Can new employees change a company’s culture? If so, how?
Salehi (n.d.) paraphrases what Simon Sinek says, the author of Start With Why: "Each hire you make changes the culture, which is why this is a critical part of the interview process, yet often gets overlooked." This means that if one wants a better culture, the new person needs to be the change agent. In some ways, this means each new hire averages what the culture's "grades" are. For example, if there are two employees who do a A grade work, but a new hire does B grade work, then the culture is now a 3.7 GPA. New hires, then, can change the culture. The B grade work, however, may not be because the new hire is a B level worker. There may be other reasons. For instance, Wittig (2012, p. 2) writes, "Defense mechanisms arise involuntarily in response to perceptions of danger and are adopted to alleviate anxiety." As much as new hires can change the culture, I also believe the way the current workers
…show more content…
Strebel (1996) states, "They must put themselves in their employees’ shoes to understand how change looks from that perspective and to examine the terms of the “personal compacts” between employees and the company." He continues and defines "personal compacts" as having three different parts: formal, psychological, and social (Strebel, 1996). First, formal compact means somewhere along the line of the job position itself: such as, 1) Do I know what I am doing? or 2) Do I know the criteria of whether I am performing well or not? At my workplace, my manager always incorporates how my personal growth and goals align with the new policies and organizational changes. While at first there is a small resistance, after understanding and tying the change and my goal together, I understand the whole picture; I accept and welcome them (as opposed to being against them because I did not understand why the changes were