.
In prior conversations and even in this one, my client expressed some things they wanted more of in their workplace. They wanted creativity, experimentation, respect for their craft, and to work with/around similarly inspired people. I asked them to describe what that workplace would feel like, what sorts of things would demonstrate that those desired qualities were in place.
Then came the sort of a-ha moment. All of those things? That's company culture at work. Company culture isn't the platitudes on the career page of a company website, nor is it a fancy office with all the amenities. No, culture is the behaviors and norms that the company embodies and supports, a feedback cycle between what's said and what's done. Anyone can say their company values work-life balance but if everyone is working 60+ hours a week, is that really true? Ditto for claiming to be collaborative simply because Slack exists.
If I wanted to make a place where people could experiment, I'd have to make that behavior something celebrated, placing value on the learning process, not entirely on the results. If I wanted to make a place that celebrated creativity I'd have to provide the time and space for teams to do that exploration. If I wanted to make my team respect a new (to them) craft, I would have to educate them on that craft and why it matters to them & improves their own work. And if I wanted people to be broadly inspired I'd want to give the time, space and opportunities to develop and share that excitement.
It's easy to see how each of those ideas extend beyond the People/HR department. It can affect management, project workflow, potentially even the physical space, and how that happens is going to be unique to every situation (a remote company can't lean on in-office practices for example). That's what makes this stuff interesting (to me anyway). For someone that doesn't live in this domain, understanding your work preferences and how that relates to company behavior is a key part of finding the place where you can best thrive, regardless of whether you use the same vocabulary to describe it.
If you're out there wondering what kind of culture works for you, try to understand a bit more about yourself. What's important to you? What's important to you in a workplace? As you're learning about a new company or team (since teams can have their own micro-culture as well), try to find out what's important to them. How a company describes themselves is a starting point, but the questions you're asking through the process can be used to help you determine if they're "walking the walk" or just "talking the talk." You may not get everything you want, but hopefully you'll learn enough to make an informed decision.
Related Resources:
Personalvalu.es - A tool to help articulate your personal work values.
Keyvalues.com - A resource for finding aligned organizations, geared toward engineering but helpful beyond that as well.
If you need help understanding more about yourself & your work values, or how to decipher the values of companies you're interested in, feel free to reach out. I'd love to help.