Culture is the backbone of a business

For businesses, having a company culture code is a way of knowing who you are and what you want to be. A shared culture around how you think, behave and work. It can help businesses to attract and retain awesome people - like you! How would it feel if you worked for a company that have a shared vision and purpose, where everyone really want to be working there, were empowered and happy in a thriving environment?

Top Priority for graduates: join a business where you look forward to going into work

Culture is present whether there is one person in a business or 10,000. Culture evolves and should be the constant backbone of any business. It helps to attract and retain awesome clients that also have have a shared vision and cultural fit. When a business looks after its team, the team look after it’s customers, then the customers take care of the profit. The priorities need to be in this order.

Zappos - an online shoe retailer - have become almost as well known for its culture as its products. They only employ people that fit their culture, along with more and more business today (including our Digital Marketing Agency BabelQuest, Google, HubSpot and Adobe). This enables them to promote their culture, create happy employees, which ultimately leads to happy customers.

When looking for an employer, you need to focus on the culture of the company, not just the role.

Typically graduates arrive for interviews full of questions and ready to sell themselves, but miss the opportunity to interview / ask questions of the business. We are trained to ask questions about how the role will benefit us, but what we need to be asking is how the role will benefit the business. Regardless of the role, the chances are you will only succeed, be happy and thrive in a business with which you can fit. If a company has a clear culture code and vision then they should be delighted to share and demonstrate that culture.

If you are looking to assess a company's culture, ask for examples:

If they offer flexible working, ask them how one of the team manages their workload and internal communications when working flexibly.

Ask the difference between a good employee in this role compared to a great one.

Ask if you can spend some time with one of their team, look how they are communicating over social media.

Connect over LinkedIn with employees or ex-employees and ask them whether they would recommend working in the business.

Ask what is the best and worst thing about the business?

Ask how does this position support the main goal and vision of the company?

The most important thing that you can do is decide what is important for you to fit in. We have a culture code within our business, but it won’t appeal to everyone. I have detailed this below, as an example, but check out other companies and look at what culture you are after. Here is a good summary of some of the best cultures. You can also see why this is our culture in our blog on why culture is the backbone of our agency by clicking here:

Be inquisitive

Be accountable

Be trustful and honest

Be responsible

Be empowered to learn something new everyday

Align the goals of visions of BabelQuest with your own personal goals

Focus on results, they matter more than when or where they were produced

If you found this useful, you are one of thousands of others that could probably do with this advice now. Please share this with your networks and if you have any questions, tweet us @BabelQuest.

Written by Rebecca Murphy, Managing Director at BabelQuest

Connections:

https://uk.linkedin.com/in/babelbec

https://twitter.com/babelbec

becky@babelquest.co.uk