Assessing your Corporate Culture

We are a fast-growing company, so from time to time I assess whether our practices are in line with our values and support our corporate culture.

I came across this article by John Coleman where he describes six components of a Great Corporate Culture – Vision, Values, Practices, People, Narrative and Place.

I figured out a table to help me in my assessment. Hopefully, it is something that you will also find it useful for your own company.

	Definition	What we do	How we ensure it	Why?
Vision	Purpose	We always aim to be the reliable solution to turn to when our Partners need technical people for their Microsoft Dynamics 365 implementations.	Together with our Partners, we collect and analyse data on current performance and discuss how we can improve our competencies to cover their staffing needs in future projects.	We cannot have a Client-centric strategy without collecting feedback on how well we are working towards achieving our vision.
Values	How we do business	We define our culture through our shared values.	We measure our authenticity by how well we practice what we preach. We openly question ourselves and obtain feedback from our Partners on whether they feel that we uphold those values.	We get internal and external feedback on how well we are interpreting our values in order to keep ourselves grounded.
People	Who do we work with	When selecting new team members, we put in a lot of effort to ascertain that their values reinforce the kind of practices we expect from ourselves.	We have a rigorous recruitment process that apart from focusing on talent, also includes an open debate on values and work culture.	Different perspectives are healthy and are encouraged but are only fruitful if there are agreed values to bank on.
Practices	Our way of doing things	We introduce policies and procedures which reinforce our shared values.	We rely on open communication to explain in great detail the reasoning behind our practices and engage in open discussions about them.	Values are of little importance unless our stakeholders can visualise how they are enshrined in a company’s practices.
Narrative	What we represent	The narrative of the carabao being a life partner to Philippine farmers is the ethos of our team – problem-solving experts that help our Partners realise project success.	We keep a close eye on our communication strategy to reinforce our message in our branding and internal communication.	If our narrative is not clear, all the stakeholders involved would not understand what we represent.
Place	“Place shapes culture”	We sought an open architecture since it is more conducive to collaboration, however, our focus is mainly on creating the right work environment.	We ask ourselves, what did we hate in our previous jobs? And keep ourselves updated on best practices.	A negative work environment would shackle our ingenuity and go against anything we stand for.