Creating a Positive Company Culture: 3 Key Components

At HireBetter, we believe culture is a big thing. Culture is the character and personality of our organization. It’s what makes us unique and is the sum of our core values, traditions, beliefs, behaviors, and attitudes. In short, our employees are our culture.

Positive culture attracts talent, drives engagement, impacts happiness and satisfaction, and affects performance. Most leaders understand that, but the biggest mistake they make is letting their workplace culture form naturally without first defining what they want it to be.

We strongly encourage you to take steps to define your company culture. To assist you, we have provided three key components to creating a culture that is beneficial to your company, your employees, and your stakeholders.
 
 
1. Purpose
The most important element of culture is purpose—why do you exist? David Packard (of Hewlett-Packard) said, “I want to discuss why a company exists in the first place. In other words, why are we here? I think many people assume, wrongly, that a company exists simply to make money. While this is an important result of a company’s existence, we must go deeper and find the real reasons for our being. You can look around [in the marketplace] and see people who are interested in money and nothing else, but the underlying drive come largely from a desire to do something else: to make a product, to give a service—generally to do something [bigger than themselves].”

At HireBetter, we impact lives by connecting and empowering good people to build great companies.

Begin by answering the question, “what is our purpose? Why do we do what we do?”
 
 
2. Core Values
Core Values are pervasive. They influence almost every aspect of our lives: our choices, our responses to others, our objectives, and our sense of ethics and morality. They motivate us before we achieve a goal and determine how satisfied we will feel once we attain it. Many well-intentioned people focus on goals, but goals have little significance in human fulfillment. Values are far more momentous.

At HireBetter, we are in the business of exceeding expectations, not merely meeting them. This is achieved through our team upholding and abiding by our Core Values. This translates into exceptional partnerships, both internally and externally. Our Core Values are guiding principles that drive our day-to-day decisions. They are our very foundation—the beliefs and purpose to which we are truly committed.

So, why does a recruiting company need Core Values? Because HireBetter is not just a recruiting company. We are a unified team of professionals who view the opportunity we have to positively impact the lives of others as the essence of our existence. This impact does not simply come from a perfect-fit candidate—it is the result of truly understanding our clients’ expectations and putting the right procedures in place to exceed them.

Our Core Values are: Be Transparent, Together We Win, Take Ownership. Be Resilient, Be Present and We are Passionate.
 
 
3. Stakeholders
What you do is not just about your company. It’s not even just about your customers. You will not succeed if your stakeholders don’t succeed. Pioneering naturalist John Muir observed that “when you tug at a single thing in nature, you find it attached to the rest of the world.”

Such is the case with business, which is an intricate and interconnected web of relationships. You should attach your values not just to getting the job done, but to every aspect of your life and the lives around you.

Unlike some businesses that believe they only exist to maximize returns for their shareholders, Conscious Businesses like HireBetter have core values that focus on the whole business ecosystem, creating and optimizing value for all of our stakeholders, understanding that strong and engaged stakeholders lead to a healthy, sustainable, resilient business.

We recognize that, without employees, customers, suppliers, funders, supportive communities, and a life-sustaining ecosystem, there is no business. Conscious Business is a win-win-win proposition. Source: Conscious Capitalism.

When our team and the work we do are aligned with our stakeholders, some pretty amazing things happen. Our team is engaged and thrives, clients return for more and recommend their peers, and our competitive edge in the marketplace is strengthened. This framework is made up of a myriad of attributes, but the heart of it is our Purpose and our Core Values. Your business is no different – your purpose and core values will be the guiding light that leads you to success.

It is our hope that, rather than letting your workplace culture create itself, you will consider these three key components and intentionally create a culture that will positively impact the lives of your employees and stakeholders, in addition to your bottom line.