Starting your company culture off strong
Proactively directing your company culture will save you a ton of headaches down the line
One universal truth about early-stage startups: there’s seldom enough time for the founder to accomplish everything that needs to get done.
It’s OK that everything on the to-do list doesn’t get crossed off. A part of a founder's job is to focus on what's most important to move a company forward and not get distracted by the rest. The danger, however, is that - to use language from the famous Eisenhower matrix framework - urgent, non-important work can get prioritized over things that are more important but non-urgent.
Company culture often falls into the important, non-urgent category for one reason: it can be very difficult to tie company culture directly to measurable business targets. It makes sense, then, that even as founders begin building a team they tend to not focus as much on putting culture or people structures in place. People Ops work can seem time-consuming, complicated, and “big company.”
The reality is that company culture will develop regardless of whether the founder is proactive about setting it, so it’s important to make the implicit explicit. While it can be difficult to tie to quarterly sales targets, it’s been proven that culture is crucial in driving the long-term success of a company: Companies with strong cultures have seen a 4x increase in revenue growth, and companies that have appeared on Fortune’s annual 100 Best Companies to Work For list also see higher average annual returns. And changing a company culture that’s not moving in the right direction is a costly, time-consuming process that can be a huge diversion for a founder.
how DO you set up your company culture for success as you begin growing your team?
Implement and nourish culture-building initiatives early and often
Why This
It’s true that most early-stage and small companies don’t need to create a super robust, complex People Ops infrastructure. However, taking a few hours to proactively articulate the culture you’re seeking to build creates clarity that will enable you to more easily align your team, hire the right people, and run your organization more effectively.
Why Now
Tech founders often think about tech debt as a tradeoff with early-stage development. While accruing some tech debt is necessary for a business to operate at optimal speed, accruing too much or the wrong kind of tech debt can create huge problems in the future. People and culture debt are very similar: the longer you go without creating a source of truth about culture, the harder it becomes to influence the development of culture at your company.
how We Do: Develop an org-wide culture manifesto
If you’re a founder or early-stage company leader, creating a Company Culture Starter manifesto will help put your company on a path to long-term success.
Clearly articulating the culture you’re aiming to foster is an essential way to ensure your culture is growing the way you envision. Many founders shy away from this because it sounds like such a big task. Spending just a couple of hours of focused work on this, however, is plenty to create a starting point that will ground your team now and provide something to build on moving forward.
Tools 🛠️ & Rules (Process) 📝
The hardest part about creating your Company Culture Starter doc is actually setting aside the focus time to put (proverbial) pen to paper.
For this task you can use whatever writing tool you prefer that has the fewest distractions. Ideally choose something you can use offline, such as Notes, Google Docs, or Notion.
Here’s a quick process you can follow to efficiently get the result you’re looking for:
Done in advance: Schedule a 2-hour meeting with yourself on your calendar. Ideally, it would be early in the day so there’s a lower chance of having something come up that would interrupt your time.
Worried about protecting time? Invite someone to the meeting who can hold you accountable.
Set a 25-minute timer (or use this site) and spend the time responding to one or more of the prompts below.
What qualities and characteristics would make a prospective employee a good fit for your company? What would make a prospective employee not a good fit for your company?
How would your current employees describe what it’s like to work at your company?
How would you define what good work looks like?
What does it look like when two people work well together at your company? What does it look like when two people don’t work well together?
Set another 25-minute timer. Review your prompt responses and add more details and examples.
Ex. Maybe you wrote that good work at your company “drives impact.” What does that look like in practice?
Ex. Could you use this doc to make a hiring decision about whether a candidate would be a good fit for your company culture?
Set your final 25-minute timer. Re-frame and/or summarize your thoughts under the header “Our Working Culture: Starter Manifesto.”
You can use whichever format works best for you. This does not need to be fancy or pretty – the most important thing is that it provides clarity for yourself and your team. A few well-thought-out bullets in an email > a pretty slide that’s too high level to be useful.
With your remaining time, read what you’ve written aloud and make edits as necessary.
People 🫶
Once you have a good working draft, it’s important to get input on it so that you can understand how much your perspective aligns with the perspectives and experiences of your team members.
Start with seeking feedback from other senior members of your team. If you all are broadly aligned, then a good next step could be asking them to discuss the doc with their teams and bring back feedback.
If your senior team members have very different perspectives on company culture, then this is a great opportunity to step back as a group and reflect on questions such as: is the current culture of the company different from the ideal you’re aiming for? Your manifesto can serve as a jumping-off point for this conversation.
A warning: getting into well-intentioned debates about word choice, etc., can be where the time suck comes from in this type of work. To get around this, put parameters around the doc when you ask for input.
For example, letting the person know the artifact will evolve over time and that the high-level ideas included are more important than the language specifics.
Take It Up A Level
Using AI to Improve how You Do:
At any step in the process of creating your company culture starter doc, you could choose to get an assist from Grammarly or Chat-GPT by putting in what you’ve written along with any other company documents (ex. mission, vision) and asking the tool to summarize main ideas.
Get Outside Input
When you’re in the weeds as a founder it can sometimes be hard to zoom out. In addition to getting feedback from folks on your team, you can also seek outside input on your company culture starter doc. If someone in your network isn’t able to weigh in, you can always ask Chat-GPT to review your doc and point out key similarities and differences between the culture you describe and other company culture statements.
Actually Actionable
Nice article. Now what?
We’ve taken the ideas above and created an action plan for you and your team.
Objective 1: Collect all existing information about your company’s culture into one place.
Task: Pull together key emails, slacks, and other docs that give an insight into company culture (2 Hours).
Some places to look: anywhere you describe what it’s like to work at your company to candidates, new hires, and investors; your “About Us” page on your website; and your mission, vision, and strategy statements.
You can also ask employees to send you any thoughts or documents they have about company culture.
Objective 2: Use Chat-GPT to get a summary of the key components of your existing culture.
Task: Use a prompt in Chat-GPT such as “Below is an overview of information from a company about what it does and how the people there work together. Using this information, please summarize the important components of the company’s culture.” Below the prompt, copy the doc you created in Objective 1. Run the query and tweak it as needed. (30 Minutes)
Objective 3: Draft your Company Culture Starter manifesto.
Task: Follow the process above. Aim to be as disconnected as possible during this time so that you can really focus on laying out your thoughts (2 Hours).
Before you go
What we’ve shared above is meant to help you get your arms around a complex, meaty topic: what culture are you building as you grow your company? The process for getting started is relatively simple, at its core: complete a written exercise that doesn’t require any monetary or developer investment, just some focused thinking from a founder. That’s what makes it so powerful and actionable. Our hope is by breaking down the overwhelming “establish a culture” to-do into a set of clear first steps, you’ll be able to create alignment on your team and influence the culture of your company moving forward.
Writer: Leslie
Interested in working with Leslie through of All Trades to transform your people operations? Email founder@weofalltrades.com for more on how to bring her in as an embedded operator in your startup.
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