So You’ve Identified Your Company Culture…What Now? (Bonus Article)
By Marina Mainescu, Wendy R. Weidenbaum, and Lois Hines
We recently released a two-part guide to identifying company culture in a virtual work environment (Part 1 and Part 2). In this guide, we talked about the difference between implicit and explicit culture cues and offered advice on how to identify and read these cues as a virtual employee.
If you’ve read our guide, and have done some thinking about your company’s culture, you may be wondering “what now?” As a new employee, once you have gotten your arms around your company’s true, functioning culture, what should you do? How do you take what you know and use it to start to adapt to and “fit in” with your company culture? Below, we’ve included a few quick suggestions to consider.
1. Ask for an onboarding plan and any other company documents that will help you get to know your new company. As we mentioned in Part 1 of our article on identifying company culture, companies may have less time and fewer resources to devote to onboarding new employees right now. Proactively asking for an onboarding plan and other helpful company documents will both help you get to know your new company and show your coworkers that you want to understand and fit in with the company’s culture.
2. Observe any dress code norms. Pay attention to what people at your company are wearing. Adhere to the norms they set, especially when you are working remotely and dress codes are more relaxed. People naturally feel closer to those who look like them, so dressing in line with your company’s norms will help you fit in.
3. Request and use company SWAG (“stuff we all get”). If your company gives notebooks, water bottles, clothing, or any other type of SWAG to its employees, get your hands on some and start using it. Using company SWAG sends a signal that you are bought into the company and its culture and makes you feel immediately more familiar to your coworkers.
4. Use the company’s lingo. As we discussed in Part 1 of our most recent article, many companies and teams have unique terms or phrases that they tend to use a lot. Note the new or interesting phrases you are hearing and begin to incorporate them into your own language when you are talking to coworkers or managers. Using company lingo is another way to show that you are bought into the company’s culture and make yourself feel familiar to your coworkers.
5. Ask for introductions and get to know people. In almost any environment, the best way to feel that you fit in is to know a lot of people. This is as true for a company as it is for a dinner party. Make efforts to get to know your coworkers. Start with your direct team, and then broaden your efforts to other functions. Try to meet key company influencers and cross-functional partners especially, as knowing these people will automatically raise your profile within the company and give you an opportunity to be useful to your teams later down the line. Usefulness is a powerful form of belonging.
6. Take what you’ve observed about your company’s power dynamics, participation norms, and team interactions, and apply it. This may seem obvious; however in Part 1 of our article, we spent some time talking through what all of these things say about a company’s culture. Now it’s time for you yourself to observe the invisible “rules” that you’ve uncovered. For example, if your company appears to keep junior people on all e-mail communications, don’t leave anyone off your own e-mails. Act in accordance with your company’s implicit culture cues, and you will fit in with the culture.
Starting a new job is always nerve-wracking, and working remotely has not made it easier. It’s both harder to identify company culture and harder to demonstrate your fit with that culture when you are a virtual employee. We hope that the above advice, as well as our initial article on identifying company culture, have offered a few practical suggestions on these topics that will make you feel better equipped to understand your company culture and become a carrier of that culture, even as you work remotely.