How to setup right company culture?
The culture is one of the most difficult challenge any founder or CEO will ever deal with while building a successful company. It is easy to set the right culture in early days of the company, because the complexity of fixing culture grows exponentially when employee count rise from 10 to 100s.
The cases of culture crisis with Uber in 2017 is one of the most discussed leadership failures in recent time. Another examples are Google and Facebook on Gender Discrimination and Integrity of employees toward company.
I always consider a company as an individual person and it is easy to relate every expects of a person in a company. The culture of a company is like the behavior of a person. It must be consistent with rare cases of inconsistency allowed. You can trust someone easily when you know what kind of person he is. Is the person like to be dressed up in a suit or prefer T-shirt and jeans? Is the person thoughtful in his action or impulsive? Is the person fitness freak or like to order pizza with double extra cheese? There is nothing right or wrong in making any of the personality or life choices. The problem starts when you don’t stay consistent with your personality or behaviors. And the result is losing trust of other people. Now it is easy to be consistent in his behavior for a person because it is quite effortless for him. But the company is not made of single person and behavior of a company is a reflection of the behavior of their employees.
Now the question is, how to make sure that employees follow certain behavior to reflect the consistent experience from a company? How to build the right company culture?
I recommend 3 step process for building company culture.
Define Company Culture: The process starts with defining what your company culture is. The best way for the founders is to sit and ask questions like what they care most about while building this company? What kind of people do they want to work with? What are their moral values? The answers to all those questions are the first step towards defining the company culture. The next step is to validate them through your current employees and add/remove values that you want to reflect on your company.
One last point, While defining company culture, people often only think about who they are. But it is also important to define who they are not. What kind of trait your company culture does not support. Sometimes those traits are presumed like you don’t want your employees to be jerk or lone-wolf. But writing out them into company culture manifesto put tight boundaries on that behavior or attitude.
Implement strategies to promote the cultural values: Once you know what your company culture should look like though building culture manifesto, you want to make sure that those values are harvested or engraved in your employees. How to do that?
There is no single silver bullet strategy to achieve it. You must device multiple strategies that promote the cultural values of the company to employees. I am going to discuss few of them here.
The first thing for founders and executives is to follow those cultural values by heart and make those moves visible to the employees. My most favorite culture strategy example is of Starbucks and its CEO Howard Schultz. Howard Schultz believed that your employees care for your customer when you care for them. And he implemented various unconventional projects and policies for their employees that reflects in service quality of every Starbucks outlets.
You also need to be very outspoken about culture and value of your company. Engrave it on the big wall of your company. Add a couple of slides about it in every introduction presentation you make about your company. Print them on a postcard and put them along with other gifts that you give to your employees on various occasions.
You can also organize events that revolve around your company culture. Like to promote innovation engineering ideas, Take the example of the Boston based company called way-fair that organizes hackathon event for their tech employees. In th event, they can build anything they want in the span of the two-day and if company founders like their idea-prototype, they assign them required resources to build the full product out of it. An initiative like these, not only promotes their employees to be innovative but also towards learning and trying new technologies.
Another strategy is to exploit human behavior towards reward and punishment. People tend to do more things that reward them and fewer things that punish them. You need to set up right reward and punishment policy to promote the culture you want for your company. This might seem effective by intuitive to many of us but reward and punishment strategy is double edge sword. You must not devise the reward and punishment strategy that invoke a sense of unhealthy competition among the employees. The unhealthy competition sometimes leads to mutual loss than mutual gain. This in itself is a big topic that I might write about in future.
Evaluate your potential hire for cultural fit: Now you have employees with right culture value and attitude, you want to make sure that every new cycle of hire also have same traits that you want for your employees. You must and absolutely scrutinize potential candidate for right culture fit. You must understand that when you have employees with the right culture they are also going to bring people with similar cultural values. The wrong hire can have a ripple effect on your upcoming generation of employees because they are less likely to filter candidate for your culture fit.
Finally, I am going to end the article with the quote originally stated by Peter Drucker and made famous by Mark Fields, the president of Ford that expresses the importance of a building right culture for a company.
“CULTURE EATS STRATEGY FOR BREAKFAST”