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Your company culture — the shared beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors of your employees — shapes how team members represent your brand, interact with one another, and respond in a crisis. Building a strong organizational culture goes beyond creating a mission statement or defining company values. It requires an ongoing commitment from the entire organization to communicate openly, recognize one another’s hard work, and build genuine connections. And it all starts with the hiring process.
You want to attract candidates who fit seamlessly into the culture you’ve worked to develop — while ensuring new hires also bring diverse perspectives that keep your company innovative and help its culture grow. Threading this needle is what culture fit is all about. Let’s take a deep dive into what culture fit involves, best practices for building cultural alignment, and how to measure if company culture is helping your organization succeed.
What is culture fit?
Culture fit is how well an employee’s values, behaviors, and goals align with your organizational culture. New hires who fit your company culture will get up to speed and start contributing quickly, while naturally aligning with important business goals. Evaluating culture fit involves carefully assessing an individual’s skills, communication style, objectives, and outlook, all of which influence their interactions with their immediate team and your organization as a whole.
Why culture fit matters
Culture fit underpins the success of many high-performing organizations. Shared values lead to mutual respect and understanding between employees, helping teams navigate conflict, find shared space for collaboration, and communicate openly. And when teams work towards the same goals with a common sense of purpose, they move more quickly and confidently, speedily achieving key organizational objectives. Conversely, chronic cultural misalignment can negatively impact your organization in a variety of ways, including increased disengagement, reduced productivity, and higher turnover rates.
It’s no secret that candidates consider a company’s culture when applying and interviewing. Forty percent of global workers think of company culture as a top priority when evaluating a potential employer. When prospective employees know that your organization has a reputation for a cohesive, healthy culture, they’re more likely to apply, interview, and accept an offer. Plus, each hire is more likely to have an easier time onboarding when they already understand and connect with your company values.
Despite these benefits of prioritizing culture fit, your organization should be careful to avoid only hiring employees that “fit” certain preconceived cultural ideas. Instead, transform culture fit into a concept that suits today’s evolving, diverse workforce with culture add.
Culture fit vs. culture add
A narrow focus on cultural fit can introduce bias into the hiring process and result in your company missing out on talented candidates with the experience and skills your company needs. Organizations that only hire candidates who are similar to current employees risk creating a homogeneous team that lacks the diverse perspectives and abilities continuous improvement and innovation rely on.
To combat these issues, companies have started to embrace the concept of culture add. With culture add, companies prioritize candidates that will extend and improve their culture, rather than simply fitting into it. They ask whether individuals will expand their workforce’s existing skill sets and introduce new viewpoints to make the company stronger as a whole.
This isn’t to say that the traditional view of culture isn’t important, of course. If a candidate doesn’t share any of your company’s values and goals, they’re likely to have a hard time meshing with your organization and their team members. And other employees may become dissatisfied if incompatibility with new hires creates substantial tension.
Hiring with cultural fit in mind
Because culture fit is so important to your organization’s success, it’s important to incorporate it into every stage of the recruitment process.
Write accurate job descriptions
A job description should do more than list responsibilities and qualifications — it should set the tone for what your organization values and expects from employees. Consider including a list of company values in the job description and linking to a page about your company culture. Potential applicants can review these materials, and candidates who are incompatible are more likely to self-select out of the process.
Ask the right interview questions
Each candidate should receive the same set of questions to assess culture fit. Using objective, consistent criteria for all candidates can help prevent unconscious bias and improve workplace diversity. When asking candidates culture-related questions, use specific scenarios that can gauge how a candidate might respond in a given situation. For example, rather than asking an employee if they consider themselves collaborative, ask how they might work with another department to resolve a disagreement.
Assess candidate experience
A candidate’s work history can reveal valuable information about their attitudes and goals. If a candidate has worked mostly at organizations with competitive, aggressive cultures, they might not be a good fit at an organization that prizes harmony and cohesion. A candidate’s prior roles can also inform your assessment. If they have mostly worked on solo projects within their own discipline, for example, they may not work well in a cross-functional environment.
Be transparent
Your organizational culture should be a competitive differentiator that attracts high-quality candidates. So don’t be shy about sharing your company’s mission, vision, and values. Dedicating space on your website to these topics or creating an employee experience blog are both great ways to publicly declare your company’s commitment to building a winning, employee-centered culture.
Share information about your company culture during the recruitment process, and explain how employees shape and contribute to that culture. Information about organizational culture should feature prominently in job descriptions, and HR professionals — along with other team members participating in the hiring process — should share their personal experiences with company culture during interviews and onboarding. When done right, the candidate should have a clear picture of what your enterprise’s culture looks like, and your company should have a good understanding of whether the potential hire is likely to contribute to it positively.
How to measure and reinforce culture fit
Building and maintaining a high-performing culture isn’t easy. You’ll want to evaluate if your investments in a vibrant, positive work environment are paying off by measuring indicators of a strong culture. These metrics might include employee engagement scores, supervisor rating, and the percentage of employees who feel like they belong at your organization.
Gathering this data doesn’t have to be time-consuming. Using an employee engagement platform with multiple feedback channels, like pulse surveys and intelligent HR chatbots, can simplify collecting feedback and help leaders quickly identify and address culture issues at your organization.
Recognition programs are another powerful way to improve cultural fit. The stats speak for themselves: 92% of employees say that when they receive recognition for a specific action, they’re more likely to repeat that behavior. And employees who have received recognition in the past week are twice as likely to have a strong sense of belonging.
You can empower every employee to give social and monetary recognition through an accessible employee recognition and rewards platform. All team members — not just managers — should be able to participate, as company-wide adoption will magnify the benefits of recognition.
Build better company culture with Achievers
Building and maintaining culture fit requires an in-depth understanding of what your employees value, frequent recognition of behaviors that reflect the culture your company wants to build, and the tools to connect team members across your organization. You’ll get all of this and more with the Achievers Employee Experience Platform, a science-backed HR solution dedicated to building a culture of belonging through a suite of easy-to-use tools.
Creating a cohesive culture starts with positive interactions between employees. Fostering organic employee connections is easy with Achievers Connect, which pairs employees together for virtual chats that drive collaboration by kick-starting conversations around shared topics of interest. Every time you onboard a new hire, they can hit the ground running by immediately forging connections with co-workers.
Once employees have built rapport, they can then reward one another for great work using Achievers Recognize. Achievers Recognize celebrates positive employee behavior and supports both social and monetary awards, including a best-in-class global rewards program with merchandise and experiences from over 2,500 brands.
Finally, to learn if your company culture is hitting the mark, you’ll need to gather feedback frequently. With Achievers Listen, your people leaders will always have a real time stream of honest employee input at their fingertips, thanks to anonymous engagement surveys and other science-driven feedback channels. They’ll be able to quickly turn this data into actionable takeaways as well, with a robust array of reporting and action planning features.
See how the Achievers Experience Platform can turn organizational culture into a driver of business success at your company with a free demo.
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