How to create a valued company culture

How to create a valued company culture!
A company’s culture reflects its overall personality and work environment. The key factors that define it are a company’s mission, values, ethics, expectations, and goals. For example, some companies might be more formal in their management style, with a conservative culture that reflects rules and regulations. Other companies might have a more informal management style, with a more dynamic, team-based culture. It’s not about what you get from the company you work for, but what you contribute to the company in terms of your own values, ethics, expectations, and goals. For companies that are coding a brighter future, the culture might include things like their collaboration approach; workplace flexibility; regular, paid volunteer hours; sabbaticals; and giving back to shared causes. These companies place great value on their employees to foster and inspire them to build, support, and continue their mission. In return, their employees feel a greater sense of fulfillment, commitment, and loyalty by working for a company who shares in their principles and beliefs.

Enabling teams to share and giving of themselves feels good

We spoke to one of our clients, Leon Miller-Out – Co-founder and CTO at Singlebrook, about what company culture means to him. “The core values of our company are in Craftsmanship, Openness, Delight, and Empathy, which is the acronym CODE, and our motto is “code with love.”
  • Craftsmanship is our focus. We often work with the software that we write for years after we originally wrote it, so building maintainable software is important to us. We also inherit software and help it to become more maintainable over time.
  • Openness means we’re transparent in how we speak with our colleagues and customers. We provide a lot of information about what we’re doing so that our customers are well informed and can collaborate in the development process.
    Delight is self-explanatory. We want our employees to find joy in the work that we do, and we want our customers to find joy in the software that we build for them.
  • Empathy is important because we work collaboratively. Developing software is very much about relationships between the people who are building the software and the developers and users of the software. It’s important for us to see other people’s points of view. We actually screen for empathy when we hire new people. It’s not easy to screen for, but we have an empathy test that has been pretty helpful.
Finding CODE characteristics in candidates is key regarding who is hired because it tells us that they align with our core values. In our business, we’ve learned that it doesn’t matter whether somebody is really good at doing the technical side if they’re unable to work well with other people. Unhealthy relationships within the team can be extremely detrimental, especially when you consider that all of our developers work directly with our customers. We don’t have a layer of management in between, so we all need to be strong and diplomatic communicators.

Final thoughts

It’s Monday morning. You wake up, get dressed, go to work, do your job, go home, have dinner, and go to bed. You repeat the same routine day after day just to collect a paycheck. Sound familiar? When you discover a company that shares in and supports your same values, going to work every day takes on a whole new meaning. You are motivated to do your best work for a company that enables you to work how you work best, fosters team collaboration and open communication, and promotes empathy by encouraging you to expand your own perspectives. By connecting with clients who need your technical expertise and knowing that your programming solutions will help others, you are inspired and energized to face each day.
If you’d like some help in finding your dream job, get in touch with us today. This article was brought to you by the technical recruiting team at Source Coders.