What is Workplace Culture

Company culture is a key criteria for being an asset to your startup. It can influence many aspects of your success from how effectively you build a product to how quickly you gain traction with your target market, to customer brand loyalty and how aligned your employees are to your focus strategy.

Building and maintaining this culture takes time and effort, but the payoff can be huge — both for your company and for your personal growth.

As entrepreneurs, we are often motivated by our desire to prove ourselves. This motivation can blind us to other possibilities. When we begin our venture, we might overlook the difficulties that might be associated with pursuing said endeavor.

Instead, we focus on how to secure the next funding round—whether it be via investment or debt financing—and often lose sight of some factors that can bring huge rewards such as Return on Culture, Collaboration in the workplace, A shared common goal and Competitive Advantage.

How to create a positive culture in the workplace

Your culture is anything but static; it evolves and changes depending on the needs of the day. This means that some companies will be more successful than others. But, understanding what makes for a good company culture can help you determine how your business will thrive.

In this article, I will define ‘what is workplace culture’ and highlight '10 proven strategies' as it relates to team composition, talent acquisition and retention, business strategy, open communication and how leadership teams enable the best possible team ethos.

Don't accept a toxic workplace culture

It is safe to say, successful companies are built on mutual success where everybody is giving everybody else credit. Ideas are judged on the outcomes, not on who came up with the idea. Individuals feel safe to take risks, and even fail, using feedback to improve the next idea. 

In toxic company cultures, everyone wants to make sure everybody else knows what he or she did, even if he or she didn’t do it. Founders focus on the wrong things, employees feel disengaged and teams do not collaborate. Being the best ‘Spin Doctor” won’t deliver the best results for your company.

Amazing company cultures are built by amazing teamwork

Great company cultures are typically made up of people who could be doing a myriad of other things, but come together as a team to work on a particular product or service their company is building, because it is important to them and they believe in it. 

These cultures are often centered around amazing team work, diverse skill sets and the unyielding drive to help your team be more successful. 

Everyone plays a role in workplace culture

Great startup cultures bring fantastic rewards for team players and have a natural self-management process for weeding out those who are not adding value to the vision, mission and team collaboration culture.

Instead of accepting the least common denominator, great start-up cultures quickly reject those who are not meeting a high bar and search for talent who will push the bar higher. 

This makes talent acquisition and retention highly competitive for modern tech companies, but if your culture is strong, teams collaborate effectively, individuals are passionate about your mission, then mediocrity won’t be something you agonize over.

Your workplace culture should feel natural

Great startup cultures make every pound, dollar, cent or penny count. Being lavish doesn’t always bring lavish rewards, however being honest to your reality and combining that with creativity from your team as you grow, the results you produce will be real and every individual will feel proud to be part of your growth journey.

Align rewards to your people and workplace culture

Great startup cultures should always reward people in the short, medium and long-term. Short-term rewards are typically cash incentives, and they can play a motivational factor in achieving short term measurable goals quickly.

When it comes to long term rewards, equity is the play for most tech companies. But many startups do this very badly, especially with younger teams who may not have experienced equity rewards previously.

If you underpin your long term success with equity then be sure to consistently communicate the benefits, think of creative ways to visualize it, as it’s a sure fire signal that if your employees are not engaged by long term rewards, then they won’t stick around for the long term journey.

Purpose, mission and strategy

Great startup cultures are well-aligned, typically most effective when working in very small teams. 

The strategy needs to be simple enough that it makes sense and is aligned with the vision, which your employees are engaged with, and best of all, pro-actively help to refine. 

People are doing what they are good at and in the right roles. Every employee, from the CEO to a new hire, is on the same page. 

The McKinsey 7-S framework is a great assessment tool to track your strategy and culture alignment.

Focus on improving communication