The notion of a culture fit is very subtle, but is on everyone’s minds when it comes to finding new specialists, recruiting candidates, and forming new teams. It’s not surprising that more and more managers not only focus on specialists’ hard skills, but also check whether their values and culture correspond to the company’s.
Serving as a synergy of values, beliefs, and behaviors, the cultural fit shows how a future specialist will fit into the tech team’s work. In your strategy of hiring programmers for startup companies and creating new teams, the focus on a cultural fit is a must.
Let’s see how cultural fit in the workplace shapes dynamics and successes of the team.
What Is Culture Fit, and How Does It Add to a Company’s Success?
Every company, from small startups to large corporations, has its values and mission. In all its activities, a tech company sticks to its culture and working style. A culture fit is that secret ingredient that allows one to identify whether a team works cohesively, goes in the right direction, and collaborates effectively. It has a say in shaping a team’s harmony and success.
Advantages of Hiring for Culture Fit and Tech Expertise
Long gone are the times when looking for a right specialist was only based on tech expertise. Focusing on a matching fit for your team brings you the following benefits:
- Shared values. When a team member has the same values as the company, it becomes easier to work on common goals. Besides feeling part of a bigger group, a specialist has more motivation to work.
- Working ethics. The cultural fit in the workplace involves attitudes towards performance and working environment. When team members have similar approaches, they support each other, work on common goals, and avoid misunderstandings.
- Effective collaboration. Culture fit plays one of the important roles in defining a team’s collaboration. If the team members “match”, their communication becomes smoother and easier.
- Employee retention. If companies think of hiring for culture fit, their teams are more likely to succeed, which creates a favorable working environment. As a result, specialists are satisfied and choose to stay in the company long-term.
- Reduced conflicts. Even if team members come with various backgrounds and from different countries, corporate culture helps them to understand each other, tolerate differences, and quickly adapt to any changes. Colleagues in such teams become more helpful than competing.
However, you’ll see the benefits if you continually maintain and contribute to the company’s culture. When the focus on cultural fit becomes a routine, it brings its fruits.
Making Cultural Fit Work on a Regular Basis
If you want to achieve successful collaboration and harmony in your tech team, you should foster a positive working environment and make ongoing efforts. Hiring for culture fit is not enough, as a company’s values and goals should be always updated and communicated to the team. Let’s take a look at some approaches that will help you prioritize the cultural fit approach:
- Reminding about core values. Remember your company’s core values during your meetings with specialists. Include the company’s goals into your team’s KPIs. Ensure the development plan of your team goes hand in hand with long-term goals and strategy set by the company.
- Working culture during onboarding. You should talk about your values and behaviors during onboarding. It should be part of the onboarding training so that a new professional becomes well-placed in the team.
- Organizing social events. Team’s cooperation is one of the successful factors of a team’s performance and employees’ retention. Organizing team buildings, meetings, and celebrations will help you create a safe and a “family-like” environment.
- Regular syncs. Taking an active part in a specialist’s development, you can help to rectify any deviations in the overall goals. Besides, they improve the overall cooperation between team members and the management.
- Caring for diversity and inclusion. Promote diversity and inclusion in various corporate initiatives and events. This helps to create a safe place for everyone, leading to the team’s satisfaction.
Though cultural fit brings many benefits, the total focus on it may cause some challenges. It’s important to find a balance between both, catering for business needs and specialists’ motivation.
Challenges on a Way to a Team’s Harmony
Diversity in the team may be a good focus, only in cases when it doesn’t lead to standardization of all team members. Trying to make everyone the same, with the same aspirations, backgrounds, and focuses may lead to the lack of innovation and creativity. The same challenge comes with assembling teams with the same expertise and the set of skills.
Another challenge to address is group thinking. As soon as your team has a high cultural fit, they can start prioritizing conformity instead of critical thinking. This can impact their problem-solving and decision-making. As a result, the specialists become less adaptable and cope with various challenges less effectively.
Finally, in forming the harmony of your team, especially in a new environment of a startup company, it’s important to cherish the specialists’ differences. The tentative goal of making a team homogeneous will influence their ability to approach multifaceted challenges. It’s critical to preserve everyone’s views and opinions, which will further contribute to managing various questions from different perspectives.
Key Takeaways
In a quickly evolving technological landscape of tech companies, the focus on a cultural fit is something that becomes a must in the strategy of every start-up. However, it’s still important to keep the balance between the cultural fit and the gains that the diversity in the team can bring.
If the team prioritizes the core values, the working culture, and the diversity in the working environment, it will bring success in the overall activity of the organization. Some of the biggest benefits include seamless collaboration, collective sense of purpose, overall motivation and satisfaction of the team, and a safe environment that respects various backgrounds and views.
Balancing between the diversity and the cultural fit, a team will enjoy the power of creativity, adaptability, and resilience. It’s their mixture that brings us the synthesis of various perspectives and values, which in the long run leads the team to success and sustained excellence.