What’s Your Work Culture?

In the past few decades, workplace culture has gained enormous amounts of attention, as it is often a tell-tale sign of a successful professional environment. Some workplace cultures have proven more attractive to employees than others. Keep reading to evaluate how these match up to your own office and if you are operating in a healthy, happy environment!

• Clan Culture: Clan is a very family-like culture in that it supports the importance of communication, commitment, and development. A sense of loyalty flows throughout the entire employee team, led by CEOs who appear as mentor-like leader figures. As a giant group built on these pillars of caring teamwork, clan is absolutely a culture employees look for as they apply to new companies.
• Adhocracy Culture: Several young, technology-based companies tend to adhere to adhocracy culture. With a goal set based on innovation, entrepreneurial qualities, and a visionary mindset, employees in this type of environment are highly encouraged to pursue their own creativity in hopes of generating new, exciting products design to meet target market needs. In this type of culture, “pushing-the-envelope” and risk-taking is valued and seen as crucial to the success of the company.
• Market Culture: This type of culture differs in that it is highly focused around goal-meeting requirements, finishing projects, and getting things done at a quick, efficient place. Where leaders in clan cultures may be seen as mentor-like guides, leaders in this culture are seen as producers, driven, expectation-setting drivers, and potentially sometimes even as rivals. If you are motivated by concrete requirements for goal achievement, an interest in market share or profitability, this type of environment may help you maintain motivation and drive.
  • Goal Examples: Increasing market share, creating 10 new products by the end of the year, measuring client preferences and evaluations, expanding competition, or obtaining new partnerships.
• Hierarchy Culture: One that has not been proven as a “fan favorite” is hierarchy culture. Hierarchy does not allow for much flexibility, as it is built on rules, structure, formatting, organization, and is quite formal. Driven to meet long-term and generally stable goals, employees adhere to the path created to them by rules and obligations. There is not much room for creativity and innovation in this type of environment, and staying in line helps the organization maintain their track by minimizing “risk-taking”.

The cultures we have focused on above are some that college students may learn in their courses and have been historically recognized by firms and large corporations. However, as the idea of “workplace culture” is one that changes frequently and adapts to new, developing types of environments, there are several different “cultures” you may become familiar with. Some of these include: “team-first,” “elite,” “horizontal,” “conventional,” and “progressive.” If you are looking to learn more about these, check out Enplug Blog’s article here!

On Thursday . . . we will dive into some of the more detailed components that help create and develop workplace cultures!

Searching for a new position? Check out our open jobs list!

Stumbled into a conflict at work? Learn our top strategies to help you solve it here!