<aside> 👉 Culture is one of the best things about Beauhurst. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what makes our culture great and how we can guide it in the right direction. This page starts from the theoretical start of how we think about culture - but if you want to skip to the bit where we talk about what it’s like working here, please go right ahead (and we’ll try not to be offended!).

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🤐 Culture is hard to talk about: an introduction

Everyone knows company culture is important. You might know this instinctively, you might have read about it, or you might have experienced or know someone who’s experienced a particularly good or bad culture at work.

But for something that’s spoken about so much, it’s surprising how bad we are at actually talking about it, let alone defining it!

We find it’s rare for people describing the type of culture they’re looking for to move beyond vague-sounding terms like “fun”, “friendly”, and “nice”. And lots of people seem to think of culture as mostly just a combination of the social events and benefits that a company provides.

While socials and benefits are great, we think there’s a whole lot more to say about what makes a culture.

We’ve spent a fair bit of time thinking about this and discussing it with lots of people inside and outside of Beauhurst. We think it’s important for you to be able to understand what culture means to us, so you know whether it’s the kind of culture that’s going to work for you!

It’s said that culture eats strategy for breakfast – and we agree!

So let’s start from the beginning 👇

🤹 What do we think culture is?

In the simplest terms, culture is what it feels like to be at Beauhurst. It’s who we are, who we aspire to be, how we behave, how we make decisions, and how we treat each other. It is defined by the daily actions of every single individual who works here, from how we interact with colleagues in the kitchen, to the commercial decisions we make in the boardroom. It’s how we engage with each other, how we approach our work, and how we behave when no one is watching.

So how do we influence this behaviour? Well, we think that how people think and what’s important to them determines their actions and behaviours, which in turn create the culture that you experience.

<aside> 🧠 Mindset & values

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<aside> 🏃‍♀️ Actions & behaviours

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<aside> 💛 Culture

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This is true on an organisational level - our principles as a company dictate the decisions we make which dictates how it feels to work here, i.e. our culture. But it’s also true for every individual - our principles dictate how we behave which dictates how the culture feels to everyone around us.

So culture comes from everyone collectively creating the workplace they want to be a part of - you quite literally got da power ⚡

😬 What do we think organisations get wrong about culture?

When we first set out trying to define our culture, we looked for examples of what other companies had done. And boy were there a lot of examples of what not to do. Here’s a (very non-exhaustive) list of things that we realised we wanted to avoid:

• Imposing culture “top-down” rather than seeing it as something that comes from everyone (values that the CEO enforces on everyone does not a culture make!)
• Defining a culture that has little-to-no relation to what the actual organisation feels like
• Codifying it into bland and meaningless words—“honesty”, “integrity”, and “respect” anyone?
• Allowing the culture to fragment between teams so they approach work in totally different ways and clash when trying to collaborate
• Losing the best bits of a culture as the company grows—people forever reminiscing about the “good ol’ days”
• Creating or allowing an unpleasant culture full of ego with no openness, no ability to challenge, and very little joy

We didn’t—and don’t—ever want to be one of those companies! Though we know it takes a lot of proactive effort and hard work to avoid ending up like that.

💛 The Beauhurst Culture