- Culture is more than the experience of being part of a team
- Without effective communication, culture is the first thing to erode
- The soft skills required to faithfully maintain and support impactful company culture require routine maintenance
‘Culture’ is a word that gets thrown around a lot, but with little real meaning.
What I’ve noticed is there is a lot of talk about the importance of company culture but very little being said about how hard it is to create or change an existing culture. For an entrepreneur starting a company and making sense of the daily turbulence while trying to make enough money to survive, culture creation may be on the back burner.
I get that, you need to be profitable and pay employees. But it doesn’t take much time, effort or money to develop a positive, trusting and inclusive culture if you integrate the efforts from the beginning. It’s much harder to change company culture once you have established norms, but it is possible. The beginning days of a company are sometimes chaotic, stressful, energizing and turbulent but this is exactly when culture should be curated. For an established company, turbulent moments are a perfect time to assess the strengths and problems associated with your culture.
What Exactly IS Company Culture?
Company culture is typically described as an organization’s values, mission, vision, principles, norms, attitudes and practices. But what’s often forgotten in the culture conversation is that culture is created, maintained, and changed through communication. Soft skills and relationships are the key to a productive and supportive company culture. When I coach entrepreneurs and established business leaders, I remind them regularly that the everyday talk and mundane communication behaviors play the most important role in developing a company culture.
Those everyday interactions play a major role in the quality of the relationships and experiences employees have. We take these everyday behaviors for granted, but the way we talk to or don’t talk to people regularly are the building blocks of culture, not a big fancy mission statement or ping pong table in the breakroom (those are fun but not fundamental to culture).
I think it’s invaluable for entrepreneurs to spend time envisioning their ideal culture. You can’t create it if you don’t already see how you want it to work. How do people interact? What does the office (virtual or in-person) feel like? How do meetings run? How do people talk about their jobs and each other? Does everyone talk about the company the same way, using shared narratives? Do people understand how their role fits in with the greater purpose of the company? Do your employees feel valued?
This exercise allows a founder or leader to be self-aware and reflect on how they should approach both business and communication processes. Entrepreneurs often skip over this crucial step because they want to move quickly to launch and hire. But when you do that without a clear cultural vision in mind, you create more discomfort and uncertainty than is already part of the start-up experience. Failing to spend real time on your culture creates inevitable friction, and often, chaos. Starting a business is stressful and emotionally charged, but successful businesses are dependent on relationship building. And having a clear cultural vision acting as your north star in the process will help you develop higher quality relationships.
When a business is just starting out, that turbulence is exciting and stressful. But in that chaos there is a need for sense making and direction. That is where the cultural vision comes into play. Think about those questions I asked above, are you making decisions that align with that vision? There is also benefit in writing out the answers to those questions and developing your mission, vision and values and building all of your processes, from onboarding to sales to partnerships, around those values. But it is also important to note that the mission or those values may change as you learn more about your business and as it grows.
An organization that has a supportive and productive culture is able to manage every round of inevitable turbulence. Spending time on that culture is an investment in social capital with your employees and partners. When you invest in the time needed to create a culture that is transparent, supportive, and productive people will trust the leadership. That is creating social capital so when a tough decision or loss happens, there will be a hit to that social capital but you won’t be in the red. You have created a buffer for loss so trust is not completely depleted.
The Risks of Having an Unclear Company Culture are Real
The entrepreneurs I’ve worked with around the world often begin to take their biggest asset for granted, their people. Developing a culture that supports and protects this asset is vital to your survival. Being thoughtful and intentional about relationship building through everyday talk and behaviors is the easiest, most effective and cheapest way to develop a company culture that empowers your business to not just survive but thrive.
Most of the problems businesses experience can often be linked back to some soft skill mistakes. Those mistakes often happen because people aren’t in alignment on the cultural vision and values of the organization. Founders and leaders may be the driving force of cultural development, but their teams aren’t mind readers. A founder has so much information swirling around in their brain and it can be frustrating when their teams are not executing things the way they want them to. I would bet that most of the time, those founders haven’t articulated their values and vision appropriately and haven’t properly informed and engaged with their team so they’re ready to execute a plan accordingly.
What Is the Solution?
The very beginning of the startup process is when these conversations and communication exercises related to company culture should happen. And if you are past the beginning phases, start this process sooner than later. This is a proactive approach that will help entrepreneurs avoid people-related issues in the future, and also help them build the social capital needed so they can more easily recover when mistakes happen (and they will, we are human). Company culture is about the everyday behaviors and procedures that serve as the framework for everything an organization does. But those norms must be discussed and created. Remember, company culture is more than a yoga retreat, happy hour, or beanbag chairs. Those things may be cool and fun, but they are not appreciated or feel disingenuous if the relational aspects of the culture have not been created.