How We Improved Our Company Culture at Alea
“Company culture is the personality of the company” says Alison Doyle. Well, and how do you improve that personality? Can a man improve his own personality? How does that work on an organizational level?
At ALEA we experienced this transformation and — as for a human being — improving your personality, your culture, the system of beliefs, actions and behaviors is not an easy thing to do. It takes time, it is incredibly complex, and it must be done with the help of the management.
This is how we improved our company culture, and why we are not done yet
“Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first.” Simon Sinek
1) Be Open to Employees’ Feedback
A few years ago, looking at ALEA you could see a relatively small tech company with a huge potential. A truly unique product in its industry, a bunch of talented people working like crazy to make the business grow. Month by month. Step by step.
On the other hand, you could immediately feel that there was some kind of discontent, especially in some departments. That was shown at first in random complains in front of the coffee machine about “managers”, about “lack of communication” or even stuff like “it’s always the same thing here, they’ll never change”.
The high employees’ turnover rate was only the costly result of that.
Facing what’s wrong is the first step towards a proper knowledge of the company’s inner dynamics and the possible solutions.
We organized a global survey and face to face interviews with each employee in order to get a real touch of what the feedback was. It is important to integrate both approaches. On one side we got measurable data by department, by manager and group of employees with comparable questions on scale. Apart from that, having F2F meetings with each one allowed us to dig deeper into specific problems, feelings and any sort of feedback you may think of.
2) Trust, Trust and Trust
At that point, we had collected a clear picture of what was happening. The most common feedbacks, along with the small office, were about the lack of flexibility, the lack of communication, not feeling rewarded humanly by the managers and a wider feeling of opposition and distance between managers and employees (on both sides).
All of it, really, all of it, had a common root: the luck of Trust. Since Managers didn’t trust their employees, they would always think that they weren’t delivering enough — in absence of a proper performance management system. On the other side, the cultural gap (most of the management was of the same nationality), the lack of flexibility and the lack of trust towards employees was generating a tremendous turnover.
If trust is missing, working together can be tedious, frustrating and quite inefficient.
3) Change Takes Courage
Changing something like that can be sometime impossible. Changing mentality, shifting the focus from “who works overtime is trustworthy, and who doesn’t is not” takes a lot of efforts. Here are some of the points we had worked on:
- Build a performance-oriented culture
- Trust in people accountability and commitment
- Make sure to work with adults
While still working on the first one, our founders have been extraordinarily open to restructure our belief system, once understood how deep that mindset was undermining the business.
Of course, in these kinds of radical shifting, you will have to take forward with you anyone ready to accept the importance of those points and let go the rest. Otherwise you risk to hold back the company for a few managers or employees who are not fitting anymore with a new, improved and healthy vision.
4) Flexibility and Responsibility
In this kind of contest, having a flexible working schedule and being able to work from home acquires a remarkable importance. That was unthinkable before, but once implemented would be unthinkable going backwards to a traditional rigid schedule.
Learning how to trust each other implies the existence of a space of autonomy and accountability where trust is cultivated on a daily basis.
The same space allows the management to understand who’s not trustworthy as well, for which reason it is a powerful tool on both ways.
If we feel entrusted, we will deliver more and be committed to the other person in order to don’t betray that trust. If we are treated like children, we will tend to behave as children.
Limiting autonomy and accountability because you don’t trust your employees, it’s like stopping training because you’re not strong enough. You will never get better.
“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.” Ernest Hemingway
5) Workplace Experience
If culture is the “personality of the company”, the office, well, would be its outfit. Would you feel comfortable wearing pants 3 times smaller than your actual size? I don’t think so. That would be quite annoying in fact.
We managed to change both offices to larger, well-designed and functional workplaces where people can work in different locations. It is important to find space for focusing by yourself, space for playing, for chilling, space for meetings of all sizes. Everything wrapped in a biophilic experience full of natural elements that just make you feel good. This is how we did it if you want to learn more.
6) Be True to Yourself
While trying to improve your company culture you will face the “copy & paste” risk. That means that many companies out there add benefits, office features, values and campaigns just because it sounds trendy, and everybody is doing that.
We didn’t want that to happen to us. Change takes a lot of efforts because before producing a nice employer branding campaign and telling the world “how cool you are”, you need to produce an actual change in the teams and on a management level, and while doing that, you need to be true to yourself as a company.
I believe the main value we carry with us is the will of continuous and constant improvement, no matter what.
At ALEA a lot has been done. Thanks to the efforts of the founders and the employees all, we managed to build a truly amazing work environment where talent can thrive, and the business grow. We are still far from perfection, and we keep working hard to make it better. Taking part in this never-ending improvement processes is what it feels like to be at ALEA.
