The Three Types of Company Culture

Bryson McIver - April 19th, 2020

In the current state of the world where many of us are working from home, I think it is obvious that teams that were used to being in a single location have had a huge change to how they operate which likely effected their efficiency and also the team dynamic culture. I've been thinking about not only how it is effecting my team, but also why it is effecting us in the way it is. I think introspective like this is what can help us improve not only our during quarantine work, but help us improve and grow from this experience. A big part of where I see morale changing relates to the culture at our company.

Often we talk about having a great company culture where people enjoy who they are working with, love their work, and believe in the company, but all three of those things are very different and effected by different factors. That's when I started thinking about breaking this down into workplace culture, professional culture, and leadership culture. Not everyone cares about all three types of culture, some just come to work and ignore anything happening outside their project, but in my experience the majority of morale can be broken into these three catagories.

Leadership Culture

I don't particularly like the name for this one, but I didn't want to reuse company culture to describe this since that is an established term for the entire picture. I see this type of culture revolving around believing the direction of the company, where the leadership is taking it, and the product or service that is offered. I find that in software development, this is often the least cared about type of culture and people will just put their heads down and focus on what is around them. Typically, companies establish this by connecting leadership with employees and painting a positive internal picture of how the company is doing. During the crisis, how leadership handles the work from home or safe essential employee treatment will completely change the way they are viewed. Before you could likely get away by being decent and speaking positively, but now the pressure is really on. On top of this, it is an excellent opportunity to build this culture by connecting and relating with everyone as they are all effected as well. Just increasing the amount of discussion can have a big impact. Of course, depending on what your company is doing, this can also kill your confidence in whatever your company is doing. While leadership might connect more, if it looks like the company is losing all revenue or having to layoff employees to extend running cash, it'll be tough for people to want to keep working when they feel like it might all be worthless. I think this type of culture is what I first think of and what many people talk of when they say company culture (Glassdoor reviews often focus on this).

Workplace Culture

This is the other big piece of culture that is always talked about. Especially in tech jobs, everyone is talking about how they offer free drinks, have a ping pong table, and everyone is best friends at work. Being in a place with bad workplace culture can make you feel like a living hell. Often this can be due to the social mesh not being a positive place to be. Most companies at least try some diversity (mainly racism and sexism based) training to make everyone feel more at home, but often this type of culture is fostered and created by the people you hire and their personalities. Companies can help with this by encouraging interaction between coworkers (this is normally what the free lunch is supposed to do) and depending on the team dynamic with their manager they can step in as well (like having happy hour with the team). A lot friends I had coming out of college focused a lot on this type of culture in their first job since having that positive social experience can help plug some of the holes in the other culture areas. People often use their social circles to cope and amplify whatever they are feeling, so to have that positive amplification which you are typically involved in every day, is a more present factor than the leadership. Working from home has completely changed the workplace culture since many aren't in the workplace. While companies are implementing video chat requirements and remote interaction, the way we are interacting has completely changed and at best is damping the positivity of workplace culture, and in the worst case previous social norms are failing in the remote communication and causing issues (sarcasm heavy teams might be feeling this especially). The reduction in this culture really led me to write this post, since without the everyday with my team I started feeling the impact of leadership and professional culture.

Professional Culture

This is the piece of company culture which doesn't get as much love as it deserves and can be heavily influenced by the company itself unlike workplace culture. Professional culture is the culture around you doing your work, improving as a worker, and general career development. Take for example you're working on a project and then the stakeholders decide to change some of the requirements part way through, whatever happens right. Now on your next project it happens again, at a certain point you're going to get pretty frustrated and feel like your time is being wasted. Often you then rely on your workplace culture and continue to brush this off, but obviously the effects of that are diminished currently. While less of a frustrating point, a company which provides opportunities for going to conferences or taking additional training to help with your field is going to make you feel like they are more invested in you. Some of this growth may also come from getting more freedom on how you approach a particular problem and receiving some sort of agency with it. Management can actually make a big impact here by providing programs and opportunities for self improvement and making sure that your time isn't wasted by external forces. When the professional culture is poor, it is easy to get a grass is greener on the other side feeling towards improving and growing yourself. Once that feeling starts happening, I wouldn't doubt that anyone will stop caring about the leadership or their peers if the culture around you doing the work itself is poor. I think this bleeds into career progression as well. If you start feeling like there's no where to go in your company and you want to take on more responsibilities, then you're going to start losing motivation to work hard and produce your best work because it won't get you anywhere.

I wish someone had focused me more on professional culture in this early time in my career, because this can be a crucial time where these things really do matter. Even if you don't care about improving yourself or progressing your career, I think many people would appreciate a positive professional culture that supports and pushed them that direction anyways. If you don't want to take the opportunities offered then that's fine, but at least you know your company is trying to improve the employees. Now I realize a lot of companies have stopped doing as much employee development and instead just recruit the experience which has probably led to some of the decreased loyalty and job hopping that is becoming more common. They attempt to fill this gap with workplace and leadership culture to keep you productive, but there may be no effort invested into you. In the end, how much each of these things effects you will vary by your personality, but I do think that we should start making the distinction on different types of company culture and really investigating each one individually to produce a balanced and happier work environment for everyone. If you're achieving this before an impacting event happens, your culture will likely be resilient instead of show gaping holes and further the impact of the event itself.