I see everyday how a resume cannot predict the success in a certain role. The company culture, leadership style and on-boarding programmes have a tremendous impact if this person will sink or shine. The comparison of years of education and years of job experience proved to be the poorest predictors of success on the job. The result of poor culture fit can cost an organization between 50-60% of the person’s annual salary, according to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM).
Recruiting for a cultural fit is the obvious choice but this can easily backfire if not executed with care. HRDs need to ensure that the "cultural fit" does not provide a way-in for bias and discrimination. “Cultural fit is often used in a lazy way, by reference to some nebulous criteria about shared values, unsupported by evidence of what the culture is like in practice across any given organisation,” says Safia Boot, director of Respect At Work, who has worked as a mediator/investigator on many discrimination cases. “In the wrong, untrained hands ‘cultural fit’ is like a lethal weapon. Anyone who does not appear to ‘fit in’ based on superficial, implicit bias and stereotypical assumptions will be a risk.”
The right fit with the company culture has always been pivotal but even more so today.
First, culture at work has become multidimensional. Especially in the Asia-Pacific region, we mostly work in a multicultural setting within the organisational culture. All our recruiters at Timeo-Performance for instance are intercultural trained by our partner Akteos Asia. We see every day how this enables us to place the strongest candidate to thrive in that particular company culture and setup.
Second, studies show that millennials, who will represent half or more of the work force by 2050, prioritise a positive company culture when selecting future employers. The Deloitte Millennial Survey 2018 states that the #2 criteria for considering an employer is the company culture.
Your success heavily depends on landing a job with the best cultural fit. Start preparing by analysing your values, your motivation and what makes you happy. Sounds too abstract? Here are some questions to get you started.
I selected for you articles to help you gauge the company's culture during an interview, how to “job-craft” your role to fit your skills/personality best and lessons learned from a clash between "too loose and too tight cultures" during a merger.
Simple Questions that Will Help You Gauge an Organisation's Culture During an Interview
Organisational culture is the shared set of values and the socio-psychological environment that an organisation develops over the course of its existence. These tend to be unique to that particular company and comprise a large part of the entity’s work environment. When selecting a new job, it is necessary to ensure that the organisation’s values, attitudes, and work culture are consistent with your own to guarantee a healthy and rewarding work life. It would be prudent on your part, to conduct this crucial compatibility check, because no matter how great the position or salary, it is detrimental to your growth and progress to survive in a work culture that doesn’t help you thrive, rather leaves you feeling unfulfilled and stressed.
How to customize a job to fit your life
Engaged employees use more than the skills their job descriptions detail to get work done. They take the list of responsibilities that define their roles and filter those through their characters-enabling them to dig into that work and make it their own. Tweaking a role to suit your skills and personality, once you’ve lived in that job and you understand its nuances, is both a survival skill and a self-management initiative. Professors Jane Dutton and Amy Wrzesniewski coined the term “job crafting” to describe how employees use their personalities to reshape their roles and earn themselves a better fit in their work.
One Reason Mergers Fail: The Two Cultures Aren’t Compatible
Amazon and Whole Foods may have seen value in capitalizing on each other’s strengths, but they failed to investigate their cultural compatibility beforehand. They now stand on a fault line where tensions often erupt in mergers. This fault line is what we call tightness versus looseness. When tight and loose cultures merge, there is a good chance that they will clash. Learn how to handle this productively and increase chances of achieving cultural harmony.
Bonus: Why being nice to your coworkers is good for business
Who do you want to be? It's a simple question, and whether you know it or not, you're answering it every day through your actions. This one question will define your professional success more than any other, because how you show up and treat people means everything. Either you lift people up by respecting them, making them feel valued, appreciated and heard, or you hold people down by making them feel small, insulted, disregarded or excluded. And who you choose to be means everything.
Leadership researcher Christine Porath shares in this science-backed talk, she shares surprising insights about the costs of rudeness and shows how little acts of respect can boost your professional success -- and your company's bottom line.
About Timeo-Performance
We were founded with a vision to improve the world of work for everyone
We are in the Skills Business!
Through recruitment, training and consulting, Timeo-Performance provides solutions for increased performance of companies, teams, and individuals. As our clients are in the center of global business and often serve the APAC region, our solutions need to be sustainable in a multicultural and remote context.
Our joint venture with Akteos, the European leader in intercultural training, and partnership with digital learning solutions provider CrossKnowledge have therefore been organic and logical additions to our service. Timeo-Performance has been helping companies in APAC increase business performance since 2008 with offices in Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong.
We love what we do, feel the Timeo-Performance experience!
As busy professionals, our schedules are often filled to the brim with meetings and tasks to complete. We can get so caught up with work that we might even forget our all-important lunch and power through dinner as well. Alas, we can only do so much given the 24 hours we have in a day. While time management is vital, being productive is another matter in its entirety.Enter time batching.
