Can you use your operations to improve company culture?
Company happy hours and arbitrary perks don’t fix company culture. But can improving your operations make an impact? (hint: yes it can!).
If you were to hear a company's culture described as "high-performing, structured, and engaging," what do you think makes up their secret sauce?
Does this company get unlimited days off? Do they have regular team offsites? Do they get free lunches?
They might. But the more important question is how do they work every day? How do they use their internal tools to communicate? How do they manage projects? How do they collaborate?
How a company operates has a direct and lasting impact on its culture. When culture goes wrong, the tempting solution is to offer a band-aid - often in the form of a new perk. Though these solutions may be intended to fix what hurts, they don't address the root cause of the problem which is often that how people are working isn't working.
There are small and simple levers that can improve our startup cultures far better than an extra remote working day or some team swag. What makes work work well is how, day in and day out, we actually do our work. If we focus our efforts here, small changes can create cascading cultural impacts.
how DO you create an exemplary company culture?
Align your tools, processes and people to make sure your team is fulfilled.
Why This Works
The fact is, there is a correlation between better execution and the bottom line. As Nathan Bachaz shares in “Execution is Exponential”,
“A lot of times, instead of thinking big, we actually need to think small. Instead of getting hyped about broad narratives that explain our predicament, we need to just buckle down and ask ourselves how we can do what we’re already doing—but much, much better. We need to focus on execution, not strategy.
So why don’t we?
The main reason, at least in my experience, is we don’t realize just how much better we could be executing, and just how much the metrics could improve if we did. We assume we’re performing most of our key activities roughly 80% of the way to perfection, and pushing harder to get the remaining 20% wouldn’t move the needle that much. In my experience, this is usually false. We may not be able to imagine how, but 10x or even 100x improvements are possible more often than we think. And the ultimate effect of making that kind of change on every activity has compounding, multiplying effects.”
At startups, we place an outsized emphasis on the bottom line, and for good reason. One too many days without a sale can lead very quickly to startup extinction. But we forget that James Clear is right about everything (of course) and that small operational habits when executed expertly can have a massive impact. A few small operational improvements like teams consistently ending meetings on time, or engaging in Slack-free Sundays can make massive improvements to our working cultures.
When work feels “just fine,” when we push through the mini frictions in our day-to-day workflows and habits, and the inefficiencies and annoyances in how we interact with our colleagues, work feels not so great. And individual habits make up the greater operations in how the team works.
Why Do This Now
Once multiple people are working together, you have a culture. And the cultural issues that occur with two-person teams quickly multiply, seeping deeply into the DNA of your organization. Fast forward and as your startup grows to many many more than one, you’re left with a broken system you’ll spend significant time trying to fix. The earlier you get your culture right, using operational cohesion as a way of smoothing work for the team, the less chaos you’ll experience at scale.
how We Do: Figure out the itchy operations that make work difficult and invest in small changes to make them better.
Generalists are culture keepers. As crossfunctional operators, they have a unique opportunity to make an impact on their colleagues and to make work feel better. When work feels better, the sense of alignment leads most often to an excellent working culture.
Tools 🛠️
Great culture-building tools are often simply repositories of personal information on the way people feel about how work is getting done, or how people reflect on their individual work identities or preferences. This can give culture keepers a series of dots to connect when choosing which operational levers to prioritize fixing.
Digital user manuals available in tools like Lluna allow team members to understand the cultural desires of the existing team. Personal Operating Profile’s (POPs) can include information such as working styles, work/life preferences, skills, goals, and even personal information that makes a person unique, which unlocks connection and belonging, giving culture keepers a place to get started.
Free up time for your team with clearer and more confident decision-making with Hoop and maintain records of the why behind these decisions.
Maintaining a practice of consistent culture surveys from Google Forms or Typeform (even on super small teams) can provide founders with a consistent pulse on how their team is experiencing their day-to-day work.
Notion Team Directories - if used at the start of a new hire’s onboarding - can give culture keepers a better sense of who is on the team and key ways team members think about how they work and what they might need.
Individual 1:1s allow you to check in on how team members are feeling at regular intervals. Those notes enable you to identify patterns or shifts in sentiment over time you may not be clued into.
Rules (Process) 📝
If you consider all of the different inputs that affect culture, you can get a sense of the differences in the process of approaching culture.
Values and Mission:
Traditional Approach: Document Mission Vision and Values (MVV) in an employee handbook. It’s there – someone can use it if they need to for onboarding or quick reference.
Generalist Approach: Bake MVV into team OKRs, laddering Objectives to higher-level company-wide objectives that are reviewed and re-reviewed by the team with a consistent cadence.
Communication:
Traditional Approach: Send emails and direct messages to individuals when and where questions arise (hey, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line!).
Generalist Approach: Intentionally design how a team communicates and documents information and decisions (see Hoop above) to increase speed and the ability for individuals to pull information when they need it. Document communication norms to make the implicit explicit.
Leadership:
Traditional Approach: Top-down leadership approach. Founders delegate and dictate the work that is being done. Micromanaging can become the accidental norm here.
Generalist Approach: Consider a cross-functional structure that allows space for creativity and ingenuity. Ensure communications channels support this style of work by being collaborative.
Relationships:
Traditional Approach: Culture can accidentally be placed in a secondary position without anyone “manning the shop”.
Generalist Approach: Create a place that is fun to work where colleagues feel connected and as if they are a part of the larger whole. See What makes managing early-stage startup teams so hard?
Work Environment:
Traditional Approach: Focus on where team members are working (in-person, remote).
Generalist Approach: When it comes to knowledge-based work, it is important to recognize that the tools individuals utilize in their tasks, such as the integration of tools, communication methods, and remote video tools, collectively form their working environment. Enhancing the connection between these internal systems is key to optimizing working environments.
Accountability:
Traditional Approach: Frequent check-ins and micromanaging inadvertently take the place of well-oiled OKRs.
Generalist Approach: Establish OKRs and a project management tool that provides top-line visibility while ensuring lines of communication are open and valued.
Learning and Development:
Traditional Approach: Employees are learning by doing at startups! We don’t have the funds to invest in anything more, so this should suffice. We provide the best learning environment by the nature of the work.
Generalist Approach: Structure clear, habitual reflection points for individuals to document their work (clarity of writing = clarity of thought). Encourage time spent on thinking and reading as part of work, and build this into team habits and norms.
Work-Life Integration:
Traditional Approach: Give unlimited PTO and increased remote work days.
Generalist Approach: Build operational systems that ease the workload and give team members space to do great work where and when they need it.
People 🫶
Personalization is key in culture, but it’s operationally impossible to manage individual preferences in how culture is built, managed, and maintained.
One of the biggest mistakes a founder can make is hiring the wrong people or failing to retain the right people.
Create processes and structures around your hiring process to ensure candidates are a strong cultural fit.
Once on the team, ensure you are keeping a pulse on your employee satisfaction - and doing everything you can - compensation, work-life balance, promotions, workload, etc. - to retain these individuals.
At the end of the day, your people are the fiber of your culture, and therefore your company.
Take It Up A Level
Using AI to Improve how You Do:
Take your findings from Lluna POPs and ask ChatGPT to summarize and create SOPs and plans that reflect such findings.
Create charts detailing how and when your employees prefer to work (and then make a plan on how often you’ll review them)!
Going deeper on what you know
Review tools such as Glassdoor and Blind to see how employees feel about your company. Where are the gaps? What can be improved?
Leverage tools such as Lluna to learn more about your people. Use these findings to make changes to your operations that improve your culture and make your business a place people want to work.
Actually Actionable
Nice article. Now what?
We’ve taken the ideas above and put them into a summary to take to your team, with key contact info for each of the resources provided within. Progressing through these key seven motions will help you identify what’s wrong, address it quickly, and progress your operations to a place that supports a healthy, fulfilling work culture.
Explore:
Project 1: Have the team complete user manuals to better understand themselves, and ultimately the needs of the team. (1 week)
Project 2: Have your team complete a culture survey to get a pulse on what teams are feeling on the day-to-day. (1 week)
Meeting 1: Have leadership complete an MVV exercise to ensure the MVV is clear to all. (90 min)
Understand:
Meeting 2: Review your findings, and take time to see where things aren’t working well. Prioritize. What hurts the most from your culture survey? X marks the spot to start! (60min)
Align:
Meeting 3: Ensure that operational leads and the rest of the team understand the changes at hand. Embrace them at the top as founders so you lead by example, but encourage everyone to be responsible for team culture and take their opportunities to lead, too. (60 min)
Improve:
Meeting 4: Work with your team to reimagine your operations, focusing on small levers and incremental increases in improved execution to make an impact.
Project 3: Have the team take the culture survey again. How’d you do? By shifting your approach, are you seeing improvements? (1 week, completed one quarter from the previous survey)
Improving company culture goes beyond superficial perks like happy hours and perks. The way a company operates on a day-to-day basis directly affects its culture. Small operational changes, such as improving communication tools and project management, can have a significant impact on culture. Focusing on execution rather than just strategy is crucial for creating an exemplary company culture. Operational cohesion and investing in small changes can lead to a smoother work environment and greater alignment among team members.
And how to turn founder habits into operational best practices for a strong culture to come? More on that next week.
Writer: Britt