Building culture from scratch: A day of cultural impact

A story-driven approach to identify the cultural elements in early-stage startups.

Photo by Helena Lopes on Unsplash

Designing a strong culture gives entrepreneurs operational leverage. Building it is hard. So far, we have not encountered hands-on resources to guide us through this process. Hence, we decided to create a playbook by ourselves.

This first essay is part of a series about company culture. This episode takes a walk through the day of a startup founder. It focuses on identifying how single actions influence cultural impact. After every section, we’ll zoom out and see how your company culture is affected by the founders’ actions and rituals. Let’s jump into it!

A day of cultural impact

It’s 8:30 in the morning. Overworked after the weekend, you enter your office. Since you founded your startup company 15 months ago, things have gone well. Together with your two co-founders you raised funds, launched a product, and built your initial team of nine mission-driven people with a shared goal.

You open the door, put your backpack down, and walk straight to the kitchen to grab a coffee. Three of your team members are already there. You ask about their weekend and how they feel today. For you, it is important to build personal relationships with your team and learn more about their lives outside the work context. After a few minutes of enthusiastic chatting, you head towards a free desk to check your email inbox and plan the day. You write down your most important tasks on a physical whiteboard next to you to reinforce transparency.

Culture impact

1. Morning chats easily fall into oblivion but are important to build personal relationships
2. Desk rotation connects people outside their functional group (e.g. sales, engineering)
3. Public tasks create transparency and accountability.

Your two co-founders enter the office. You head off to the dedicated meeting area to prepare for the company-wide all-hands meeting punctually starting at 9:00. It took a bit of convincing to establish this weekly ritual at such an early stage. However, you believe that such meetings create alignment between the co-founders and provide direction for your small team. Together, you decide on the three most important organization tasks for this week. Your technical co-founder, a critical thinker through and through, cross-checks the new weekly priorities with your mission and how they contribute towards your OKRs progress.

Culture impact

1. Preparing the all-hands meeting aligns co-founders, sends a coherent message and prioritizes the next steps.
2. All-hands meeting helps to prioritize when choosing between tasks.

At point 9, you gather your team. The all-hands meeting is time-boxed for 15 minutes. You, as the CEO, start the short presentation with a revisit to your mission. In a few sentences, you reflect on why this company exists, what the final vision looks like, and how you will get there. Your co-founder takes over, sharing the progress of your OKRs and the three most important tasks for this week. You round up the last minutes by letting a team member share a short story about what she has done in the last two weeks to advance the company’s mission. You introduced the last agenda point only recently after you have realized that mission should not only be communicated top-down but rather be lived by everyone. With this bottom-up approach, you hope to foster stronger identification with the company throughout the team.

Culture impact

1. Time-boxing and punctuality signal valuing the team’s time.
2. All-hands meeting reinforces your vision and roadmap.
3. Reviewing OKRs creates transparency, motivation, and alignment.
4. The personal story fosters company identification and signals how everyone contributes to the goal.

After you wrap up the all-hands meeting, the group dissolves into smaller teams to share the most important tasks within their functional group. Each of these smaller gatherings starts with a check-in to gain an understanding of how everyone is feeling. You introduced these check-ins like describing the emotional state with one or two words after you realized how the individual’s current context influences decision-making and performance. Understanding that someone has slept badly or is stressed helps to adapt to the individual’s needs. While check-in is similar for each functional group, discussing priorities, challenges, and next steps is individual to each team. Engineers discuss how to tackle an unsolved problem, while the growth team determines measurable sales results for the end of this week.

Culture impact

1. Check-in creates psychological safety through understanding.
2. Functional group meeting improves alignment and resolves roadblocks.

From 10 am until lunch, your whole organization dives into focused and silent work. Since you recently read a few books from Cal Newport and Jason Fried/DHH, you realized that productivity stems less from many working hours but rather undisrupted high-quality work. After some initial resistance, your team has adopted this approach with great enthusiasm. Making progress increases their motivation.

However, you make an exception and take the time to personally onboard a new hire today. It is important to provide new team members with full context on the company and the inner workings. You do not want to micromanage but enable smart people to work with great autonomy and let them decide what is best for the company. Context is essential here. So for the next two hours, you explain to your new hire the most important things. That includes the financial status and unit economics, product and technology, as well as your customers and acquisition channels.

