What is corporate culture?

An excellent corporate culture is incredibly important when it comes to managing and developing the characteristics necessary for business success. Having a recognised and well-developed culture can be a major asset for your organisation that you should not neglect, as it generally delivers greater individual involvement and commitment from your employees.

When a company has a bad culture, you get a lot of employees, from the rank and file to leadership and upper management, doing their best impression of a pit of snakes. Everyone’s a mercenary, doing just enough to cover themselves, subconsciously marching to the toxic mantra: “Take credit, apportion blame.” When a company has a best-in-class corporate culture, and it’s truly embraced across a business, the result is that the most entry-level employee gives the same enthusiasm and commitment to their role as the founder does to theirs. Every member of the team is engaged.

How do you define corporate culture?

The term “corporate culture” first appeared in the 1920s when British journalist Arthur Millspaugh popularised the concept in his book, Your Company’s Way of Life. Although the definition of “corporate culture” remains somewhat unclear today, most people agree on its basic principles: it is a shared set of values, actions, goals, attitudes, and behaviours that constitute an organisation.

A company’s culture is shaped, among other things, by the philosophy, beliefs and management that a company, together with its employees and leaders, puts in place or strives to achieve. It is therefore entirely up to each organisation to determine how it wishes to create its own corporate culture and identity, which will characterise it and make it unique.

Defining and creating a strong and positive corporate culture can be difficult, and so too can implementing it across different teams of employees. This organisational concept refers to the way employees think, act, and feel as members of a collective unit, i.e. the company. In other words, they are complex social systems that develop over time based on the leadership, management, and contribution of employees. However, a strong corporate culture generally leads to increased productivity and commitment by motivating individual employee involvement, both in their own tasks, and in working towards the success of the company.

The different types of corporate culture

This shared set of values, objectives, attitudes, and behaviours differs from one company to another depending on the history of the business, its evolution, its dress code, its management, and of course, its working methods, to name but a few factors. The country where the company is located is another factor, with its own customs and relationship to work, the business sector it’s involved in and the associated industry norms, and its corporate structure and size can also shape a company culture.

On the last point, consider the difference in cultures between a business with a flat organisational structure with minimum hierarchy, against a more traditional, multidivisional structure. While obviously the size of the business, and the diversity in their offerings will greatly affect what structures companies can adopt, it’s clear that this will have an enormous impact not only on what corporate culture will prevail, but how universally it will be adopted by the total workforce. Cultural models are therefore as numerous and varied as companies are.

Globalisation and transnationalism leads to homogenous corporate cultures

As global business becomes more commonplace, cultures also tend to become more homogeneous, as companies adopt and adapt to the attitudes and behaviours of others. Globalisation has made it easier for companies with similar cultures to collaborate on development plans, further increasing global homogeneity.

Whatever the corporate culture, it needs to be learned and accepted by all to make a tangible impact on productivity, especially by new employees. After the recruitment phase, gamification can be used as part of the onboarding process to help new recruits get to know their team, bond with their colleagues, learn about the company’s practices, culture, and values, and integrate more quickly.

How can a company’s culture help to create a sense of belonging?

A common purpose can help create a sense of belonging for employees in an organisation that has positive leadership. A strong sense of belonging to the company often comes from providing employees with opportunities to succeed and have fun at work. When defining a corporate culture for an organisation, it is important that employees take pride in their work and their workplace.

The use of gamification is one of the best ways to foster strong social bonds among teams, and unite employees in a sense of belonging, both to the company, and to its culture. The relationships that colleagues build with each other through playful, gamified activities and experiences, such as escape rooms or other extra-curricular activities, can help the company achieve better results through teamwork and better communication. Playing together gives colleagues the opportunity to get together around activities, and promotes a positive company culture and sense of community.

How gamification plays its part

Before we continue, let’s take a second to define gamification. Gamification is the application of game mechanics to everyday, non-gaming contexts to improve user engagement. Think about interactive content provided to you by retailers where you receive promotional codes or discounts. Think about every social media quiz you’ve played through. Think about interactive assessments you’ve participated in when applying for jobs, or even as part of onboarding procedures for places you’ve worked. These are all examples of gamification – game elements carefully structured through content to deliver you, the user, to a desired action or outcome.

Gamification can be applied to any business function, and any aspect of the workplace across sectors, and defining and implementing a company culture is no exception.

Gamification in practice for implementing a company culture

The first thing you need to ask yourself is, does my company actually have a culture? It will do, every place has a culture, it’s just a question of if the culture your company has is a culture it has by your design, and if it’s a culture your company necessarily wants?

A first step would be to seek feedback from your existing pool of employees. You could create a customised Survey on the Drimify games creation platform to gather feedback from them. You could ask them questions about what they perceive the current company culture to be, and you can correlate their answers to see what the picture looks like. If you’re happy with it, but it’s not something you’ve necessarily achieved by design, you then need to consider how you can continue it, and allow it to exist and survive through periods of staff turnover.

However, let’s assume the worst-case scenario: let’s say you implemented a company culture years before, and even had a set of company values as the tenets of this culture. Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, were you excited when you set down those 10 values back in the day, you felt like God himself handing down the 10 commandments to Moses. “Things are gonna change around here,” you said. “These are gonna do some good.” But here we are, you’ve sent out a Survey, one of the questions of which asked your employees to name as many of the 10 values as they could, and damn, did those results disappoint. What went wrong?

Gamification is active and participatory, and can keep you accountable for your company culture long-term

You can’t just set down a corporate culture and trust in the power of your words to keep the ship steady. You need to reinforce it, lead by example, and create a regular dialogue with your people.

By creating gamified communications as part of your human resources approach (HR), be they Quizzes, Surveys, or longer-form playable experiences that reinforce the desired culture through scenarios and video content, sent regularly to your staff, you can not only reinforce the culture, but also solicit feedback, and even implement change. Look at how what’s socially acceptable can pull complete U-turns in the space of 10, even 20 years. It will be necessary to adapt your corporate culture to the broader culture of what’s socially acceptable and important to your people over time.

As much as gamified content can influence and dictate a corporate culture, by using it year-round, you can take feedback from your employees, and reflect the necessary changes to keep your culture from becoming outdated, so it stays relevant and attractive. A strong corporate culture, that management lives by and rewards people for living up to, instead of just paying lip service to, will be far more likely to drive individual involvement, and go further in attracting new talent whose values align with those of the company.

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