<aside> 👉 Culture is one of the best things about Beauhurst. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what makes our culture great and how we can guide it in the right direction. This page is designed to help you think about culture and to give you a really good sense of what the culture at Beauhurst is like. If you want to skip to the bit where we talk about what it’s like working here, please go right ahead (and we’ll try not to be offended!).
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${\color{4b4897}\LARGE\textsf{Culture is hard to talk about: an introduction}}$
Everyone knows company culture is important. You might know this instinctively, you might have read about it, or you might have experienced or know someone who’s experienced a particularly good or bad culture.
But for something that’s spoken about so much, it’s surprising how bad we are at actually talking about it, let alone defining it!
We find it’s rare for people describing the type of culture they’re looking for to move beyond vague-sounding terms like “fun”, “friendly”, and “great”. And—when pushed—we realised lots of people seem to think of culture as mostly just a combination of the social events and benefits that a company provides.
We think that this is a bit limited. It’s not wrong, but it misses out on a whole load of valuable bits.
It’s said that “culture eats strategy for breakfast” – and we agree!
We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this and discussing it within Beauhurst and with lots of people outside Beauhurst. We think it’s important for you to be able to understand what culture means to us – then hopefully you can work out if you think similarly!
So let’s start from the beginning 👇
<aside> 👉 (Psst – if you want to skip to the bit further down where we talk about what it’s like working here, please go right ahead!)
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${\color{4b4897}\LARGE\textsf{What do we think culture is?}}$
We see culture as the result of everything everyone in the company does—how we interact with others, how we approach our work, and how we behave when no one is watching. The way we do these things in an organisation also tend to repeat and become common—people approach others, problems, or their work in a similar way. All of this makes up culture.
We think all of these actions and common behaviours are a reflection of the mindset and values that each person brings with them into the organisation, and the influence they have on others around the business.
Or to put it into a flow chart, it looks something like this:
<aside> ❓ Why talk about it like this? We think it’s helpful to think about culture like this because it shows how organically it comes about. Everyone, however junior or senior, new or old, can influence the culture! And it also goes a long way in highlighting how companies can so often get it wrong.
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${\color{4b4897}\LARGE\textsf{What do we think organisations get wrong about culture?}}$
When we first set out trying to define our culture, we looked for examples of what other companies had done. And boy were there a lot of examples of what not to do. Here’s a (very non-exhaustive) list of things that we realised we wanted to avoid: