It's helpful to know what it's like to work somewhere before you actually do. How To Uncover Company ... [+]
How do you assess the culture of a company before you work there? – Health care director
This health care director is currently at a company where the promotion process is opaque and their manager is not very assertive. If they make a move, they would love more transparency and leadership support in their next workplace. But how can you really know a company’s culture before you actually work there?
Define What You Mean By ‘Culture’
Company culture means transparency and leadership support for this health care director, but you might prioritize different criteria – collegial support, overall team spirit, company mission. There are many factors that make up a company’s culture. Therefore, in order to uncover a company’s culture in a way that is useful to you, you’ll need to define what culture means to you. (Start with this list of 40 factors to help decide your next career move).
Then, you need to figure out how you’ll measure your most important criteria. For example, if transparency matters, do you mean pay transparency or transparency in company strategy, financial condition, management changes and/or something else? For leadership support, do you mean visibility opportunities with senior executives, organized management on a day-to-day basis, consistent adoption of employee suggestions and/or something else? If you link a company’s culture to its mission, which missions do you find purposeful?
Tap Multiple Sources For Information
During the hiring process, you’ll have a chance to ask questions, so your interviewers comprise one source of information for uncovering company culture. That said, you’re still selling yourself during interviews, so most of your questions should focus on the nature of the job and how you can best contribute. When you do ask about company culture, you can’t probe and risk sounding argumentative. Until you’re hired, you need to always appear enthusiastic about joining.
Try to find people outside of the hiring process, and ideally friendly to you, so you can speak candidly. Talking to people who have already left the company may uncover even more information – just remember to take negative complaints with a healthy dose of skepticism since these are ex-employees after all. Take into account what the person’s role was within the company so you can gauge how relevant their insights are to where you will be staffed. Also, try to get some context into why they left so you can assess how objective they are.
Finally, tap into published sources, such as Glassdoor or media coverage. Look at company rankings, such as Best Places To Work, where articles might go into detail about what different work environments are like. Your alma mater, especially if you went to a business school, might curate information on different employers.
Don’t Forget That You Affect The Culture
Whatever you uncover about a company culture, remember that you affect the culture once you join. If you join in a management role, you can change the culture for your immediate team. Even as an individual contributor, you influence culture in the way you collaborate with colleagues, how you communicate with senior leaders and by getting involved in firmwide initiatives.
As you dig into a company’s culture, you’ll inevitably hear critical feedback. Don’t be too quick to dismiss a prospective job (the latest job trends data shows a cooling market!). If you hear mixed reviews on culture, remember that you may be able to find a supportive tribe once you get there, or your immediate department might not suffer the same drawbacks as elsewhere in the company, or you can try to effect a change from the inside.
