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Understanding the culture factor

Get to know your new company's mix before it turns you upside-down

By Alan R. Earls, Globe Correspondent, 8/22/04

It's the best job ever. The money is good and the benefits, great.

But a dream job can turn into a nightmare if you haven't checked out a company's culture before joining it, say career specialists.

Starting work in a new firm is like moving to a new country -- you may speak the language but the cultural nuances take more time to master, said Dan King, principal at Career Planning and Management Inc. in Boston.

''Culture is a mix of habits, norms, and behaviors that can only be learned by immersing yourself into it,'' he said. So new hires eager to make their mark, said King, should take time to understand the culture before plowing ahead.

As the labor market thaws, eager job hunters or those who have have just joined an organization need to recognize and understand the new rules of the game to succeed. For job seekers, it can be a matter of ''reading'' the company to see if the employer will be a good fit and to make a good impression in an interview. For those who have already been hired, mastering the corporate culture can be the key to on-the-job success and satisfaction.

New hire Bern Krafsig is trying to get a handle on his employer after making the leap from another industry. ''I've been pretty lucky in terms of joining companies whose cultures I've meshed with,'' said Krafsig, a software quality assurance engineer from Northborough. Now though, after several months of unemployment, he's in a ''90-day contract to hire'' spot at a new employer -- and he's a little worried about making the transition.

Krafsig said in the past he has worked for high-tech companies with very informal relationships among workers. Now he's on staff at a large and expanding food company. One of the cultural differences, he said, is that unlike the multiple interviews that preceded getting hired in high tech, ''in this case, it was one hour of interviewing and, bang, an offer,'' he said.

With so little exposure to the company, Krafsig said he felt he was to some extent ''going in blind.'' Now, a few weeks into his assignment, Krafsig said he is working hard to fit in and to avoid a reputation for ''aloofness or worse.''

Illustration/Jon C. Krause

He is also trying to learn about the organization by building relationships. ''I try to gently insinuate myself into chat going on,'' he said. In addition, he maintains a dish of salted peanuts ''as bait'' to draw people into his cubicle. Krafsig says building relationships is especially important for him because he must enforce software quality practices -- a job he admitted is not likely to endear him to some of his coworkers.

IT professional Kathy Bailey, a Virginia native who now resides in Whitinsville, recalled one of her first job switches, a move from a bank in her home state to what she describes as a highly hierarchical ''northern'' company, JP Morgan in Delaware.

''It was a huge culture change,'' she said. For example, she explained, ''I tended to wear bright colors but the men there only wore white shirts.''

To make the ''180-degree adjustment'' to her new region and firm, Bailey said she realized she would have to make some changes. She started by taking notes and trying to categorize and understand everything that was unfamiliar.

One thing she figured out fast was that JP Morgan was a big company with a very slow and deliberate approach to everything. Mired in an endless round of meetings at which people would argue back and forth about ''whether to call something a record or a transaction,'' Bailey recalled, ''I had to get over the notion that I was going to get something done.''

But rather than just getting frustrated, Bailey said she learned to operate like an old hand and, in the end, ''broke their record for contractor longevity,'' staying two years rather than the 18 months she had expected.

''In all jobs, there are two important considerations for the work: what gets done and how it gets done,'' said King of Career Planning and Management. To impact what work gets done, you rely on skills and experience. But how work gets done depends upon the network of relationships that exist, he said.

History matters, too. King said it is important to ask employees what happened at an organization before you came along. Who are the survivors, how has the company structure shifted over time?

King also recommends eyeing the demographics of the workforce since factors such as gender, age, and racial diversity or homogeneity will significantly affect culture. And social groups and networks within the organization can be determined by noting which people eat together.

Reading the official information about a company's culture and values that may appear on websites and in printed material is near the bottom of King's list. That, he said, will tell you ''how they want to be viewed'' but often there are large gaps between stated values and the real values that rule the organization.

Exploring that gap is one of the first things you should do in an interview, suggests Joanne Meehl, a principal of Meehl & Balzotti, a Hubbardston career consultant.

Mike Andrew, vice president for organizational consulting at Right Management Consulting in Boston, says new employees should harness all their powers of observation and intuition to understand the behavior they observe in terms of the real culture and real reward system of an organization -- not what it officially espouses.

Andrews had to make a major adjustment when he worked at a manufacturing firm several years ago where the official culture -- the one described in the brochures -- bore no resemblance to what the company was really like. ''It was high pressure and everyone yelled at everyone else all the time, including subordinates and colleagues -- but that was how things got done in that organization,'' he said.

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