How our Culture is Different

Today I took six of our new hires out to lunch. I try to take new employees out to lunch within their first month of starting and I also do a monthly cross-functional lunch with team members I don’t work with on a regular basis. The goal with the lunch is for people to get to know each other in a more casual setting outside the office. At lunch I do two simple conversation starters: tell us about your background and how is our corporate culture different from your previous company.

Here are a few of today’s responses to the question of how our culture is different:

• Training was more comprehensive and hands-on
• The other sales team members genuinely want to help each other and aren’t looking to split commissions for their help
• There’s not as much pressure and craziness to get new product features out the door
• People genuinely love coming to work
• Co-workers hang out with each other after work

This question about corporate culture is important because often times people don’t think about their corporate culture consciously, but rather they think of what they like and don’t like about their company. Talking about corporate culture, and using those two words, makes it more meaningful and easier to stress how critical it is to everything we do.

What else? How is your corporate culture different from other places you’ve worked?