Morning, Friday, sorry we were a bit late today, I wanted to make sure this issue was as up to date as I could.
It’s Kerry from
Try Catch and this issue is the finale of Try Catch Essentials.
It’s the last edition of the Professional Cultures series and thus the last issue we’ll be joined by
Paul Musters,
Founder of Amsterdam-based Fortify.
One last time: the March topic of Try Catch Essentials is Professional Cultures.
Try Catch Essentials are:
- For HR leaders, recruiters, founders and hiring managers
- Handpicked essential reading on important topics in HR and Tech
- Sent to you in 4 easily-digestible issues per month
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To begin,
Because of what’s happening in the world around us: now is the most important, the most impactful, the most difficult, and the most meaningful time to establish what the core culture of a company is.
Let’s refresh our memory on how we defined Corporate Culture in the first issue of this series.
Corporate Culture:
A set of shared values, goals, attitudes and practices that characterize the organization of an organization. This includes generalized beliefs and behaviors, company-wide value systems, strategies, communication, policies, work environment, and attitude. Corporate culture involves the origin of myths, symbols, phrases, logos, slogans, products, design. If we have villages and kingdoms, the corporate culture is the interpretation of the holy book that guides it all. This is our ‘macro’ level.
While a list of industries have been monkey wrenched, others are able to trudge onwards, and a very few have been able to continue or even soar because of stay-at-home conditions.
In America, where businesses have been given pandemic distinctions of “essential” and “non-essential” - and a significant number of workers have been laid off due to lockdown measures - retailers like GameStop have
been in the news with reports of corporate greed to maximize profits from the crisis.
“How companies respond to that very question is going to define their brand for decades. If you rushed in and somebody got sick, you were that company. If you didn’t take care of your employees or stakeholders and put them first, you were that company.”
These are just a few examples among dozens of how a corporate culture is
undergoing scathing critique under a magnifying lens, during these trying times - and this works to
illuminate what a business’s purpose in the economy and what policies are in place to navigate these pandemic challenges.
Brewdog, the UK based brewery, has followed suit of
dozens of others doing good during the pandemic in
producing hand sanitizer to donate to those in need amidst the shortages, however the brand has faced online critique that the heavily branded sanitizer
serves more as a marketing function damping the goodwill optics of the brand.
Beer giant Heineken, for example, has been eerily silent, perhaps taking measures to decide what is the best application for their corporate culture knowing what’s at stake or perhaps working in silence to avoid calling attention to themselves just yet.
The reason that this is THE time to be considering corporate culture, is because this is arguably THE time all of us alive are going to remember.
Keeping with the times: there’s an
online database documenting which companies and celebrities have aided in the crisis.
We’re going to remember what we did, we’re going to remember what we didn’t do, and we’re going to remember who we worked for, and who worked for us - and these memories are going to shape our future.
Read on to discover Pauls’s advice of important questions all businesses should ask themselves during this formative period.
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