What do you mean by corporate culture?

Industrial Revolution that had begun around 1750 in Europe surely radicalized the economic scenario around the world. It is at this point in the history that we begin to see a shift of employment more towards the secondary and eventually the tertiary sector. 200 years after the Industrial Revolution, technology took the lead in the economic development of many nations and giant companies started to establish their firm footing.

In India, it was post-1991 i.e. the liberalization, privatization, and globalization or LPG Model in the Indian context, that has led to the booming of different industries and corporate hubs in this tough competitive market and mainly in the Information Technology industry. The term ‘Corporate Culture’ started gaining currency in this background. Culture as a term encompasses the set of beliefs and practices that are shared by common groups of people.

Corporate culture is thus understood as the shared work methods, practices and norms in an established organization which forms the basis of its functioning. It also incorporates the interaction that takes place between the management and handles their work. It involves the following components.

Goals of an organization

• The organization cannot function without short-term and long-term goals. These goals create the blueprint of what should be the work plan and what are the different procedures that should be followed.

• The mindset of employees is altered and motivated based on the targets to achieve the set goals.

Values and ethics

• While your employees want to work, in what manner will they work and what gives meaning and essences to their work? It is here that the values play a very important role.

• These values can include empathy, teamwork, excellence, commitment, hard work, integrity, etc. Major companies who have created great culture have fixed values as their foundation for ethical guidelines.

Human resources

• People form the backbone of creating the entire culture in their organization and also keeping up with it and maintaining the standards that are required. It is the people of the organization who build the peripheral components of this corporate culture.

• Thus, the culture is reflected based on appraisal system, grievance redressal, working hours, incentives, employees’ satisfaction, etc.

Work practices

• Effective and successful corporate culture in the organization is possible only when the best practices are researched and altered based on the project needs of your organization.

• These practices become the customs and usages of a company. These practices ought to be tangible and measurable in terms of scale or metric.

Working environment

• Environment implies the surrounding of the company. Here, the physical space plays a very important role. Employees can contribute to building the culture and raising the bar even higher only when they feel safe and secure.

• There should be enough resources for an employee to work independently on his business to a major extent.