How to identify work culture in your organization? | A short Publicis Sapient review

Many people are experiencing stress and the brunt of extended work-from-home scenario hours. Nonetheless, people are trying to achieve a balance in their life and create a serene workplace environment.

Identifying your organization’s work culture is important because a relaxed and collaborative workplace increases productivity while imparting a sense of happiness and satisfaction.  

What defines work culture?

Work culture can be assessed by how managers treat their employees, employee work ethics, nature and magnitude of projects and clients. A few other things that determine a company’s work culture are ambience, employee-management interaction, and career growth opportunities.

In a large organization, work culture may vary project-wise and location-wise as well due to cultural and regional differences. For example, I find that Publicis Sapient Bangalore work culture is different from Gurgaon’s work culture for a different project. When I relocated from Gurgaon to Bangalore, I observed these changes gradually and adapted to them.

 

Also, some professions are known for their hectic work-life balance reputation regardless of organization, such as sales, marketing and software engineering. I have seen a friend change his career path after 6 years of work experience, from a hard-core programmer to QA Analyst, just so she can maintain work-life balance.  

 

Key indicators that tell your organization has a good work culture. 

1. Leadership: Learn by observing senior leadership’s behavior. Like, how they interact with clients and in the team, what they communicate, emphasize on and how they make decisions. If senior management and leaders show empathy, integrity and have well-defined transparent processes, then it’s a sign of good work culture.
2. Workplace practices: Before joining Publicis Sapient, I had read in a Publicis Sapient review that its workplace practices are good for working mothers, which influenced my decision. It was one of the winners of 100 best companies by Working Mother in 2018 for the second consecutive year. Also, things like onboarding process, rewards and recognitions, training, career advancement opportunities and work-life balance determines how good you are treated.   
3. People Policies: Your organization’s people policies such as dress code, attendance, hiring, promotion and leaves policy can give you an insight into how they value people and possibly give you an insight into the work culture. For example, a friend of mine once took 40 days’ paid leave in TCS for his mother’s open-heart surgery and extended hospitalization due to complications. Meaning, people policies can reveal a lot about a company’s culture. Publicis Sapient’s people policy is one of the best I have seen so far.
4. Working environment: Office ambience, furniture and infrastructure, ergonomic spaces, car parking zones, gyms, gaming zone and cafeteria facilities also go a long way in defining work environment, and to know what the management believes is important to bring out the best in their people.
5. Communication: Internal communication among leaders, managers, and between subordinates and their managers also gives you a peek into the organization’s work culture. Companies where leaders often communicate with lower-rung employees often have a good work culture. At Publicis Sapient, during COVID, we received regular emails from the leadership, acknowledging our queries, project-related updates, and resources to help manage our work and personal lives. Our project managers were calm and dealt with empathy and in all situations.

 

Publicis Sapient company review on work culture from my perspective:

 

Being a large organization, they have well-defined workplace practices and ethics. I even underwent mandatory trainings on workplace behavior, data protection and work ethics. Completing those trainings gave me a broader perspective of what mistakes to avoid while handling client’s data and interactions in general.

 

In this Sapient company review, Iwould say that I like the thoughtfulness behind organization-wide trainings on Data compliance, as I learned some hard lessons about data security through mistakes in my previous organization.

 

Publicis Sapient’s work environment is also one of the best I have observed so far. During remote work, we have monthly fun evenings for team interaction. My Manager starts work week with some fun quotes and quizzes usually, which lightens the mood. On the team’s WhatsApp group, we can express our emotions and hardships faced during COVID freely. Emotional and physical support provided was much appreciated. These are some of the good instances I have mentioned from my pandora’s box.

 

In accordance with my experiences here, I can deduce that Publicis Sapient has a good work culture.