Facebook famously reflected this culture with its “move fast and break things” philosophy. Individual creativity and risk-taking are valuable commodities as companies seek to create the next big idea. By asking your employees how they feel, you’ll be better equipped to recognize strengths in your current culture, as well as areas for improvement.

How to Build a Great Company Culture

Sharing their experience has created a bottom-up culture that Nerds across the board find refreshing and enlightening. The company creates a video each time a person is promoted to share that employee’s passions and quirky personality. You may have a vision of your company culture, but the only way to know if that vision matches reality is to assess your company culture. A company founded with an adhocracy culture may have to eventually adopt aspects of other cultures as they succeed and grow, though Google continues to thrive while remaining in an adhocracy mode. One of the downsides to an adhocratic culture is that consistency, accountability, and coordination can sometimes be lacking yet must be managed closely. Startups often adopt an adhocracy culture, which is about driving change and innovation.

By forcing an organization into a predefined box, these surveys fail to identify what is different about an organization. Instead, they direct it to be the same as others, causing it to lose its uniqueness in the process. If culture is unique to each organization, it must be self-defined — not merely categorized. We provide leadership with a report indicating areas of consistency, alignment and clarity and reveal potential barriers to commitment.

For example, Meta Inc. attempted to build and brand its “metaverse” project as the next tech innovation. But consumer demand for the metaverse wasn’t present, and the company lost more than $45 billion from 2020 to 2024. Facebook had overhired during that time, in part to build up its metaverse division, and had to begin laying off thousands of employees from 2022 to 2024.

Create a Culture Committee

1. At its most extreme, dysfunctional culture eats away at your customer base as they lose trust in your brand promise or no longer share it with friends.
2. Many blame the company’s ruthless and aggressive culture for their inability to course correct when things started to go awry.
3. It’s important to understand the research and statistics around how employees experience culture.
4. A strong culture ensures that employees feel supported, respected, and connected, fostering a sense of belonging and loyalty.

Instead, HR leaders should help keep people accountable for organizational culture. They play a big part in aligning employees and managers with company culture and ensuring it’s practiced in the right ways. They should recognize employees for demonstrating behaviors that align with culture, help employees set individual goals that align with organizational goals, and provide helpful feedback to promote employee growth.

Define Your Mission, Vision and Core Values

After the onset of the pandemic, some organizations have adapted and thrived. But other organizations haven’t effectively adapted their culture, and employees are feeling it. 69% of organizations that adapted amid the pandemic say culture offers them a competitive advantage.

Employees’ remarks in meetings or on company review websites can give you more information than you think about culture. Employees give genuine insight about culture everyday—ensure you’re listening for it. Employees experience culture everyday, and they can help you interpret culture accurately. They can help you understand where your culture stands and where improvements should be made.

Use Dovetail to track and understand what’s important to existing and future employees. The company encourages fun as employees organize activities for what is corporate culture events they love, such as the pinewood derby, Harry Potter, and an annual Star Wars movie marathon. We help some of the most influential organizations in the world transform their culture. They may simply seem like a general but growing feeling of unease that “we are not who we once were.” Each organization has its own history and goals for the future, and its culture should be true to both. Few things are as important — and sometimes as difficult to grasp — as an organization’s culture.