Partner Article

This is How You Safeguard and Thrive Your Startup Culture

The underdone and untapped energy of a new business is a powerful, yet a fragile thing. It’s what asks the workforce to enter the office at the first sunlight and stay for extended hours. That’s what drives the most efficient employees and keeps them dedicated and loyal in an aggressive market even after being underpaid and unable to enjoy the benefits your competitors might be providing to their workforce. This is where your business culture steps in!

For any startup, the ‘survival’ aspect is the foremost thing, while thriving and maintaining a foothold in the industry is practically harder than most business owners realize. Agreeably, as the company grows and tends to increase its hierarchy levels, the more the threat from external influences.

Here comes the big question: how to protect and elevate your new business culture while your company grows? Do see that it’s not the “Fun Fridays”, ultra-personalized HR policies, exceptional visionary statements, etc., but here are the tips you need to be aware of if you are to safeguard and boost your company culture.

1. Obtain a precise insight: Getting into tune is all about acquiring an in-depth and accurate understanding of your team’s dynamics and the tone employees are setting on regular basis. Closely see the things you have been avoiding until now. If the team is practicing collaboration and performing all the rights tasks without requiring your monitoring, then you have a functional team culture. Employee retention is another powerful indicator that shows the organization is moving in the right direction. Consider the ideal scenario, you team is hitting its monthly goals perfectly, performing up to or even beyond the expectations, so what else is there to think about? In cases when teams start to expand, it’s important to stay vigilant and gauge what the increasing workforce is trying to tell you. The time when everything is going as planned in a lucrative manner, it is when you can consider leading forward by following. But don’t forget the valuable touchpoint from where it all began.

Acknowledging the behavior and recognition of your workforce is important, but so is the big game in your job as well.

2. Opt it (only if it works): Never hesitate to create culture-oriented decisions related to the behaviors that are already providing you top productivity. Consider refreshing a big office for instance, if your workforce is spending half its time cooperating in the kitchen, this might be your move to build more inviting and friendly common areas rather than trying to squeeze everyone back to their workstations. While if the major chunk of your team comprises of youthful energy who are hell-bent on accomplishing their targets, then practicing early morning work hours might backfire to their productivity, rather than enhancing it.

3. Say no to ’one-size-fits-all’: Containing a company’s culture is not an easy task, especially when the culture has expanded to multiple times the size that it used to be at the inception of the business. The goal may even be unrealistic. However, the best bet can be placed on adapting and renewing the culture. Avoid announcing the culture incorporation on a company-wide macro level, and go for the individual team cultures.

What we should understand is each employee comes from a different professional and demographic background, and follows the working habits quite different from the colleague sitting next. Considering each team in your company has its own culture and working philosophy to register, provided all are moving in a unified direction, then it’s a positive indicator for culture nurturing. Take Microsoft for example, the tech giant has adopted the concept of ‘mini startups’, which allows each team to fabricate and practice their own culture and management style all within the umbrella of an established enterprise. Even moderately-sized firms experience multiple cultures within the business, a positive notion if all the teams are aiming for converged goals and objectives.

4. Guidance and empowerment: Culture is a complex toolset constituting variety of organizational values, norms, work ethics and personalities, and not something made from processes and checklists. Considering processes in the equation is not bad, but if it is absolutely necessary for the company growth, you need to be vigilant on how to use it. In many industries, processes are extended and incorporated in the organizational culture if management feels the workforce is not heading in the right direction. On the bad part, it hinders top employees from demonstrating their full potential and decision making ability due to the limitations imposed. It’s as simple as congesting a number of complex rules, flow charts, and conditions, and see the drop in the productivity yourself.

To counter the issue, it’s better to devise smart and measurable goals for your team. Provide them the relevant tools and trainings to perform at the peak of their game. As the company starts to grow and you gain more experience, hire better people and eliminate stuffing layers of irrelevant processes. The point is to hire people that not only fits well with your organizational culture, but also helps it thrive.

5. It’s about the values, not added amenities: Undoubtedly, a nice fortune earned by the company each quarter is an attractive prospect, but the equation for a perfect company is not complete. In short, setting up the best company culture is not about copying the game changers in today’s competitive era. Offering free lunches daily, unlimited annual leaves, and the benefits only the biggest names across the globe has to offer to their workforce, but such perks aren’t a part of culture, not to mention the mounting expenses the company will be struggling to contain very soon.

It might come as a surprise, but the most potent culture-centric tools will never incur you a single penny. Such as the foremost values of a true leader and entrepreneur. Investing in cultural aspects will facilitate the tone of your team. Despite the fact that team culture tends to change and evolve with time, but there are some core norms that defines the backbone of your organizational culture and philosophy and should remain intact for future generations to understand and thrive in the company. The decisions and company-wide changes you make as the business grows should reflect the true essence of your values from each aspect.

Final Words: Summing all the pointers above indicates that the organizational culture is the driving force behind the success or failure of any business. But in order to keep your cultural values intact, it’s important you create and maintain a team chemistry, team dynamics, and provide them challenging opportunities on regular basis, especially when there is a startup involved. Undoubtedly you want to keep your employees motivated and show them a clear roadmap as to where they are headed, provided you want your startup to hatch out of its infancy and be ready to face the big guns in the industry.

Author Bio: Finn Watson is an avid reader and writer of a number of top blogs for business and management sciences and regularly provides valuable advices to students and professionals. Finn is an MBA, an experienced dissertation help service provider, and has worked with some of the leading FMCG companies across the globe.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by James Akins .