Anyone employee who tells you that managing people is easier than managing products is either lying to you or is an invaluable asset to your organization.

If you come across an employee more skilled in handling people than paperwork, hold onto that employee with everything you have. Paperwork requires attention to detail; people require attention, full stop. Both sometimes require an endless well of patience, but at least when the paperwork is filed, it’s done; people inevitably come back.

Products, at least until they are released into the wilds of public opinion, go where you push them and stay there. They do what you tell them to do. They may go over budget and beyond deadline, but by and large they’re a manageable creation.

Problems arise when people get involved. People have opinions. People change their minds. (People lose their minds, come to that.) People have conflicts that need resolutions, and challenges that require solutions.

People are hard. Products are easy. But in the end, a better product is created by the involvement of all those people, and so they must be part of the process.

Once you have all those people in one place – generally your offices, but this also arises in the vastness of cyberspace – congratulations, you have a company. And now you have to determine how best to manage those people. How can you best support them in their processes to produce the best possible final project? How do you manage what is created as a side effect of those endless meetings of minds – that dreary buzzword, “corporate culture”?

The readers of Banker & Tradesman work for companies that range in size from a one-person consultancy to worldwide organizations with thousands of employees. There’s a B&T reader living every possible iteration of corporate culture – and for every iteration, there’s an employee (or several, or dozens) unhappy with it.

Here again is the trouble with people: you can’t make all of the people happy all of the time. Freewheeling startups in open-concept offices are disorganized and loud; cubicle farms on the 60th floor of a skyscraper are stuffy and dull. Compromises must be made and then no one is happy.

A lot goes into “corporate culture,” from the design and location of the office to the benefits offered to the attitudes held by upper management. (Trickle-down economics may not be real, but trickle-down leadership deficiencies most certainly are.)

All of those threads tangle together into something that’s very important to attracting and retaining quality employees. It cannot be allowed to create itself; it must be recognized, planned, protected and nurtured as much as you would a person (or product, for that matter).

So add this to the recent deluge of articles and listicles that have proposed best uses for this generally slower time of year. As you ramp up for 2017, take a look at your corporate culture – check in with your employees and see where there are opportunities to increase their happiness. It matters to your current staff and it matters to your future potential employees – and to your bottom line.