Here is a brief excerpt from an article by Tim Sackett for Halogen Software’s TalentSpace blog. To read the complete article, check out others, learn more about the firm, and sign up for email alerts, please click here.
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It’s impossible in today’s world of HR not to be told a least a hundred times per day what “great culture” means, or should mean, or used to mean. We’re constantly bombarded with facts and opinion about culture!
On the leadership/HR side of great culture, we tend to be very technical. We talk about having a clear vision and mission, about what we do and where we’re going. We look at ways to measure our culture and drive the various components of the culture we desire.
What we rarely hear about is how our employees would define great culture?
What employees want from organizational culture
Our employees look at culture very differently. Culture to them is more about how they feel at work. How they feel about their job, their boss and the organization. It’s very untechnical. It’s emotional, to a large extent.
An example of a great company culture
The best culture I’ve ever worked in was at Pamida, in Omaha, NE — a small regional retail company that had a few hundred locations scattered across 20 states in the U.S. The company’s performance wasn’t all that good. It seemed like we were in a constant cost cutting mode, reducing expenses to match falling sales. Not a fun environment.
Sounds like a great culture, right?!
I laughed more at that job, than at any other job I’ve ever been at in my career. I worked with three guys in HR (Luke, Ray and Bob) and we all went to lunch with each other almost every day. We would laugh! Laugh at our jobs. Laugh at the company. Laugh at each other. Laugh at life. Side-splitting, belly-hurting, I-have-a-headache-I’m-laughing-so-hard laugh.
It was awesome. I loved going to work every day. At a company that was in a complete death spiral.
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Here is a direct link to the complete article.
Tim is the President of HRU Technical Resources, engineering and IT staffing firm in Lansing, MI. He has 20 years of HR and recruiting background split evenly between corporate Fortune 500 gigs and third party staffing gigs. The best performance feedback Tim ever received was that he was “unfiltered and loose in the corners.” Tim tells it like it is, which means sometimes he calls HR and Talent Pros out on the dumb stuff we do. Catch him weekly here and here.