Do you understand your workplace culture?

When we talk about work and career satisfaction, we often forget to analyse the culture of the organisation in which we work in and, more importantly, we forget to think about what kind of workplace culture would suit our own personality. We talk about salary, holidays, work-family balance and intellectual challenges and as if these are the key words that explain how happy we are at a certain job.  But there is so much more to career happiness. If we look at all our working life, since its beginnings until now, the most important factor that explains it all- our successes and our failures- is the workplace culture(s) we have inhabited.

The best employee is not the most educated, most resilient, most productive, most communicative or the most flexible person in the group. It is actually the employee who will intuitively understand or, better yet, make the effort to understand (= learn) their workplace culture: the "rules of the game" of their workplace. This person will know the days when things should be said to superiors and the days when one needs to keep quiet. They will make an effort to understand what the boss, colleagues, clients, customers and/or stakeholders really expect from them and how they can do even more. Who they need to talk to in certain situations, who to avoid, and what communication mode to use with each person. When it is time to insist on an issue (=when change is possible) and when it is time to give up (but not give in to frustration).

This kind of employee is not that easy to find, but if you have someone like that working in your organisation, it shouldn’t matter if you personally like them or not. You can be almost certain that they will get very far. And if they have good intentions for your organisation, you will all get very far together.

In most workplaces however, we find an abundance of the other kind of employee: the unhappy one. The one who would rather be doing something else. The employee who hates the rules of office politics and the unfairness of it all. The one who has been so unhappy that they don’t even care anymore. The one who would rather be doing something else, somewhere else, for someone else, or, why not, for themselves. The one who dreams of the grass being greener on their neighbour’s side, but doesn’t know what kind of house they should be living in or what they need to do to keep that grass green and healthy.

The key to being happy in your career and with your workplace, is taking the time to understand you current workplace culture and asking yourself how your personality fits in. If there could be a match between you and them: BINGO. You can start learning more about their office politics and how to live with it. You can learn to see what makes your boss tick, and not take things personally. You can be happy. But if there is no love between you and them, and their workplace culture is one you can never truly adapt to… why suffer? It may be time to move to a sunnier place.