Your company culture is your company’s personality. It refers to the shared values, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours that characterise who you are, how you behave, what you stand for and what you want to achieve.
And just like human personalities, you can work on your company personality over time to gain new skillsets, strengthen key traits and accomplish new things.
A key way to do that is by hiring for cultural add.
Hiring for cultural add involves assessing candidates for sets of skills and traits that your existing employees don’t have and that will help strengthen your company culture.
You’ll not only need a solid understanding of what your existing company culture actually looks like but also how you want to improve it and where your skills or capability gaps currently are.
In this article, we’ll run through four steps to help you measure and define your existing culture, so you can hire for cultural add and strengthen your company’s personality.
1. Identify Your Company’s Core Values
The first step is defining your company’s core values.
These are the guiding principles that shape decision-making, behaviour, and interactions within your company. In other words, they’re the things that matter the most to you.
For example, a sustainable tech development company might identify their core values as innovation, collaboration and sustainability, to name a few.
Here are a few ways to brainstorm and identify your core values:
- Reflect on your mission and vision: Are there any recurring themes or principles in your mission and vision statements?
- Sit down with your leadership team: Ask your leadership teams what they think the company believes in, stands for and wants to accomplish
- Ask employees: Conduct surveys, workshops and brainstorming sessions to gather input from employees at all levels on what’s important to them and their work
- Analyse success stories: Examine instances where your company achieved significant milestones or overcame challenges. What values were instrumental in these successes?
2. Observe Your Current Culture
What behaviours and attitudes are currently prevalent among your employees? How do team members interact with each other, treat one another and feel about their work environment?
To define and improve your culture you first need to understand it.
And to do that, we recommend starting with employee surveys and focus groups.
Ask questions about teamwork, communication, leadership styles, work environments and overall job satisfaction to uncover what it’s really like to work at your company. Be sure to encourage complete honesty and transparency among employees (top tip: anonymous surveys are a great way to solicit candid feedback.)
Personality profiling is another great way to understand what kind of personalities commonly thrive at your company, as well as which are the most/least common. For example, you might’ve heard of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and the Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Conscientious (DISC) assessment.
With personality profiling, you can not only understand what traits and behaviours are common in your highest performers but also where your gaps are and how you can fill them with candidates who have different personality profiles or thinking styles.
Here are a few additional steps you can take to observe and measure your existing culture:
- Analyse interactions: How do teams collaborate and communicate? Is there a sense of camaraderie, or do silos exist? Are communication channels open and transparent or do employees feel cut off from each other?
- Review leadership styles: Leadership plays a pivotal role in shaping your culture. Take the time to assess whether your current leadership is more hierarchical or collaborative, and how employees respond to it.
3. Define Behaviours and Expectations
Once you’ve identified your core values and gained insights into your current company culture, the next steps are to translate those values into actionable behaviours and set clear expectations for what you want from your employees.
This involves understanding and defining how your core values should manifest in day-to-day activities and interactions.
To do that, take each core value one by one and reflect on the specific behaviours and actions that will exemplify and reinforce that value.
For example, let’s say one of your core values is collaboration. Which day-to-day actions and behaviours will help your employees bring that value to life and incorporate it into their work environment? You might say keeping open communication channels, running cross-departmental projects and regular team brainstorming sessions. These are your desired behaviours.
Once you’ve defined desired behaviours and expectations for each core value, you can not only start to evaluate how often you actually see these embodied at your company, but also what kinds of hires you can make to improve how often you’re seeing those behaviours.
For instance, if your existing culture is relatively reserved and doesn’t encourage employees to ask questions, you might want to look for a candidate who’s outgoing and outspoken to challenge the status quo and encourage your team to speak up, ask questions and delve deeper into specific topics.
4. Set Goals
Finally, once you’ve defined your core values, understood your existing culture and outlined your desired behaviours and expectations, it’s time to set actionable, time-bound goals to help you put it all into action.
Start by thinking about any internal changes you can make to improve your culture. For example, if you’ve identified work-life balance as a core value yet 60% of employees feel overworked and stressed, you might think about increasing your paid time off or ensuring each employee takes a specific number of days of leave per year.
This is also where you can set goals around the types of culture-add hires you want to make. For example, you might want 50% of new hires over the next 12 months to have strong collaboration skills and experience working cross-functionally, or 60% of new candidates to have fine-tuned creative thinking capabilities.
Once you’ve set your goals, you can start putting them into action and assessing candidates for cultural add.
Our Talent OS – Measure service can help with that. Our proven assessments, personality tests and competency tests accurately gauge each candidate’s skill, experience and culture fit. So you can pinpoint the most suitable people for each role and hire for culture add.
Struggling to hire for cultural add?
Find candidates with the skills, experience and culture add you’re looking for using psychometric and organisational assessment tools.
- Screen candidates using industry-leading tools and tests
- Reduce risk and cost of hiring
- Understand how to improve your business culture through hiring
Learn more about Talent OS – Measure and how it helps via our website here.
