Culture. We all know that the culture of your business can have a huge impact on success. As they say, culture eats strategy for breakfast.

But what is culture, and why is it important?

Defining Your Culture

Culture is that indefinable thing that makes your company work. It’s the tacit order of an organisation. The attitudes and norms that govern what is acceptable, and what is definitely not. And for every business, that’s going to be something different.

For Google, culture is ‘Googleyness’. For Nike, it’s ‘talent’. And for MATE, it’s ‘mateship’.

Mateship means pretty much everything at MATE. For us, it means that every customer, every staff member and everyone we meet is treated like a friend.

It’s like this. Imagine you’re in the pub. The footy is on the TV and your boys have just scored a try in extra time to win the premiership. The place erupts. Strangers are throwing arms around strangers. Beer’s being slopped on the floor and on each other. But no one cares.

That’s mateship.

And while your culture will be entirely different than ours – it should be entirely you.

Embracing Your Culture

Having a great culture needs to be natural. But you also need to put in the work to support it. For us, this means having strong company values in place and hiring the right people that fit and feel comfortable in our company. It means that we don’t always hire the most qualified. In fact, sometimes we hire people that may not seem like the right choice from the outside, but they are someone who shares our mission and our goals.

It also means that we spend time and resources in training our team and giving them the opportunity to embrace and guide their own future within the company. And, we always say, the perks don’t hurt! For us this means a complete gym set up and shared staff lunch prepared by our Aunty, for example. What you choose to guide the culture at your company will be different than what we do. But, at the end of the day, every company needs to build a culture that creates a comfortable and productive (and we think, fun!) working environment for their team.

Culture Matters

Culture can sometimes sound like a bunch of fluffy nonsense. And when you’re in the business of servicing your customers or clients, it can often get stuck on the back shelf. But culture matters.

Increases productivity.

Happy employees are more productive and perform better. When your employees are more productive and their performance is at its peak, your business is going to excel. Importantly, your staff will also feel good because they’re doing good.

Great for recruitment.

Culture is also an excellent recruiting tool. The better your culture, the more people want to come work for you and the easier it will be for you to retain quality staff. It works the opposite way as well. Having poor culture, or hiring people with a poor cultural fit, can lead turnover that can cost your organisation 50-60% of the person’s annual salary.

Drives innovation.

A strong culture that creates an environment where employees are satisfied and happy drives innovation. Happy employees feel confident to move outside of their comfort zones. They feel supported and valued and so are willing to challenge themselves with new innovations that could benefit your business as a whole.

Measuring Culture Performance

As one of your most important business assets, it’s important to measure your culture performance. You can do this via HR reports, online tools and employee surveys. But one of your best performance measures is simply staff turnover.

At MATE we’ve been so fortunate to have had some incredible successes. We know that comes down to our amazing team and our strong company culture of mateship. And we know we’re doing something right because we have zero staff turnover. That’s something we’re pretty proud of.

Takeaway

Not every company is going to be able to create a culture of Googlyness, and that’s OK. Every organisation is unique, and every organisation will have a culture particular to them. But the benefits of a strong organisational culture are clear. And once you have that in place, you’ll find you’ve built employee and customer loyalty, and long-term success.