Building a healthy corporate culture

Milan Vrekic, TitanFile Inc., @truejebus, Halifax, NS, CYBF entrepreneur

If the form of a company (corporation, sole proprietorship, partnership…) is the body of a company and the managing board is its brain, than corporate culture can be considered its soul.

Corporate culture includes values, beliefs, taboos, symbols, rituals and myths and each of these evolve as the company develops over time. You can say that corporate culture is like a culture of a country or ethnicity, albeit on a much smaller scale. Simply put, corporate culture is the sum of all things we encourage and discourage in our company. What works for one company does not necessarily work for another.

Each company must develop its own corporate culture over time. To get started with defining your own company’s corporate culture, write down what are positive and negative cultural aspects you encountered in the past workplaces. Each experience we had can teach us a bit about what we do or don’t want to see in our own company.