[MUSIC] If you believe, or if I've persuaded you that organizational culture is important, how do you find out about it? Well there's some pretty standard ways. You should look online, you should do your research, you should talk to your network, ask you mentor. If you get an on-site interview there's some questions that would be really great to ask. One of the things when you go on-site is to use all of your senses and all of your professional IQ. Seek out and talk to some of the low status or low power players in the organization because they'll know a lot about how the organization works. The person who arranges your trip is a good person to talk with. If you run into janitors, strike up a conversation, be friendly. There's some interesting questions to ask. How do you like it? Pretty standard question. Would you come here again? Would you like your sister to come to work here? If you can, ask people questions like this, what happens when people here make a mistake? That's really illuminating about a workplace culture pretty routinely, if you can find an appropriate time and place to work it in. Don't go in asking questions that might raise hackles. So, you don't want to ask any question that might fall under the category of so, are all the people here scum buckets? You really want to explore what have you learned while you're here. How have you grown, what kind of opportunities have you had, what kind of contributions have you had a chance to make? Let's hear what some of our experts have to say about how they find out about organizational culture. >> Well, it's a little bit different on the other side of where I am. [COUGH] Interviewing an organization, especially for a candidate, would be finding the compatibility of that person in the culture of the organization. The skill set is certainly very important, and the education and all the other things that are going on with that. But what I would be looking for in an organization would be to see how they compliment my style of doing business in an honest, open environment. Having teamwork that where everybody has an opinion and it counts. And they're contributing. Everybody's contributing because everybody's opportunity is to have an opinion. [COUGH] So in looking at that organization in an interviewing situation I think that you'd want to be sure that it is a good fit in relationship to what your goals are and what the organizational goals are so that they have some sort of compatibility there. In a realistic open conversation really, that seems to be key in an interview situation. >> What kind of culture you're comfortable working in, is as important as the values that you uphold and those that you want employer to uphold >> And you start observing this from the moment you make that first application. From your first interview, the first phone call, the first meeting. You can learn about culture by learning about what the company or organization does, read about it in the press, follow it on the Internet. If you have colleagues or friends who work there, ask them, what is it like to work here? It's as simple as that. And listen carefully to their conversation, to the words that they use when they talk about what is it like to work here? S you need to think about culture even before you accept the job and certainly, from their first day of work on. Because you're now part of that culture and influencer, a molder and an upholder. >> I think he critical piece for that is understanding what your, personal philosophy is about work, life balance, what that means to you, because it does mean different things. Some people feel like, I need to have the flexibility to just go spend time with my kids and attend kids programs and have some time with them. For others that mean I need weeks off at a time to be able to re-energize myself. And so you have to really measure in an interview and in a discussion with an employer what are my personal values in terms of my work life balance and is that going to match with the organization. So to me it's a very personal decision that you have to identify and then see if it matches with the organization. The other aspect of work-life balance is the ever present emails, cell phones, texting, the accessibility. That's something that I struggled with but I would still say that if you were interviewing for an executive level position at our organization right now, I would ask a question about that. If I were to leave here and go interview someplace else, that would be a question I would ask, what type of connectivity do you expect? What type of response time? What is your philosophy on answering phone calls, emails outside of ours. because I think it's important to understand going in, and have a clear expectation of what that looks like, and then determine if you're willing and able to live up to that expectation. [MUSIC] [NOISE]
