Culture, culture or culture - but does it fit?

We are very proud to see our workforce development flourishing recently. Since start of 2021, many new people have joined DieProduktmacher. To be exact, it was 20 great new proactive doers. And as you probably already know, we value people and culture very high here at DPM. Thus, for a long time the cultural fit has been a just as important part of our hiring process as the technical fit.

But what is a Cultural Fit?

A cultural fit is a step in the hiring process that every company undergoes at one point, either deliberately or not. This depends largely of the setting, the definition of company culture. Most often the culture lived by employees of a company is just that, it is lived.

Frequently is not defined in any way, at least not on paper. How people interact in lunch breaks, in after work events or generally in company related social events is pretty distinct for the respective business. These interactions form over time and change along with employee fluctuation, employees values and support among themselves and for their employer.

A first step to a deliberate cultural fit along the hiring process would be defining your company culture. That way it allows you to pinpoint what your companies values and goals are and where you maybe want to evolve to. A good way of defining these crucial topics would be to do a workshop with all levels of employees.

Once company culture is defined, this information can be used in the hiring process. Now is pretty straightforward to develop a list of “No-Gos” for your company: personality and work ethic traits that you don’t work for your business. With this list, applications can be filtered initially to reduce a waste of time and effort on both sides. In this step, motivational letters can be a great tool for assessment.

Of course every business has to decide with how much importance they want to handle this topic while hiring new people.

Cultural fit can be used not only for thinning out the amount of applications, it can also be used to solidify the fit of a potential employee in the process of hiring. A catalogue of questions, aligned with the company culture, can be consulted during an interview to find out more about the persons beliefs and work ideas. Also keep in mind, that a persons skillset is pretty easy to evolve. Though it is pretty hard, if not impossible in some cases, to align personal beliefs and values to fit your culture, if they are fundamentally different from the start.

Why is this so important?

The last two years have shown in particular how fundamentally important it is for companies to have a functioning and motivating culture. It is not only about having free drinks in the office or offering employees christmas pay check bonuses. It is more about growing a happy and supportive atmosphere among your workforce that motivates people to get up in the morning without hating the job they do. People will happily go the extra mile to satisfy every customers need, even when they’re technically not obligated to.

Investing in good company culture is not only important for personal fulfilment, happiness and loyalty, it will ultimately also be beneficial for the financial and business side, since, as we all know, only really happy employees are productive employees.

How we do it at DPM

Here at DPM we always had a pretty modern and human-focused culture with flat hierarchies and the obligatory free mate drinks. We recently took our time to define our company values. You can take a look at them on our about page.

So for cultural fits we like to meet our new potential team members in one of our favourite coffee shops around the city. This way the unnecessary pressure of this interview situation is reduced a lot. People can enjoy their time talking and being more like they really are. We also work with a catalogue of questions aligned to our company values. Although we select some questions for each applicant individually, according to our first perception through the documents we received from them. And then we can just drop in some of these questions during some small talk or other conversations over the nice cup of coffee we’re having.

If both sides feel comfortable after the cultural fit, the process would continue with a technical fit, where we go more into the details about skills and work projects.

Did you know? We are nominated for the Best Workplace Award 2022!

We are among the top 10 small and medium-sized “workplaces with a feel-good atmosphere” according to a voting done by kununu and iba this year. We look forward to the awards ceremony on 27.10.2022 in Cologne.

About the award: The Best Workplace Award honours companies that offer a genuine feel-good atmosphere. The award is presented by kununu, the leading online platform for employer ratings in German-speaking countries, and the Industry Association for Offices and the Working World (IBA).