Once thought by many as a touchy-feely element of dot-com-era startups, company culture has gone mainstream. Companies of all sizes are discovering the concrete benefits of defining who they are and using that as a blueprint for all operations.
Brett Hoogeveen, co-founder of BetterCulture in Omaha, is a sought-after expert in the field of helping companies define, articulate, and leverage culture to their tangible advantage. He said moving companies past “culture” as a mere corporate catchphrase starts with a clear understanding of themselves.
“Culture is a buzzword you hear a lot, but relatively few people can succinctly define what they mean,” he said. “I would say probably 60 to 70% of the organizations out there don’t have that much clarity on culture, and they couldn’t tell you what they’re doing to get it.”
He continued, “One good definition of culture is simply the attitudes or the behaviors that a group of people come to expect from one another. If you want to have a great culture, at a very bare minimum, you need to be able to identify or describe the culture you’d like to have. Step two is to influence it, to do something about it.”
Hoogeveen said one of the most important benefits of a well-defined, and well-understood, company culture is in personnel. People stick with, and do their best work for, companies where they feel at one with the company’s culture, he said, inspiring loyalty and job satisfaction that go beyond compensation and benefits.
“A company’s culture is really the biggest incentive organizations have to attract, and build, and motivate, and keep people,” he said. “In the short term, you can do it with money, but eventually that wears thin. In the long term, it’s more about whether people feel connected to the company. Do they enjoy the relationships that they have? Do they feel there’s a purpose? And most of that, in my opinion, comes from culture.”
Efforts to improve a company’s culture must reach employees at all levels, Hoogeveen said, to the point management is willing to enforce the plan just like any other employee job expectation.
“If you say you want to have a great culture, you have to mean it, and you have to deal with people that violate it,” he said. “If you’ve got someone who’s running contrary to company culture ― maybe they’re productive, maybe they get their work done, but they’re really hard to work with ― that becomes a performance management and a leadership responsibility.”
He continued, “If you don’t deal with what I call vacuums, people who are sucking the energy or just making kind of a toxic work environment, then your best employees will leave and the vacuums will stick around, and that’s not what you want.”
Stephanie Gould, executive vice president and chief communications and talent officer for American National Bank, said working with BetterCulture has paid tangible benefits for the company that have only grown more foundational with time.
“The tools that BetterCulture provided us (have) helped us do things like clearly define performance levels using a common vocabulary and things that people understand, because we’ve defined it for them in the program,” she said. “It’s helped us work across teams, especially in cross-functional efforts or projects that impact multiple different divisions where leaders are very collaborative. They can work from a common set of principles about what leadership means, especially as it pertains to working with a team that maybe doesn’t directly report to you.”
From a coaching standpoint, Gould said ANB’s well-defined set of cultural benchmarks and expectations helps provide a framework for conversations around employee career planning, leadership development, and performance improvement.
“We have had leadership development programs and we have done employee engagement surveys in the past, but what the partnership with BetterCulture has allowed us to do is frame it around the tenets of culture. It didn’t really change what we were doing except it gave us the tools and the vocabulary to roll it out in a consistent way and have people talk about it in a way that they understand and feel comfortable with.”
She continued, “People now feel more comfortable with having performance conversations, even when they have to have the hard conversations.”
For more information, visit betterculture.com
This article originally appeared in the April/May 2025 issue of B2B Magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
