Building your company culture

Company culture is a term that gets thrown around a lot, but it is often misunderstood by business owners and managers alike. Despite how we may have come to see it in the early aughts when Silicon Valley was rising from San Francisco’s fog, company culture is not a matter of putting ping pong tables in the staff room, or doing staff pizza nights once a quarter. Nor is it necessarily about creating an environment that is as fun as possible for the team.

And after the waves of headlines about ‘the great resignation’ and its counterpart the ‘epidemic of quiet quitting’ a lot of attention has landed on what workers want and how companies can give it to them to make them happy. You might wonder, is that company culture then?

To put it simply, company culture is how a company engages and communicates with its team to build an environment that is healthy and productive, and aligns with the company’s wider vision.

Why is this important?

Even though company culture may sound like a floaty, ambiguous term, it can actually make a huge difference to the day-to-day performance of your company when you take the time to understand and implement it properly.

Having a strong culture can result in better morale across the organisation, which in turn can lead to better staff retention, improved team performance, while ultimately leading to improved financial performance for the company.

As such it is important to understand company culture is a key component of running a business, not just an afterthought. This is becoming particularly important in recent times as record numbers of workers are coming to expect more from their jobs than just a recurring paycheck. Jobseekers are looking for an environment where they are able to feel fulfilled and content with their work. It’s about the quality of their professional life. For companies which are able to communicate and embody a clear culture you’ll find yourself with a very real competitive advantage when recruiting and retaining team members.

Need more convincing? In 2022, 40% of job seekers listed company culture as their top priority when considering a new job – only falling behind compensation and work-life balance. And on LinkedIn job listings that mentioned ‘culture’ got a 67% engagement boost.

So, we can all agree it should be a priority. Now the hard bit – doing it.

Start building

As a small business owner, it may seem impossible to balance tight finances and limited resources with building a company culture. There might simply not feel like enough hours in the day to correct bad habits or reset the weekly meeting that has lapsed as work piled up. However, I would argue that building a culture is far easier for a small business owner than it is for an established organisation with dozens or hundreds of team members.

Whether you’re just starting out or you’re revisiting your own CC, here are 3 things you can do from day one to start building a great company culture:

1. Write down what you want to represent

This may be a bit daunting, but you can start by scribbling down some ideas about what makes your company unique, what values your company prioritises, and where you want your company to go in the long term.

It’s also useful to compare yourself to your competitors, and see what they do really well and what they do badly. Perhaps your competitors are incredibly efficient, but they treat their staff poorly and have huge staff turnover. You could target this, and build a strong business competitive advantage in the process by attracting and retaining high performing team members, for example.

Examples like that easily illustrate how company culture and strategy go hand in hand to build and grow your business in a sustainable and competitive way.

Once you write down your ideas for what you want your company to represent, you should try to rank them in order of importance. Now you have a list of what values you want to implement through your culture.

2. Keep listening

A lot of managers and business owners decide what values they want to focus on, and they dictate these to their teams. They decide unilaterally what should be done to embody those values. This is a mistake. One of the most important steps when building a culture is to engage with your team, and LISTEN to their thoughts and opinions. It is not a culture if it is dictated, it becomes a rule. You need to hear from your team, tweak your ideas accordingly, and ensure that the culture you build has genuine buy-in from everyone.

This is also an opportunity to hear from the front-line what your business does well, where it can improve, and how those actions fit with the values you have listed.

3. Embody your culture

The simplest way to build a culture as a business owner is to embody the values yourself. This costs nothing at all, and is the most effective way to create a strong foundation.

Do you want your team to feel like their work-life balance is respected? Ensure that they aren’t forced to work excessive hours or miss events with their family and friends due to work. Actively encourage them to enjoy their time away from work. Or even better, lead by example by clocking off at 5pm to get to that birthday party or stop yourself from sending that 11pm email reply. Even the greatest workplace in the world is still a workplace, and it is totally understandable for team members to need time away to feel content, recharge and ultimately perform better when they get back to their desk.

This goes for any number of principles which you want your company culture to embody. Want your team to feel heard in the company? Ask them for their feedback on decisions and take it seriously. Want your team to feel well-managed? Understand what they need from a manager and act accordingly.

Conclusion

Being a business owner can often feel like you have too much to do and no time to do it all, and the qualitative things like building a culture can often slip into being secondary priorities which don’t deserve attention immediately.

I’m hoping the above has helped to change that notion. A company culture does not need to cost excessive amounts of time, money, or effort, and it has the potential to add a huge amount of tangible value to your business from day one.

It will help you to build an environment where your team is aligned, engaged, and motivated to work together for the success of the business. And where they’re happy to stay for years to come.

And the good news is that it is also never set in stone! Good leaders keep evolving as times change and innovating not only in their business but in the behind-the-scenes culture that feeds it. Don’t be afraid to revisit the decisions you’ve made, or to change your mind. Always keep asking the hard questions of yourself, and your company to keep building the company you hoped to run.

Dan Yates is the Co-Founder and CEO of Greener