InJuly I joined the team at Hifyre, a company that builds cutting edge digital products, to develop their community engagement. The first project that I was tasked with was building a culture guide. What in the world is a culture guide you ask? Let me take you on a journey.
Before we get to what a culture guide is and why they are important, let’s look at the big picture. This year has been a particularly bad year for company culture in tech. Or at least in the number of companies that were featured in exposés illuminating bad culture that has persisted for years. Early in 2017, Susan Fowler published a piece exposing practices at Uber that were less than kosher. What followed was a year full of allegations and exposed poor practices at companies in both the United States and Canada. Even companies like Google and Amazon were exposed in various examples of unsavoury behaviour. Culture problems don’t just arise at small startups, they manifest in the conglomerates too. And it’s become more obvious throughout this year that good culture doesn’t just happen accidentally. Positive company culture must be nurtured and raised alongside the company itself.
Our team here at Hifyre can proudly say, we do not fall into the category of “tech company with a problem”. As a matter of fact, we feel very confident that Hifyre has exemplary company culture — a core set of beliefs and practices that makes our team who we are. Maintaining a positive culture regardless of how many people join our team, as our company grows.
We began wondering — how can we make sure that this culture continues to carry forward? We started jotting down thoughts on what makes our team unique, what our values are, who we aim to work with, why we love coming to work, and many other little bits that we felt made us, us. The next thing we knew, we had an overflowing list of ideas, values, traits, core beliefs, and goals. That’s when we knew — we needed to put together a document capturing our thoughts. Having a living, breathing document that captures the essence of our team would allow us to hire more effectively, demonstrate our ethos to new clients, and provide a concrete standard for what we expect of our team members — both new and “original stock”.
“Culture is not just one tangible thing, but rather a collection of values, beliefs, and practices that come together to create an atmosphere.”
So we got to work. Now, culture is not something that is easily defined. From our experience, culture is not just one tangible thing, but rather a collection of values, beliefs, and practices that come together to create an atmosphere. A culture.
So how do you compile a feeling into a physical form? Our main concern was making sure that the document we were creating, our culture guide, was not representing purely the executive perspective on the company. Hifyre is full of dynamic, creative, passionate individuals — and when we all come together to work on projects — we get amazing results. So we wanted to make sure the culture guide was created the same way.
Our approach for getting everyone’s perspective was to send a list of questions to the team for them to answer anonymously.
1) What interested you in working here when you first joined the team?
2) In your own words, what does company culture mean to you?
3) How do you think our company incorporates culture into day-to-day work life?
4) If you could put the vision here at Hifyre into words, how would you describe it?
5) Looking forward, where do you see Hifyre headed?
6) Where would you like Hifyre to be heading?
7) What are the mottos that you feel are important for Hifyre to live by?
8) How do you bring Hifyre’s purpose & mission into your work on projects?
After receiving input from the team, our next step was working on collating the responses and ideas into a document that represented everyone’s views. This was not actually a difficult task, because as we’d previously surmised, our company culture is strong — the result of that being that our entire team had a unified vision. We built a framework around the values we have collectively agreed upon, and then began to draft copy around those pillars.
Once we were happy with the content, we began to incorporate visuals. Building a culture guide is about more than just getting words down on paper. No one wants to read something that looks as boring as a legal document. We wanted to make sure that each page was illustrated to help create a vision. Not just in words, but an actual vision.
As with everything else we do here at Hifyre, design is crucial. If you are unfamiliar with the way design thinking flows, it goes something like this: Empathize & Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test, Implement. No matter what project we work on, design thinking is ALWAYS our process. As you may have guessed, we had reached the “test” phase for our culture guide. This meant gaging reactions — both internally and externally — of our first draft.
We circulated the document to the team first, and once we had taken their suggestions into account (draft two), we then began sharing the guide with our friends, families, and networks of colleagues for further guidance. The feedback was incredibly valuable and overwhelmingly positive. We started to realize that we were not the only team thinking about these concepts. Nearly everyone that provided us their opinion said something along the lines of, “This is great! Our team has been meaning to create something along these lines. Can we share this out?”
So, what did we learn?
Building a culture guide for a rapidly evolving team of developers and creatives was a journey. It allowed us to have candid conversations both within our team, and with other companies having the same types of conversations. It made us realize that these are the types of conversations that we don’t want to stop having. Even though our culture guide is now publicly available, we decided that it will never be a static document.
Culture is dynamic. As our team grows, we want to make sure that our guide provides structure and helps new hires, new clients, and everyone in between, with a baseline for who we are as a company and a team. That said, we also want to make sure we continue to iterate. We will be revisiting the culture guide each year (for now — perhaps more frequently if necessary) to make sure that our team is still being served well by the guiding principles and values. Making an effort to openly discuss company culture, founding values, and guiding principles brought our team closer together. We made a culture guide, and we’re better for it.
You can view our Culture Guide here:
