Dialectica’s Culture Code: Our Secret Sauce (even while remote!)

Back in 2009, Netflix started a trend by publishing their culture code, a 125-page PowerPoint deck, that resonated with the world and went viral. Since then, it has been viewed 17m times on SlideShare alone, with Sheryl Sandberg the COO of Facebook calling it the ‘the most important document to come out of the valley’).

Since then, the term ‘Culture Code’ has become a standard term in the lexicon of fast-growing startups and modern workplaces. At its most basic, a culture code is a document that breaks down your company’s culture, core values, and mission into clear, easy-to-absorb pieces.

But why, you might ask yourself?

To answer this question, we must first understand what culture means. Here are few definitions of culture:

1. Edgar Schein (MIT): A pattern of shared basic assumptions that a group has learned as it solved problems of external adaptations and internal integrations, that has worked well enough to be valid and therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct ways to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.
2. Brian Chesky (AirBnb): Culture is simply a shared way of doing something with a passion.
3. Me (Dialectica): The shared behaviors, beliefs, and overall mindset that guide the way a business and its people operate. Culture is never monolithic or static, but rather a dynamic concept that is defined by the ‘average’ of the people within an organization.

There is one thing all these definitions have in common, which is that culture is a ‘shared’ way of thinking and doing. In the context of an organization, this can include things like the key priorities of your organization, what’s important to succeed, what to expect from one another, and how the company really has to operate, among many other things.

It is the blueprint for how your business should operate, which as you scale is increasingly important to ensure you ‘keep your business on track’. It is the compass for maintaining focus on your original purpose and driving everything (performance, growth, etc.) in the desired direction.

Sounds pretty useful right?

In the middle of 2018, as we shifted from start up to scale up, we decided it was high time to join the bandwagon and define the Dialectica Culture code. As a human capital business experiencing hypergrowth, this was a necessary measure to make us move forward in the right direction and maintain our ‘googleyness’ as they refer to at Google.

With that in mind, we moved rapidly to define our culture conducting a set of companywide exercises notably a full day culture workshop to understand what our culture was. After numerous reviews and iterations were conducted (We did more than 22!) through workshops, focus groups, and management meetings, we reached a final product. The Dialectica Culture Code was born, which would act as our internal ‘operating system’.

To ‘inaugurate’ our newly defined culture code, we threw a launch party on our rooftop, with all our employees and an amazing Acropolis view in the backdrop. The goal here was to get everyone hyped on the culture code they helped shape, define, and ultimately launch. This party had something special compared with our usual office events. It was a unifying moment where we all acknowledged what made us a great company — our culture, but most importantly our people!

Culture Code Launch Party

The Dialectica Culture Code is built on our vision and mission:

Vision: to innovate how business professionals share knowledge

Mission: to achieve unparalleled customer recognition as the most trusted knowledge sharing platform in the world and build a truly great organization that attracts and cultivates top talent

It consists of 7 values that underpin these two defining elements of our business and where we want to go:

Dialectica Culture Code

Since the launch, Dialectica has doubled in size going from about 80 employees to more than 160 Dialecticans! It’s essential that we ensure our culture remains alive and well especially in midst of hypergrowth.

One of the most important things about a culture code is ‘how you live it’. This is even more important given our current circumstances with the COVID19 pandemic. Across the globe, companies have shifted from office to remote, which brings a major challenge in maintaining company culture, among many other things.

At Dialectica, we are no different. Three weeks ago, we took the decision to go 100% remote and although our transition was smooth like we just flipped on the ‘remote work’ switch from on to off, we immediately felt a drop in our ‘culture meters’. Since culture is a group construct, not being physically present with one another creates barriers.

The good thing is, we were prepared for this, and immediately shifted our focus to reinforce our culture. What we found was most important to sustaining culture was the following:

1) Focus on the things that unify your culture

At Dialectica, this is our service quality and our people.

During this time, we have the opportunity to take a hard look at our workflow and find ways to optimize and strengthen our service quality. What is amazing is that even with our sudden switch to remote work, our team remains as dedicated and motivated as ever (if not more) to delivering our quality differentiated service.

Additionally, as a company we are doubling down on efforts to ‘care for people’, by identifying ways to improve remote work, increase engagement through a range of initiatives, and ensuring we are listening to employees by activating more feedback channels than ever.

2) Increase communication to address the ‘loss’ of physical presence

Since the transition to remote work, we have increased communication on all fronts. Corporate communications has increased to provide employees with necessary company updates. Teams conduct minimum 2 meetings per day. Employees have 1 on 1 catch ups with managers and colleagues. Slack channels are full of updates, shared insights, and funny comments. The use of videoconferencing has skyrocketed (thank you Zoom slack and hangouts). We’ve even held our first remote All Hands meeting gathering everyone together.

3) Take every opportunity to reinforce your values

From slack posts, emails, to video calls; be sure to leverage these opportunities (and others like social media) to highlight your values especially if someone in your team is actively embodying it!

4) Replicate office like behaviours and habits that are staples

Nothing can replace being in the office. But, what you can do is try to recreate the office environment and rituals virtually. For us some things that have been quite successful include:

• Leveraging tools like discord to set up an open communication stream with your team that you can toggle on and off as if you were all sitting in the office
• Continuing office activities like yoga, but via videoconference. This is something we’ve done and seen even higher participation than in-person yoga!
• Launching new initiatives like virtual coffee breaks, where employees are grouped to have a short video conference break together to socialize and discuss a theme (for example this week was spotify playlists!) and many others

Now more than ever, culture needs to be in the front line of your organization’s priorities. Here are Dialectica, we are doing everything we can to keep our culture thriving even amidst a crisis! The secret sauce that makes us truly unique.

Did you like this post? Share it via social media and give a 👏 for more people to see it. If you are interested in learning more about our culture, do not hesitate to visit our website and take a look at our job openings!