Big boss tips for the top girl or guy

How to attract awesome people through your company culture

A lot of us have worked in an environment that is no fun. We all know about the workplace that sucks the motivation out of you, a place where you definitely don’t want to be. It sounds shithouse. The last thing you want is to wake up on a Monday morning, dreading the working week ahead. A main reason that you feel like this can come down to company culture. Company culture defines a business. Good company culture boosts morale which makes workers happy. Workers with high morale means a way more effective and productive workplace. A ‘happy place’ so to speak. So how do you make your side project the place where people want to work? How do you get your employees going to bed early on a Sunday so that the Monday morning meeting comes quicker? Okay, so maybe that won’t happen, but all you bosses out there can dream. Anyway, have a look at these tips, you can create your own ‘happy place’.

Setting out your values.

A team is made up of all different characters. The hard worker, the comedian, the perfectionist. Every type of person has their individual values. Finding that perfect value system needs to involve everybody in the business from the quite guy in the corner to the girl who lets her hair down that little bit too much at the staff party. Every voice, loud or quite, needs to be heard. For this to happen, have a team meeting. Get everyone on the team to sit by themselves for ten minutes and write down their ideas of what the company’s values should be. This is the best way to know how everyone feels. It can also be a great way to address any future problems that may arise. The best thing about this exercise? It’s that everyone in the workplace will feel that much more comfortable at work if everything is out on the table.

Hire staff that will work well with your startup.

Hiring a certain type of worker is a major way in shaping your companies culture. ‘Fitting in’ means finding the right people. If you want a harmonious workplace full of efficient and friendly workers, find the ones that will get along. When hiring, the people that ‘fit in’ should share the attributes that your company bases itself on. You have to spend a shit load of time with these people, so make sure they are people that you can stand. Things like identifying the person in questions sense of urgency, curiosity, willingness to fail, friendliness or adaption to change are important. Putting someone that culturally fits can sometimes be better than someone that fits functionally.

Growth can be inevitable, evolve with it.

Your business has created the culture you want to work with. But now all of a sudden, from ten people at the start you now have 50. Controlling all of the businesses employees on a day to day basis is pretty much, well, impossible. You need to do what you do as the boss, you can’t possibly take care of every single one of them, although you may want to. It’s just too hard. You still have direct control of all these busy working bees, but you realise someone else now needs to help. You may not have employed someone with leadership skills at the beginning, but now it seems pretty necessary to do so. Evolving and employing someone that can give you a hand is part of a growing business, more employees means more leaders. So find potential staff with great leadership qualities, it helps everyone involved.

Be the example

Everyone hates the boss who says but doesn’t do. We’ve even got friends or family members that sometimes share this sometimes ugly characteristic. You know, the one that tells you to do something, but do the complete opposite. Quite frankly it pisses us all off. It’s only human. So the last thing you need to be is a hypocrite in your own workplace. Be transparent, lead by example and your employees will do the same.

We all know that being a boss can be hard. But this is your chance to be the best boss that you can possibly be. Remember those times when you worked for someone else? You thought that you could do it better? Well, do it better. Show your workers how you want it to be done whilst also listening to what they have to say and your company’s culture will be reflective of the two-way communication. Employees always want a job that they love. You’re the one that can make the difference of whether they want to rock up every morning.

Have you established your own side project and instilled a great company culture? If so, we want to hear from you? What did you do to make your employees want to come to work? Maybe your ideas can help someone else make their side project the ‘cool’ and ‘fun’ place to be.