The way your job description is written is part of your company’s culture and can influence who applies.
The troubling dysfunction of San Francisco-based Uber Technologies, Inc.’s corporate culture is a testimony to the workplace mantra that “culture is set from the top.” Did Uber’s management really think that a hotline for anonymously reporting illegal behaviors or the nomination of a prominent woman to its board of directors would be enough to turn its culture around and make its problems go away?
Those actions were merely reactions to a crisis and did not provide a solution for fundamentally turning things around—the bad culture had gone too far to be good again! Ultimately, the only way to affect real departure from Uber’s well-anchored dysfunctional culture was to start with changing the very top in order to stop the hemorrhage of customers and damage to the brand and, of course, to meet the company’s ultimate goal of launching a successful initial public offering (IPO).
According to the 13-page recommendations report from the international law firm of Covington & Burling, currently made public on uber.com:
“Uber should reformulate its written cultural values because it is vital that they reflect more inclusive and positive behaviors. To achieve this reformulation of the values, there are several steps Uber should undertake:
- work with an established and respected organization that is experienced in organizational change to restate the values with significant input from employees;
- consider further defining the values in a manner more accessible to and more easily understood by employees;
- adopt values that are more inclusive and contribute to a collaborative environment, including emphasizing teamwork and mutual respect, and incorporating diversity and inclusiveness as a key cultural value, not just as an end in itself, but as a fundamental aspect of doing good business;
- reduce the overall number of values, and eliminate those values which have been identified as redundant or as having been used to justify poor behavior, including Let Builders Build, Always Be Hustlin’, Meritocracy and Toe-Stepping, and Principled Confrontation; and encourage senior leaders to exhibit the values.”
Human Resources (HR) should play a very important role in changing and driving the culture, not only from an accountability standpoint—being the referee to ensure that managers are actually walking the “new” talk and taking immediate action when they do not—but also from a recruiting standpoint, ensuring that the company hires employees who are going to be a good fit for the new culture the organization is trying to establish and maintain.
The hiring process for any position starts with the drafting of the job posting, and the language contained within a posting can reveal a tremendous amount about a company in the eyes of potential job candidates.
I recently interviewed a candidate who told me that the reason she had applied for the position was because of the way the job description was written. When probed, she responded that the words “warm, collaborative, integrity, positive attitude, great personality” conveyed to her that our firm values not only technical abilities but also the soft skills that are indicative of the type of employees we hire and therefore the potential colleagues she might be working along with.
Tomorrow we’ll hear more on the topic of job descriptions and company culture.
Florence Richard is a director of HR at an asset management firm in Sausalito, California. She has 20 years of HR experience.