Like with a great pair of jeans, you’ll just know the right workplace culture fit when you feel it. Not too tight, not too loose, enough stretch, enough structure. You can rock it with sneakers or a tailored blazer. You just feel like the best version of yourself when you’ve got that fit.
It’s sometimes an unspoken vibe between you and your colleagues about how to approach a project, how to talk to and support each other, where to draw the line between being people and being professionals. Culture is more than just language and location. And as much as culture thrives when things are going great (think: afterwork drinks on the company tab or tree-canopy teambuilding), it really comes into play when things don’t go according to plan, when people need help, or when you need to tighten your belts to watch the bottom line.
Anyone who thought touchy-feely company culture was a nice to have would have been set straight during the Great Resignation of 2021, when record numbers of professionals left their jobs worldwide, having realised – through loss or existential grief or a great personal reckoning – that their lives were more important to them than a paycheck for a pointless job.
PwC’s 2022 Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey, which draws from more than 52 000 workers across 44 countries and territories, deals with these very issues, finding that the Great Resignation is in fact far from over. A fifth of workers surveyed plan to quit in 2022.
When asked about the most important factors when considering a change in work environment, 66% of respondents cited “I can truly be myself”. Freedom to be authentic trumps even flexibility, with it being more important to respondents than “I can choose when I work” (50%) and “I can choose where I work” (47%). Also high up on the list were “My team cares about my well-being” and “I can be creative/innovative in my job” both clocking in at 60%. As suspected, a fair paycheck came in top of the pops, at 71%.
But the PwC report issued a warning call: “Establishing an environment in which employees feel they can be their authentic selves calls for training leaders, eliminating cultural barriers and blind spots, and holding managers accountable for creating – and modelling – the organisation’s culture and behaviours.”
Especially in a place like South Africa, companies and their decision-makers need to be sensitive to employees’ diverse backgrounds and experiences. You can’t assume everyone enjoys a glass of bubbly, owns a car, has space at home for a quiet place to work, or knows never to warm up fish in the office microwave.
Working in a company whose culture is aligned or in harmony with yours (even if it’s not the same, exactly) means you can focus on what matters – your role, your projects, and, if you’re lucky, your growth. If you feel like you don’t click with your colleagues, you could be spending a lot of energy hiding your true personality, or feeling disregarded. Not a good look for inspiration and motivation.
Are you going to be one of the 20% changing jobs this year? Here are five questions to ask to figure out if you fit with a company’s culture when you’re looking around.
1. What do you want from your job?
Before you look into the affairs of your prospective employer, you need to quiz yourself honestly about your stage of life, needs and desires. Are you in a new city early on in your career, looking to find like-minded people to form a roller derby crew, or go cocktail tasting at the bar across the street? Maybe you’re a parent who needs colleagues who can understand the demands of this phase, with all its body fluids, doctor’s visits and school runs. Maybe, and this is just as legitimate, you just want the biggest paycheck you can possibly get, due to student debt or Black tax or being in the “sandwich generation”?
2. What does the company expect from you?
The other side of that coin is what will be expected from you. How do you know? See how the leadership talks about the company and its values. Do they walk the talk? Stalk them on LinkedIn and see what kind of content they share. You should 100% do some light Googling on them and their professional history, finding clues about how they might run the show and what’s important to them. See who else works at the company, and how long they’ve been there, and what kind of things they post about. If you are interviewing for a role, ask about the previous incumbent, how long they worked there and why/how they left. Inquire how often you get to check in with your line manager and leadership, and where they are based. The picture should start taking shape.
3. The great space-time continuum: where, how, and for how long, will you work?
Years of honing your “skip ad” reaction time on YouTube will tell you that the need for time management at work is still a biggie. Does the company have project managers and/or use software tools? Do you need to log hours? This conversation should also include the discussion about working hours, flexibility, and meeting etiquette. Cameras on or off? Can your cat be in frame (YES) and, if you need to be in the office IRL, do you have to be there all day? Do you want to be? Will you be asked to travel, and to where? Is the office in a cool part of town, near a shopping centre, near a highway or public transport? Is there parking? What is the coffee situation?!
With quiet quitting, burnout and presenteeism (being physically or virtually at work but mentally absent and unproductive due to illness, injury or stress) now everpresent buzzwords since the world changed in 2020, companies need to have clear policies and communication in place. As this excellent piece in FT.com puts it, “Zoom calls, email and Slack channels have facilitated [remote] work…but they have also made it harder to take sick days.”
Presenteeism in the wake of the pandemic now comes at a greater economic cost to our country’s GDP than absenteeism, according to professor Renata Schoeman, head of the MBA in Healthcare Leadership programme at Stellenbosch Business School. She says the cost of mental health-related presenteeism has been estimated at R96 500 per employee annually, totalling R235 billion or 4.2% of GDP, versus R14 000 per employee and R33 billion annually for absenteeism. A company’s approach to employee health is critical.
4. How do you like to communicate?
Pivot back to the fun stuff. Do you express yourself only in Schitt’s Creek memes, or prefer chatty phone calls over snappy DMs? Maybe you’re cool with clients who are partial to a 9pm WhatsApp convo – or maybe you’re practising setting those healthy boundaries. Maybe you just want to be left alone to do your thing and attend a meeting once a week. (If this describes you, you might want to turn your Slack notification sound to “hummus”.) What’s your vibe – and theirs? (And will it be cool to use “vibe” in a work email?) You need to be able to connect in ways that work for you and your potential team.
5. What does productivity look like?
With the shift to remote or hybrid work, companies have (hopefully) learned that sitting at your designated office desk for eight hours a day does not equal productive work. But it’s essential to define what productivity means to the company you’re checking out, and to you. Does it include having time to make things, time to meet with colleagues, time to read, time to think? Maybe you work best by buckling down to focus early in the morning before your chats fire up, need a midday promenade stroll to get juices flowing, or maybe you’re a burner of midnight oil. What results do you need to produce, and how will your success be measured – by yourself and the business?
Author Austin Kleon famously said, “Creative people need time to just sit around and do nothing”, in his book Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative. Will your role be a slow death by back-to-back Zoom meetings, or will you still have time to stare at a spot on the wall? And what about the future?
In her TED talk about beating back busyness, marketing strategist and business thinker Dorie Clark quotes a study of 10 000 senior leaders by the Management Research Group. When asked what was key to their organisation’s success, 97% said long-term strategic thinking. Yet in a separate study, 96% of leaders said they didn’t have time for strategic thinking. Would you?
Dorie also said (which you may have read in our IG post) that, as well as making sure you’re meeting the short-term needs of your job, you should also be spending time on new activities and opportunities to position yourself for longer-term success.
If this wish list seems long, good – it should be. Chances are you spend more waking hours with colleagues than with people you actually choose to spend time with. With any luck you can choose your work family, too. Your perfect culture “jeans” are out there, you just have to know what you’re looking for, and be willing to try on a few looks to find them.