Why Recruit for Cultural Fitness than Cultural Fit

Culture brings an organization or team members together. But at times, it can make them stuck rather than making them stay together. Companies have witnessed cultural fit becoming a limitation instead of becoming a strength. This condition makes us question whether you hire people that are cultural fit or you hire to improve your culture fitness.

Culture is Dynamic

Cultural fit acts like an operating requirement and force new employees to adapt to a certain way. It limits their ability to grow. It can be seen at an odds with fluid teams organization structure. One should not only care about the cultural fit but also the cultural disruption.

You need candidates who not only get influenced by your culture but also wants to influence and challenge your culture too. A reason behind this is that if you stick to your existing culture your organization will remain stuck . On the contrary, if you care about the new shining object, then you must throw away core elements of your culture for the sake of bringing changes.

Go for Cultural Fitness

Always select those candidates that will help your team grow. For this, you will have to recruit people who are experimental, adaptive and resilient.

Here are few things you need to consider while recruiting for cultural fitness:

• Expand your team’s perspective

  Recruit team members with different skills, backgrounds and personalities. This way you will avoid any kind of partiality. Create a culture where people can get inspired from each other.

• Stretch their Comfort Zone

  Well, disagreement is not comfortable but it is a way to avoid group thinking and stretching team members from their comfort zone.

• Continuous Challenges

  Recruit opinionated people or hire people from outside your industry. This will help you go against your culture. Shaking things a little but will help you keep your culture in a perfect shape. At times, misfit is the best option to energize a team.

• Diversity of Thinking

  Your team should embrace different opinions. With a heterogeneous team members, you can create a more productive and interesting team. People with different background can create a smarter team. It will not only solve your demographic diversity but will have a purpose behind it.

Diversity demands Training

One of the most frequent problem with diverse environment is that teams are not trained to deal with different opinions. Team members and managers are trained in a certain way or say corporate way. Employees have to accommodate rather than challenge the status quo.

The biggest advantage of having diverse people in a team is that they see things from different perspective. Now the question arises, how to embrace a culture of diversity to improve cultural fitness? Well, we have compiled few points to achieve that:

• Different not Inferior

  You need to shift your conversation to curiosity, We need think about things we can learn from people that are different from us. Diversity is about getting better at interacting with people who can offer fresh perspective and challenge the way we operate.

• People beyond their demographics

  Being a part of minority is a just one aspect of any individual. An individual is a composite of different factors like origin, experience and many other. You need to encourage team members to make sure that they go beyond their demographics.

• Transparent Conversations

  There isn’t still enough conversation around diversity due to which organizations need to discuss things more openly. You need to create experiences where people can share their ideas, journey and passions. A transparent culture can help reposition diversity.

  The above discussed point can help you create a cultural fitness in your organization. Many companies even hire staffing company to maintain talent channel and diversity.