Many people think company culture is solely the domain of HR or a company’s people team. But founders and company leadership also play key roles in company culture. When defining culture, they set direction and tone, and without executive buy-in, culture initiatives may as well not exist at all.
Between developing a business plan, running operations, taking care of company finances and making sure the product works, founders of a new company might find creating company culture to be a daunting challenge. And for companies who may have let culture fall by the wayside over time, getting back on track might seem like an impossible feat.
But there are some specific things founders and executives can do to ensure a strong culture for their employees — which will ultimately reduce turnover, improve employee engagement and boost the bottom line.
Values
The basic building blocks of any company’s culture are its values. It’s important for leaders to recognize what’s important to them in building a product they’re proud of — and in finding a team to create it.
“A great company culture isn’t created by simply coming up with a list of core values and posting them on the lobby wall,” said Leanne Smullen, SVP, Marketing and Training for SpotX. “It comes from leaders embodying the values and passing them on as new talent enters the business to make it a living part of the organization.”
Instead of creating a list of company values or a mission statement full of common terms like “transparency” and “trust,” leaders should take a critical look at what matters to them. Culture is more than following the latest trends in office perks and company outings; without a strong foundational reason behind these factors, culture falls apart.
“At the end of the day, technology is the product that arises from culture,” said Gene Stevens, co-founder and CTO of ProtectWise. “Culture functions as grammar that allows us to express ideas, which would allow us to articulate and execute on technology.”
The SpotX team showing off their school spirit.
People
It’s impossible to have a strong company culture without a good team. At the beginning, founders should consider what types of people they want to have working beside them — especially when it comes to company leadership.
“We had to focus on hiring really senior people,” said Stevens. “We knew the foosball, beanbag culture would attract the wrong crowd for us.”
Instead, they hire based on three core principles: people first, passion and the ability to execute. Stevens sees working for ProtectWise as more than a job — it’s a “great home for hackers, gamers and inventors who would have been writing software in their free time,” he said. “It’s a home where your passion can be given the resources to take off.”
At SpotX, employees are essential to ensuring the success of the company’s culture. Their leadership training program highlights the importance of ensuring individual values and company values are aligned, and employee engagement is a core element of SpotX’s culture.
“While founders and senior management can help shape the general ideas of a company culture, each and every team member is the ultimate stakeholder in how a company culture develops,” said Smullen. “The best and most successful company cultures are those where every employee, regardless of his or her title, is invested in fostering a thriving environment made up of trust, hard work and collaboration.”
Scaling
Just like they need to build a plan for scaling their company, founders and leadership also need to consider how they will scale their culture. Are the values — and how they’re practiced — sustainable after the team grows to 10 people? How about 50? Or 1,000? Adjustments will need to be made along the way — what’s the best way to make those changes with minimal impact to the team?
Stevens said ProtectWise was designed from day one to be a large company. “We’re working on some giant technology problems, so toward that end we knew two guys wouldn’t be able to scale this,” he said. “We had to build an environment where all of us could produce a culture and technology that could do this at scale.”
Stevens said ProtectWise has implemented “Socratic leadership,” presenting problems to the team and and encouraging them to discover the answer for themselves. He said they see familiarity as a form of currency, allowing teammates to architect and articulate solutions to very complex problems, which comes with a strong sense of ownership.
As SpotX scaled internationally, they had to consider how to make the company values fit the regional cultures of each office.
“We have recognized as we have opened offices and developed teams in other parts of the globe, that you can’t simply export the entire culture from our US headquarters and expect it to be as successfully adopted in every region,” said Smullen. “While we ensure that the company’s key values are in place in every office, we also understand that the local culture must be a part of each office’s individual culture.”
She said this practices has allowed SpotX to grow in multiple countries while embracing the unique characteristics of each region — therefore creating an evolving global company culture.
Admitting mistakes
While some executives do end up steering their company culture in the wrong direction, Stevens said it’s not impossible to get back on a solid path.
“If you’re a founder or a leader and you have culture issues, you need to own that that’s your fault,” he said. “You’ve failed.”
But remembering the reasons for starting the company in the first place — and relying on that narrative to make a cultural pivot — can shape the future of the culture.
“Poor culture comes from a lack of vision about the future,” said Stevens. “But if you can tell the story of where you’re going and articulate the vision, I think those problems tend to go away. That’s an opportunity to fix culture, but it has to come from the leaders.”
Ultimately, Smullen said it’s important for companies to talk about their culture and for leaders to ensure their teams are embodying common values at all times. “SpotXers are proud to work here, and we know that the more we communicate, collaborate, serve our customers and move things forward each day, the more successful and happy we'll be,” she said.
Images via SpotX and Shutterstock.
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