Culture Book
A culture book is a valuable HR tool that provides invaluable support for employer branding, recruitment, and new employee onboarding. Learn how to create a valuable organisational culture book, what to pay attention to during its development, and discover examples of culture books that have made a significant impact.
Table of Contents:
- What is a culture book?
- What should be included in an organisational culture book?
- How to create a culture book in your organisation?
- What should you pay attention to when creating a culture book?
- Examples of culture books that resonated widely
What is a culture book?
A culture book is a document that presents the values, beliefs, and norms important to an organisation. It can be used as a tool to help new employees understand their workplace culture, and existing employees to stay aligned with the company's values. It also holds value for key contractors and entities performing outsourced work for the company.
By clearly defining the organisational culture, a culture book can help employees better understand each other and collaborate more effectively. If the document's content reflects reality and is not just a collection of marketing slogans, it becomes a valuable tool for companies employing more than a few people. By articulating the organisational culture clearly, it helps improve communication, foster collaboration, and build a stronger sense of community.
A clear exposition of the company's values also ensures that its employees know which standards they should strive for. By following the norms recorded in the organisational culture book, employees gain a sense of purpose in their actions. These actions begin to serve not only the performance of daily duties but also the building of a larger project. This, in turn, helps in engaging with the company's development and experiencing greater job satisfaction.
A culture book is also becoming an increasingly important employer branding tool. By gaining insight into the organisational culture, potential employees learn whether their career vision aligns with the company's goals. They also have the opportunity to build a picture of daily work and the requirements for employees, which helps them decide whether to participate in recruitment. From the company's perspective, this reduces employee turnover and ensures that new hires are not surprised by the prevailing rules.
What should be included in an organisational culture book?
A culture book should describe the organisation's principles, values, and vision. These ideas can be reflected in various forms of information: textual, graphic, or even numerical. The essential elements of a culture book therefore include:
- company history,
- staff structure,
- statistical data,
- organisational values,
- long-term goals,
- work standards,
- business processes,
- recruitment and onboarding principles,
- career development paths within the organisational structure.
The above list is by no means exhaustive. While it might sound like an unnecessary tautology, the content and nature of an organisational culture book largely depend on the organisational culture itself. A culture book for a dynamic company that values individualism and the free spirit of its employees will contain different elements than a collection of values and principles for an organisation based on a formalised structure and collective processes.
How to create a culture book in your organisation?
A culture book should not be a loose collection of items ticked off a standard list, but rather a compilation of information, data, texts, essays, and photos that form a cohesive narrative about the company. It's worth involving not only HR department employees in its creation. Even if the contribution isn't direct, company-wide surveys and individual interviews can provide valuable perspectives.
The process of creating a culture book can look like this:
- Defining the objectives that the created document is intended to achieve.
- Determining the image to be presented.
- Gathering information that will confirm, enrich, or change previous assumptions.
- Choosing the form and structure in which the company's story will be embedded.
- Developing attractive textual and graphic content.
- Compiling the collected material and giving the book its final shape.
- Updating the culture book with the natural evolution of the organisation.
What should you pay attention to when creating a culture book?
When creating a culture book, you should consider what the planned document is meant to achieve. Is its main goal to promote an already established company culture among potential employees? Or has the organisation only grown in recent years, and the values guiding daily work are just emerging, so the main goal will be to systematise them? A culture book, even in its basic form, can fulfil both these tasks, but adopting certain priorities makes it easier to define the overall picture of the culture book.
When gathering materials and developing content, it's worth remembering that a culture book serves a practical function. It's not another PR accolade for the company or a collection of nice words. It should therefore contain reliable information about the organisation's processes, structure, and culture. An attractive form that creates a cohesive story facilitates identification with the organisation, but only if it doesn't consist of empty words and stock images.
Finally, it's worth emphasising that, just as in the traditional sense of the word, organisational culture is not a static and unchanging entity. Although the most important values are usually universal, every enterprise undergoes changes. Therefore, a culture book should be refreshed every few years to reflect the current spirit of the company.
Examples of famous culture books
Although a culture book rarely gains interest from anyone other than current and potential employees, there are examples of company manuals that have achieved wider recognition. While the Netflix organisational culture book can be seen as standard interest in one of the world's most recognisable tech companies, several others garnered attention for purely substantive reasons. What made them stand out?
Zappos' culture book doesn't contain many elements characteristic of this type of document, but it stands out for one reason – it almost entirely gives a voice to employees. Their enthusiastic and very natural statements, interspersed with series of photos, are placed in a graphically excellent book. Even if it doesn't guide a new employee step-by-step through organisational processes, it enthusiastically introduces them to the company's atmosphere.
The graphic design of Valve's New Employee Handbook also stands out. In terms of form and content, however, it is much more traditional. A significant player in the digital entertainment market, through a combination of images and text, skillfully introduces new employees to the world of daily work and gives them a picture of how the company operates. It is not an overly lengthy document, and since it reads like a good novel, reading it is more of an adventure than a chore.
The mentioned examples of culture books show how two different approaches can lead to the creation of an excellent organisational culture book that serves as a superb business card for the company in the eyes of future employees.
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