Every small business has a corporate culture. Whether you’ve shaped yours deliberately or let it form on its own, the expectations and habits your team develops affect everything from productivity to turnover. For smaller teams, the stakes can feel especially high. There’s often very little margin to absorb bad hires or a string of departures.
But small businesses also have an advantage: Cultural changes don’t have to fight their way through layers of bureaucracy and multiple departments. This article covers what corporate culture actually means, the role of culture in business success, and practical steps to build a workplace where top talent wants to stay.
What is corporate culture?
Corporate culture is the personality of your company—the unwritten rules everyone follows. It includes things like how decisions get made, how people treat each other when something goes wrong and what people say about the business when leadership is out of earshot.
The term corporate culture can sound like it only applies to large corporations, but that’s not the case. Despite the name, corporate culture doesn’t require a company to be incorporated or publicly traded. Even a 5-person startup or a family-owned shop has a corporate culture because every business develops shared norms, values and behaviors that shape how work gets done. Sometimes, “organizational culture” is used to include nonbusiness entities.
For small businesses, corporate culture often grows from the founder’s priorities. That’s an advantage when those priorities are clear and a liability when they’re not.
