Is  Company Culture fit dead?

First of all, I would like to thank everyone who organised and attended the DisruptHR event taking place at The Landing UK in Media City Manchester. Special thank you to Rebecca Taylor & Louisa Scanlan FCIPD for organising the event.

My presentation is based on my research carried out at University of Manchester, where I spent some time analysing and researching the concept of culture and the benefits of culture fit.

If you google culture fit… the answer is…

Culture fit is dead…

Here some examples of the end of culture fit

the end of culture fit

But the real question is… why did we kill it?

Although we all know based on many research papers that culture fit brings benefits to every company, such us:

• Improved Commitment
• Time and Hassle Saved
• Bad Hires Avoided
• Improve Employee Satisfaction and Retention Ratios

So… we killed it because of the way is used in practise!

Recruiters too often say no to candidates because they ‘don´t fit the culture’ when in reality it is just a blanket term with no valid reasoning behind it.

Reality turns this blanket statement in a weaponise blanket term as a it is used to reject candidates who do not think, look or act the same.

Don´t get me wrong – I´m not saying that all recruiters are evil, all I’m saying is that we are all prone to bias. Conscious or unconscious the result is the same – death of diversity in your organisation.

This leave employers and recruiters with a dilemma to either pick the the diversity or culture fit, no middle ground.

 

That is the reason why we are here to disrupt it and find the middle ground (or a green pill).

Before we move on to how this disruption might look like…. Let´s focused on what culture actually means.

Culture is a very complex concept, there is at least 150 definitions of it! In terms of the recruitment spectrum, the best way to think of culture is to see it as a pyramid. At the base you have the core values and tacit assumptions. They create the environment for all other constructs to grow upon.

So the best way to create the culture fit is by aligning the core values of businesses and individuals in order to build a long-lasting, positive, and high-performing relationship.

 

However, companies still get it wrong as it is difficult to get this right, and please let me give you some real examples, Dan for instance, is the CEO of a company in Manchester, and even though he is aware of the importance of culture fit for his company, he is still struggling to find the best fit to make his team stronger in order to build a passionate workforce. He is not alone – 90% of CEO´s admit they have retention problems!

 

However there are some companies who do manage to get their culture right which we shared in one of our past articles. (read full article here- add link to the article)

And you might ask yourself, why do they do it?

They first invest a lot of time and money into leveraging their culture. More importantly, they constantly look out for the technology available to support them with the recruitment. Technology often helps them with maintaining and developing their cultures while maintaining diversity improving their employee retention and satisfaction rates.

The beautiful thing about technology is that is can be BIAS-FREE. It can make a great friend in recruitment decision-making. Technology such as SaaS, AI, Machine Learning can be very helpful as once you teach it a research-based method it will follow it without any human error.

 

There is already some solutions available to help companies using the culture their advantage while maintaining diversity, such as

• Macawly
• Visual DNA
• Crystal

The right mix of the technology can help you build high-performing and more motivated workforce.

This will not only help your own company it will also benefit the entire UK economy! You are all probably aware of the skills gap within the UK market which is growing every year. It is worth over 2 billion pounds this year. (link)

 

What’s the best way to fix it?

The best solutions is to put people in an environment where they are more motivated and more committed. They will learn four, five, or more skills throughout their careers rather than staying at one company they are not committed to whatsoever and learning only one skill… It would pump up the UK economy with much needed talent and narrow down the skills gap.

 

Conclusion by Michal Wisniewski.

At Macawly we have created a research-based tool capable of mapping any unique company culture. We measure core motivations of each candidate who wants to join our company and we offset them against our core values. Calculating the % culture fit we make sure that everyone who joins Macawly fits into our culture creating happy employees and better results for everyone.

Find out more about Macawly on:

Macawly´s website and make sure that you connect with us on social media, by following us on twitter! 🙂