Workplace culture can sometimes feel like a bit of a fluffy or undefinable term. It is something that gets bandied about in job descriptions and during interviews as an attractor – if the company has great culture, then it must be a good place to work, right?
What workplace culture is actually defined as is a set of practices, values, and behaviours that employees will experience in their workplace. It is also true that culture comes from the top: we see this particularly in companies where the culture is poor. Look up and see how leadership behaves; the tap drips down.
While most of us can spot toxic behaviour or red flags fairly easily, other areas that may point to a poor company culture are things we just put down to the rough and tumble of office life. But, according to Stacy Norman, COO and founder of BizClik Media Group and March8, a community of women executives, entrepreneurs, and professionals, there are certain behaviours that define whether a company has a poor culture.
What to look out for
So what should you be looking out for at work, in order to spot a workplace with bad culture?
The first thing to watch out for is a blame culture. “Blame is probably one of the worst things you could have,” Norman says of workplace behaviours.
“It’s where projects are wrong or clients are unhappy, and fingers get pointed. It is easier to blame that person and forget they are on your team and you work together. When you have a blame culture, people won’t innovate, and they will sit around waiting for direction.”
How communication happens is another big indicator of a business’ culture. Look around you and see how the entire company communicates, Norman advises. Does everything happen in silos? “This is where different departments won’t communicate, and don’t communicate. They don’t have a combined objective.
“Within any business, a process has to go 360. It should start and finish in the same place. If that communication breaks down, that process breaks down. So this is something that’s very, very important that you do.”
You should also take a look at how employees are treated. “You have to innovate your staff, you have to grow your staff,” Norman says.
Why does this matter?
But ultimately, why does this matter? There is a direct relationship between organisational culture and employee engagement, and that translates directly into your job satisfaction. The happier and more productive you are at work, the longer you are likely to stay.
If you’re working at a company where your job satisfaction is low, you’re not learning anything new and you are ready to make a move to a company you’ll love working for, then we have three jobs below that are worth checking out. Plus, there are thousands more to discover on The London Economic Job Board too.
Sales Manager, Cryptocurrencies and Digital Assets, Checkout.com, London
Checkout.com is looking for a creative, and highly driven Sales Manager, Cryptocurrencies and Digital Assets to establish relationships with top prospective merchants with a core focus on digital assets and currencies, driving new business growth. You’ll collaborate closely with the rest of the sales team to provide extraordinary service. You’ll also work with various in-house leaders to position Checkout.com’s capabilities, products, services, and solutions optimally with top prospects. You’ll need four years’ of sales and/or business development experience working in payments with a focus on bringing onboard key strategic accounts and an excellent knowledge of the digital assets and currencies space. Get the full job description here.
Senior Analytics Engineer, Spotify, London
Spotify’s freemium R&D team oversees the entire user journey on Spotify and ensures it engages with people in innovative ways. Spotify is now looking for an Analytics Engineer to solve problems in the data space and build the commerce platform’s data platform, and evaluate the data quality and performance of existing pipelines to make meaningful improvements. You will work with development teams to ensure features launch suitably instrumented and monitored. You’ll have a track record of working in the analytics space and have experience with building robust data models for analytics purposes, plus a masterful understanding of SQL. Apply for this role now.
Cloud Security Operations Analyst, GoCardless, London
A global leader in account-to-account payments, GoCardless makes it easy for merchants to collect both recurring and one-off payments directly from customers’ bank accounts. As a Cloud Security Operations Analyst you will participate in the design, development and implementation of cloud security architecture, strategy and standards. You should have a background in cloud security operations or as a SOC analyst and be experienced using cloud-native services and environments (GKE, GCS), and performing incident response in the cloud. You’ll need a knowledge of recommended cloud security controls, fundamentals and best practices and have experience using SIEM tools (ideally Splunk) to develop security monitoring cases and writing scripts to automate tasks. Get the full job spec here.
For more great opportunities, visit The London Economic Job Board today