Company culture can be the surfboard of a business, helping it ride the exciting waves of evolving trends. It provides the necessary stability. Just like how The Rolling Stones have been rolling for 50 years and DreamWorks producing wonderful films year after year, culture is the glue that helps the best teams thrive.

Most companies take too long to define their culture. It took us four years—and an exponential learning curve—to define ours.

What happened to our team

Before I give my thoughts on why company culture is important, I’d like to share some instances of how I realized why we needed to shape our culture. And I’ll be happy if you can learn from them.

There was chaos

When humans come to work together, different aspects of their personalities are bound to collide. There will be chaos. In our case, arguments erupted over varying perspectives, and it was not always calm to begin with.

We slowed each other down

Our employees slowly arranged themselves into small groups and each group formed their own micro-culture. Some groups even imposed their micro-culture on other groups. When distinct groups move in different directions, they are bound to slow each other down.

At one point, the sales team and the creative team formed their own cultures, and their pacing for planning and implementation were different. The sales team wanted to do 10 pitches a day, but the creative team wanted to think their ideas through for each pitch and present tailored pitches. Both teams were right in their own way, but they were not ready to understand each other. The resulting constant back-and-forth slowed things down.

There was attrition

Even though you, as a founder, are rational in solving tension between groups, you will often leave at least one group unhappy, unheard, and disappointed. And most of the time, employees tend to rationalize their job dissatisfaction rather than consider that they may be part of the problem. The unhappiness will sink in faster than you can imagine and they will quit—sometimes even in groups.

While I understand that attrition is a reality, it feels a tad more personal in a startup. One time, I realized that complacency and stagnancy had crept into the team. There were two-hour tea breaks happening twice or thrice a week and unplanned leaves. These would be OK if there were progress in the assignments. But in a startup, stagnancy is a disaster, especially when a new product is about to launch.

Despite giving the employees polite reminders for months, there seemed to be inaction and I received replies like, “Don’t worry—all on track.” When words were not cutting the deal and enough was enough for me, I sent one warning email. But within a week, I found myself handling a group exit. The employees chose to leave the boat in choppy waters rather than paddle faster.

Guiding lights to the right culture

With all of this happening, I found it imperative to define our company culture and shape it right. So, here are some thoughts on what helped us in the process.

alore-team

Our team at Alore.

Embracing speed

Company culture needs to embrace speed because once you’re in business, life will never be slow again.

Over the years, I’ve observed a lot of people at various companies sitting around and working on a single task for weeks. What this often implies is that the executive is slow and in no real hurry to go anywhere.

Moving fast is scary and, perhaps, even unsettling. But once you let this feeling sink in, you’d see that it has a lot to offer. There are so many interesting things to do, new perspectives to share, and barriers to break. Gradually, speed will become natural, and the change in pace can help a company’s capacity grow exponentially.

Nurturing talent

Company culture must nurture talent but never tolerate bad attitudes.

At the business school I went to, a professor once wrote an interesting maxim on the board : “Never meet your heroes.” This contrarian advice intrigued me and has stuck with me ever since. The professor’s reasoning was simple: “The heroes might just turn out to be egotistical, conceited mortals.”

So, encourage an environment of humility at work. Encourage talent and celebrate success, but never ever allow snoots to thrive in this environment. It would only diminish the cohesiveness of a talented and promising team. My point is we should aim at not only working with each other and blending our talents but also spending an awful lot of time together at work.

Rewarding small hustles

To move mountains, you start by picking up pebbles. Those who head right to the mountain will end up only with sprained backs. Company culture should reward small tasks done excellently while planning the big score.

Most people don’t see the importance of doing small jobs, and they might even see it as a waste of time. But doing 20 small tasks sets you up well for that one big challenge. It can give you massive insights to help you plan the big score and refine your processes, thoughts, and actions. So, company culture needs to reward the team for doing small things well without losing sight of big opportunities.

Sharing knowledge

Company culture must celebrate the willingness to learn and the ability to share.

A company must foster an environment where individuals feel happy and proud of sharing what they know and not threatened if they give away their secret sauce. It is the boss’s duty to identify individuals who do their job well and encourage them to share their knowledge. Learning and sharing is a complementary process and nurturing this in a company is essential.

Empowering human insight

Company culture must constantly feel the changing pulse of human insight and use it wisely.

Behavioral change is the most important change we are dealing with in the digital age —and only the power of human insight can help us lead this change. With that, a team in this age must be able to calmly and confidently move from failure to success and vice versa.

Final thoughts

These are some of the guiding lights to designing a company culture. Of course, culture isn’t something where one size fits all. For example, an investment banking firm’s culture can be very different from a digital marketing agency’s. One must really think it through in detail, but I hope the points I shared here are relevant to most.

Culture will be associated with you, the founder. When you see that the thing that took so much to build starts falling apart, a lot of agony and self-doubt will creep into you. But then, you need to face the reality head on. While your growth might be slow for a while, you and your team may have more control over the situation than you can imagine.

With all these insights, I’m sure you’d have your surfboard ready to keep you afloat the crazy tides of the startup journey. I would love to hear your thoughts on company culture and what you expect the culture to be like in your dream company.


This article was originally published on blog.alore.io. Please click here to read more such articles.

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