Here’s Exactly How We Keep Bannersnack’s Culture Strong
An insight into how great core values and flexibility helped build a team of professionals for a strong and healthy company culture.
For some of us, company culture can be only a buzzword that HR people use in presentations at different events. But what if we look at this term as an engine that helps the car move forward? Company culture can be defined as rules and principles, but at the same time, it also acts as important physics and mechanics principles that help the car work properly in the long-run.
With that being said, I thought I would take this opportunity to write down a few simple yet powerful ideas of what company culture means for a business that started out back in 2008 as a small team of people passionate about web development.
They wanted to make a tool to help marketers create stunning visuals for their online campaigns. The core was formed by people who had strong and healthy values and for whom teamwork, friendship, and flexibility were not just plain words.
In the beginning, there were 20 people working for this product (developers and designers mostly), and soon after launching Bannersnack and seeing that it brings money, they got the idea to make a family of similar tools for a suite called Snacktools. The entire team was gathered around the CEO and founder of the company, a young entrepreneur, Gaby Ciordaș. Soon, more people joined the team because of those initial people, who turned out to be great choices for our project.
That’s when Bannersnack started to grow. And as a clever man once said on the internet, more people mean bigger responsibilities and of course, bigger problems. So we needed problem solvers who could troubleshoot and solve the issues for us. And in came people, lots and lots.
They were layers upon layers around that core that brought great value to the company, whose vision was flexible enough that it ended up adapting to fit the needs of the many, but at the same time, careful not to neglect the main pillars.
How to find people who fit your company culture — 5 easy steps
Of course, the issue with the growth of the company was how can one find people who fit the culture? The answer was simple for us. And we made a simple guideline for you to follow, too:
1. Don’t prioritize skills over human character
In searching for people to fill the positions you have in your company, you might come across some brilliant jerks (which is to say people who are very talented but have doubtful morals or nasty personalities).
Should you think about hiring those people, please think twice, for their impact might destroy the culture you fought to preserve in your company.
I love how Jason Fried & David Heinnemeier Hanson talk about this idea in their recent book “It doesn’t have to be crazy at work”:
“We hired many of our best people not because of who they were but because of who they could become”
So the selection was made taking into consideration how a person was as a human being, and not only relying entirely upon his/her abilities (which, everyone knows, can be developed through time, if the person is willing and shows interest).
2. Establish management roles
You have your team assembled and it’s great… but who leads all those people? This was another challenge we had to face: how to establish management roles.
We did not choose to bring outsiders in order to simply cross that task off the list, but rather we looked inside our group to find the ones who were recognized by their colleagues as native leaders. We chose to put in charge people who were given authority by their peers because they were the ones who took in responsibilities, people who were hard workers and knew the product like the back of their hand.
This decision turned out to be exactly what the doctor ordered, helping us increase employee loyalty over time.
3. Understand the value of time
There’s an Irish saying that says ‘It takes time to build castles.’ So if you come and think about your company as a castle, you surely understand the value of time. The growth of both our team and the product was done over a decade, so we can argue that this way of doing things is not the fastest, but then again, please take into consideration the fact that we had no investors to bring in money at the drop of a hat and we were working on our own product, which meant no client got to boss us around and decide which features to implement or which direction our product was headed for.
4. Ask your team
In 2016, we conducted a study to see what type of organizational culture we have here at Bannersnack. Surprisingly or not, our findings reinforced the idea above, that leaders were not appointed, but self-made, and that people worked as one big family instead of mere coworkers.
The working environment was a friendly one, and people had a lot in common. Our company was held together by loyalty and tradition, with great involvement from our people.
We now had a name for our particular way of doing things — we were identified as a CLAN (according to the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument — developed by Cameron & Quinn). And it works for us because all these values are intrinsic, and we managed to create here a personalized culture which is 100% our own, and not something someone told us to enforce one day. In other words, this right here is our legacy.
We repeated the study at the beginning of 2019 when the team has doubled its number, and the results were the same. Coincidence? I think not! The CLAN typology works for us and gives us the results we want, so for the time being, we here at Bannersnack have no future interest in changing the status quo.
5. Grow as a team. Develop as a person
People who work together, grow together. As new faces were coming in, and new departments were formed, we started to implement different kinds of practices. We started a mentorship program and paired the new-ins with mentors. The mentors were those responsible for the progress and development of our new employees.
Not only they were teaching from their experience, but they also started having frequent feedback meetings (at least once a month) to address certain issues and search together for improvements.
In the beginning, we found it hard to talk about “what we do”, “how we do”, and “what we face” so we started to have workshops on addressing constructive feedback. And it did help!
We started talking more and more about what we’re doing good or what we need to improve, to encourage our discussion about progress but also about things that are holding us back.
We also started to develop a career job ladder (junior-middle-senior), that really came in handy for our mentors. At first, we made it for the development team, then we extended it for different departments (marketing, design, support, account management, and so on).
As we were growing we felt that the job ladder was too general and we started to divide each level, junior, mid-senior in another 3 branches. If a person met our requirements we were going to the next level. When a person reached a senior position, we started talking about leadership opportunities.
It was a great journey and we tried our best to learn from our experiences and to accept mistakes as learning opportunities.
What’s next for Bannersnack? Getting bigger and better, of course!
