Hiring the right people for your business is one of the biggest challenges of running a successful company. All good businesses need to have the right people in the right roles, and not only that, but they need to ideally share a similar culture. Workplace culture is an important aspect of any team, affecting how likely a team is to achieve its goals and helping co-workers understand each other better.

For a business looking to improve results or take a new direction, changing culture can make a big difference. This doesn’t have to mean hiring a whole new workforce, but bringing in the right people in the right places can drastically change how your team operates. To do so, the hiring process needs to be very specific and ensure it finds candidates that are exactly the right fit.

Finding candidates that can change the culture of your business is never easy, but pre-employment skills testing can help. This form of testing is a useful way of determining the core values and skills of each candidate. It makes it much easier for the hiring manager to discover the best candidates and ensure that the ones they hire fit their requirements as closely as possible.

In this article, we’ll be explaining what workplace culture is and why it can be so important for achieving goals as a team. Additionally, we’ll look at the use of pre-employment skill testing and how it can be used to identify the right candidates for your business.

What is Workplace Culture?

The culture of a company is summed up by the values, traditions, beliefs, interactions, behaviors, and attitudes of the people that work there. All companies have a distinct culture which can be described as the personality and character of the team. Those that work in the company will be influenced by the culture just as they will also influence it themselves.

The right culture can help a business to achieve its goals, while the wrong one can lead to poor results. A positive workplace culture attracts talent, encourages engagement, improves happiness and satisfaction, and has an impact on performance.

Everything has an impact on the overall culture of a company. Leadership, management, workplace practices, rules, people, and other factors all have a substantial influence on culture. The most common error made by businesses is allowing their workplace culture to develop spontaneously without first articulating what they want it to be. In addition, many businesses are unsure of how to change an already developed workplace culture.

Positive workplace culture can have the following effects:

• Helps attract the right talent – With a good workplace culture, businesses have a much easier time attracting the right talent to work for them. People with in-demand talents and skills are drawn to businesses that provide a workplace culture with good communication, accountability, equity, and expression. This makes it much easier to hire quality individuals who will help maintain the culture and improve the quality of the business.
  
• Increases satisfaction and happiness – Ideally, workplace culture should help promote satisfaction and happiness from employees. Research has shown that workplace culture will have a significant impact on this, which in turn will affect the performance of staff as well as improve employee retention.
• Improves performance – With the right culture, employees can be more focused and motivated, and the above two points will lead to a team that is talented, happy, and motivated to succeed. Organizations with strong workplace cultures are more likely to outperform their competitors financially and can have greater success overall.

Setting or Changing Workplace Culture

For a lot of businesses, workplace culture develops naturally over time. It will often be affected by the core values of the company as well as the industry it operates and the kind of people it hires. Over time, a business may need to change its workplace culture if it wants to improve its chances of success. Alternatively, businesses may consider setting up a strong workplace culture while they’re still growing in order to increase the opportunities for long-term growth.

These are some of the best tips for changing and setting a successful workplace culture:

• Clearly define a set of core values and behaviors – Every company should clearly outline its values and behaviors for staff to understand. These values should be as easy to understand as possible and explained in simple language. People should be able to understand the company culture and expectations from its value. This means developing behavioral descriptors for each value and specifying how they apply to all levels of staff, from secretaries to middle managers and executives.
• Align the culture with business strategy and operations – Examine how the company’s purpose, vision, and values align with its HR operations, such as hiring, performance management, compensation, benefits, and talent advancement. Ideally, a business should think about how culture is built into the future by recruiting and talent management.
• Establish a link between culture and accountability – It’s often easy for companies to lose sight of their own values and ideals, especially in challenging times. Ensuring that no matter what, the company and people are accountable for their actions is important. Those values must always be upheld, and there should always be a link between the company culture and accountability.
• Align the company’s culture with its brand – Employees and the marketplace must be on board with the company’s culture. There’s now a growing relationship between HR and marketing in many businesses, with the culture of a business being equally important to consumers as to staff. Culture can have a big impact on how successful a brand is when done correctly.
• Hire the right staff – Of course, one of the best ways to establish a successful culture is through hiring people that fit with the values and ideals of the company. Businesses should try to ensure that any candidates they assess share similar values to the company, as these will be more likely to fit in and succeed.

How Pre-Employment Screening Can Help

Finding candidates that fit into the company culture is difficult, but pre-employment screening tests can help. When a company is looking to change or set its company culture, it needs to ensure that the people it hires fit the set values. To begin with, these values should be included when advertising the role. In addition, it’s important to discuss the values and overall culture during the interview. This will help ensure that the people applying for the job are more likely to be a good fit for the culture and not just the role itself.

A pre-employment screening test is a way of getting more in-depth information from a candidate than can be obtained simply through an interview. While interviews are useful, they can sometimes fail to reveal the values of the candidate. A pre-employment screening test can provide greater detail on the candidate, their values, and how they would fit within the team and its current culture. You can also learn more about how they might impact the current culture of the organization.