Company Culture

Transcript

Companies with lots of employees are typically pretty proud of the environment that they've created for those employees. Company culture is a really big buzzword these days. So a little bit nebulous and hard to define, but what it essentially is referring to is how a company wants their work environment to feel. Sometimes that means that they have working lunches on Tuesdays. It might mean that their office is dog friendly. It might mean that for your lunch break, you can take a bicycle ride and use the shower in the office bathroom. There are lots of things that it could mean.

Some of the things that company culture refers to are unwritten. One of those examples is alcohol. There are some companies that will actually have beer or wine in the kitchen, and you're welcome to have it within certain parameters. There are other things like how flexible you can be with when you show up and when you clock out and how long your lunch break is. All of these nebulous aspects of a company's culture are very hard to control or define when you're working from home.

So, for example, if you are coming from a company that was very cool about "you can show up at nine o'clock, 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock, we don't care as long as you get your work done," that may or may not translate well into a work from home option. Or if, at one of my previous employers, we had a time every day that we called beer thirty and that meant that starting at four thirty, the fridge is open and it's beer thirty. You can drink a beer and be on the clock and that's totally cool. Again, that may or may not apply when you're working from home.

I think it's really important if you have an employer to understand what their expectation is of you when you're on the clock, even though you're at home. Some of them might not care at all. Some might have very strict ideas of what they're expecting of you. So if you possibly can, get that expectation set ahead of time.

If you're self-employed, this actually applies to you even more because you who are working for yourself are also the employer. That means that you have to set your own standard for your own behavior. So for me, for example, I've decided that I don't have beer thirty. I only drink alcohol for the most part after I'm done with work, when I clock out and then I say work is over, then I'll have some wine. That's just what I've decided for me. And I'm not saying anybody else should do that, but I am saying that as a self-employed person, you'll start to get a sense of can I handle this? Can I not handle this? What is the culture? Think of yourself as a company. What is the culture you would want if there were other people working there with you?

So for me, beer thirty is fine. That's not my point. I'm not picking on that. I think that's great for some people, but I can't focus on work when I'm drinking beer. It just doesn't work. My attention goes, so I've decided that for me, when I'm doing important work, I stop working at a particular point in time, and then I might have a drink, but I can't let drinking happen before the day is over because I'm going to miss deadlines. Because I just get so relaxed, then I end up saying like "Oh, it's not a big deal. I'll do it tomorrow. Who cares?" Well, if it was really important to me earlier in the day that I finished this particular thing, then who cares? I care.

So I want to stay true to myself. I want to have a company culture where I'm focused on the things that I decided in the beginning of the day were important, and I follow through with them if at all possible at the end of the day. So whether you work for somebody else or work for yourself, there are some unquantifiable nuances to the way that you go throughout your workday. And you'll have to define those for yourself or get your employer to define those. And I highly recommend you do that ahead of time.