I've worked a number of companies where a culture formed spontaneously, and it was both productive and motivating with a real sense of camaraderie.

I've also worked at companies where the company created a culture with artificial team building tricks, and without exception it led to a shitty environment where HR and political schemers screwed over both the company and their fellow employees for petty gain.

Let's look at the other side:

I run process oriented companies

Would I add a beer keg-refrigerator aka "kegerator" to keep some 25 year olds from considering other companies for 3 months longer than they would anyway? sure

Would I allow the work place to be used as a surrogate for their social causes? no - actually maybe if it needed to court advertisers all the time, but otherwise no because that was not the point of the business entity.

Would I hire an operations person to plan social things for employees to look forward to because I don't care about that at all? maaaaaaaaaybe

I never needed that stuff, clock in, clock out, nobody is really on the clock just meet your goals

For me, location is more important. What can you do in walking distance after work? I tend to keep my social circles separate, I don't want my colleagues or employees around.

The jobs I loathed the most had car-only commutes to office parks.

The jobs I enjoyed the most were in trendy parts of towns.

I think the people that attracts are heavily correlated and makes the culture on its own.

> The jobs I enjoyed the most were in trendy parts of towns.

Same here. In a way, location can be thought of to be one of the most concrete parts of office culture. In NYC, where I've spent a lot of my work life, it's amazing how much of a proxy office location was for founder style. For some founders, a chic location wasn't prioritized or seen as ROI positive. For others, it was the exact opposite.

All I can say is that for the former category, the value-add generally far outweighed the outlay for a very crucial and formative period of its life. At a certain size, logistical concerns like price per square foot and available commercial inventory become a lot more pressing concerns.

> Would I add a beer keg-refrigerator aka "kegerator" to keep some 25 year olds from considering other companies for 3 months longer than they would anyway? sure

This has extra benefits too. You don't want to turn the office into a bar for quite obvious reasons, but having it in the office makes it convenient. A lot of senior will skip off-site events because they have a family to go back to. But one beer and leave? Sure.

If you consider it carefully your absence of “culture” is in itself a culture. Just one that eschews those other things.

Good idea, I would absolutely love to add that to my "culture documents", I enjoyed the breath of fresh air that Netflix's old notorious one conveyed

Has NFLX employee culture become more mainstream?

I think it sounds like you have built a great culture there, adding a beer tap would not be your culture so don't do it, but it sounds like you have worked hard to create and nurture a culture I bet your staff love.

I do think "culture" is overused in the MBA buzzword sense sometimes, but even I know having a kegerator or [dis]allowing political activism on campus has absolutely nothing to do with culture.

Are you sure? The only thing I see is that the word culture is not conveying a shared message and is therefore failing at language. Another person in this thread said something similar to you "Culture is an overused and overrated term" while defining it similarly to me.

Why speak in absolutes when it absolutely is not conveying a shared message.

You can’t not have a culture. All you can do is to hire people who’s values match the culture you want, and organise the reward/incentive structures to match.

> Just because the average shitty ones still talk about culture and pretend they have it, doesn't mean a good culture isn't important.

Exactly. Companies that have terrible culture project the need for a good one to get out in front of the accusation that their leadership failed in actually establishing a good one.

Culture is an overused and overrated term that means nothing without detailed context.

When people say “culture” they usually mean...

- My company treats developers like rockstars; everyone else minus executives is treated like shit. “Ninjas & unicorns!”

- My company doesn’t have HR or need it. “Who needs HR? It’s only for women, losers and SJWs.”

- My company doesn’t have security and risk processes for handling user data or anything else. “Everybody’s root!!!”

- My company has cool perks like a game room, free beer, no vacation limits and a chef on staff; but everyone is underpaid compared to market. “I know they pay me 85k to be a senior dev but at least I got beer!”

Yeah, my example had none of that stuff.

It was a place where people were made to feel welcome, got listened to, were trusted, cared about and helped each other, were free to be themselves, could freely and honestly express their opinions to execs without repercussions etc.

People were given chances to grow into new roles, and their knowledge from the previous ones was valued (no roles were looked down on). It had the right amount of management (not too much, not too little), and they took good management seriously as something to empower people rather than control them.

A lot of it was built from the ground up rather than imposed from above, and there was not a lot of money thrown at it.

All that can be destroyed much faster than it can be built.

To me, good culture means:

- People are comfortable giving and receiving feedback

- Expectations and priorities are open and honest

- Work/life balance is seriously respected

- Managers serve their reports, not the other way around

Culture is (per definition) the unspoken rules that is behind everything people in the culture believes in and do without controversy. You can’t not have a culture.