Culture impact

1. Deep work ritual signals to value productivity.
2. Skipping a ritual violates a rule. It is a balancing act to enforce rituals while still being flexible. When skipping any ritual, make sure to clearly communicate it to the team and its reason. Be proactive about the ritual next time.
3. Enable autonomy for new hires by providing a broad context during onboarding.

It’s lunchtime! Every day, one person is responsible for cooking, ordering food, or reserving a table at a restaurant so that your team can eat lunch together. Throughout the lunch, you discuss your deep work achievements as well as personal matters. It’s good to relax and catch up after an intense work session.

Culture impact

1. Lunch is an invaluable (often skipped) ritual that enables the self-expression of individual team members.
2. Team lunch signals caring about personal relationships.

After lunch, you are conducting two client calls and share your observations within a dedicated Slack channel with your team. You believe everyone in the company must gain context to autonomously make user-centric decisions.

Culture impact

1. Communicating observations from calls enforces transparency within the team.
2. Sharing customer insights with the team allows them to empathize with the user.

In the early afternoon, you head over to private meeting space to conduct your bi-weekly 1:1 with one of the engineers. You have read in Andrew Grove’s book High Output Management about the importance of regular discussions with your employees and encourage everyone in the organization to do the same. Your team members can only do their best work if they have clarity, accountability, and are valued for their work. Dedicating time each other week to talk about work and non-work-related things provides structure.

You start the 1:1 with a check-in question to get a feeling for the context your engineer is in. This opener can be something like “How are you feeling today?” or “How was your day so far?”. If she had little sleep or is stressed, you might expect more emotional reactions. You then talk about how the last week went and future development.

The 1:1 meeting is not only about her but also about a way for you to learn and improve. In the second half of the meeting, you shift the focus towards bi-directional feedback. In the last few weeks, you have noticed that she made many avoidable mistakes. Hence, the message in this specific conversation is “We have high standards, you currently don’t fulfill them.” So you both discuss the questions on “What should I start doing? What should I stop doing? What should I keep doing?”. You as founders decided early on that radical transparency is important for the progress of your company. So the mutual feedback is honest and direct. No sugar-coating.

You wrap up the 1:1 with concrete action steps for next week to keep each other accountable. You end on positive terms with a round of appreciation.

Culture impact

1. Regular 1:1s help to early-detect arising tensions and solve them immediately.
2. Paying full attention values your team members and helps them grow personally and professionally.
3. Ending the 1:1s with honest appreciation improves your emotional connection with the engineer.

After the conversation, you take a coffee break and casually chat with an engineer you casually met in the kitchen. It’s important to relax for improving long-term productivity. You spontaneously decide to play a short game of table tennis so that everyone can actively participate and recharge.

Culture impact

1. Spontaneous chit-chat lightens the mood and builds good relationships.
2. Playing reduces stress and encourages playful work.

It’s 15:30 and you conduct a final interview with a potential marketing hire. You perform the initial two interview rounds virtually and the final one in person. Physical meetings help to spot non-verbal cues for better decision-making. Since you still are a small company, every new hire has a huge impact on the company culture, affecting the work and team dynamics and indirectly by whom they attract as additional hires. You once more introduce yourself on a personal and business level and why you are building this company. Regardless of the hiring outcome, you show enthusiasm about the mission as you want to convert a stranger into a believer. Every interview is an opportunity to reinforce the public image. Later, you summarize your impression when it is still fresh and prepare to present it to the team on the next day for decision-making.

1. Hiring has an enormous influence on the company culture — make sure to be diligent.
2. Focusing on personal bonding during the interview phase enforces the company culture.

At 18:00, you go on a walking meeting with your two co-founders. Since ca. 2/3 of founder teams get divorced, building strong and trusting relationships is crucial. Taking the time to focus on personal relationship building reduces the risk of misalignment and frustration. For an hour, you walk through a nearby park and discuss the general state of the company and that arose throughout the week. After you arrive back at the office, you complete some unfinished tasks. At around 20:00, you personally say goodbye to the night owls and head back home. With a smile on your face, you close the office door and reflect on the achievements and learnings of this day.

Culture impact

1. Taking time to talk with your co-founders can prevent a ‘divorce’.
2. Saying goodbye to each team member at the end of the day enforces a personal bond and also shows respect.

Conclusion

Culture is formed through many, mostly small, actions. Building a strong culture requires a deep understanding of its drivers, establishing personal relationships, as well as communicating with clarity and honesty.

DISCLAIMER: The information presented in this article is from a variety of different sources, namely books, blog posts, common knowledge, our own projects, and work experience.