Hacking culture fit at the workplace

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Culture fit and diverse talent. Fundamentally, these two concepts are symbiotic — meaning, they are not mutually exclusive. But what has been happening for a while is, on the path of establishing an enduring company culture and an employee profile with a set of competencies and skills, organizations have compromised the diversity at the workplace.

 

“A diverse mix of voices leads to better discussions, decisions, and outcomes for everyone.”

-Sundar Pichai, CEO, Google

 

Mind that I am here not only talking about diversity in terms of gender, race, religion, generations and so on, but also in terms of academic backgrounds and previous working experiences. One implies not only diversity but also inclusion, the other implies valuable cross-sectoral perspective.

 

Very recently at LinkedIn’s Talent Connect 2016, the HR responsibles of Pandora Media talked about replacing the term “Culture Fit”, which is a term that potentially excludes great talent, for “Culture Add”, which allows more diversity to the workplace, yet with the same amount of quality on the workforce.

 

Today, it is very important to have a more flexible work environment and to be more flexible ourselves in terms of job allocation and career planning, because a lot of us aim to work with different functions from what we’ve studied. With new technological alternatives coming up, our academic formation has been each day deviating from the traditional protocol.

 

In today’s scenario we have lawyers working with marketing, we have economists working with HR, we have accountants leaving the corporate field to become cooking chefs. That brings both more possibility for us as professionals, and more diversity to the workplace.

 

So when an organization starts recruiting from the “Culture Add” perspective, it also starts giving more value to the unique and special aspects an employee can bring to the workplace beyond a degree, and effectively what the workplace can gain from these.

 

At the same time, when we talk about diverse work environments it is also important to talk about how inclusive they are. A great example of inclusiveness is Google’s established practices of empowering their employees to address unconscious bias at work, creating communities and networks for their minorities and ensuring equity in their processes.

 

These are definitely important while shaping a global and contemporary organization that respects each professional, their dreams and ambitions – and knows how to utilize them for the organization’s benefit.

 

Hacking the “Culture Fit” aspect, means also being ready to embrace whatever is different and learn from it – and become globalized in all perspectives. That is definitely what we millennials look for in a place to work.

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