Four Lessons We’ve Learned About Creating Company Culture
Organizational culture isn’t about employee perks or special events — it’s the day-to-day interactions and persistent improvement efforts that make every team member feel valued.
Early in my career, I believed that creating a positive company culture meant making the workplace a fulfilling, pleasant, and rewarding place to be. If we’re going to spend a quarter of our lives working, we ought to enjoy our time doing so. I’ve worked in a handful of completely different environments — a fondue restaurant, a university office, a bank branch, and a small nonprofit. When I landed my first agency job in 2011, I was in awe of the creative ambition that energized the company and team. Soon after, I was thrilled to roll up my sleeves and become part of the Culture team.
The Culture team met twice per month. We scheduled birthday happy hours and team-building activities. We organized staff volunteer days to engage with our community, sorting produce at a food bank and sprucing up a local park. We served bagels every Monday and hosted team lunch-and-learns on Tuesdays. We hosted the occasional Waffle Wednesday and paired drinks with team recognition at the end of the week.
But these attempts at incorporating team-building, fun, and food didn’t address underlying issues around the expectations and realities of working together day-to-day. Although activities were scheduled months in advance, nearly half the staff worked through volunteer and team-building days under the pressure of deadlines. Bagels and lunches were eaten at desks, and often nibbled on through the evening as the team worked late hours. One by one, I saw team members growing frustrated, facing burnt out, and moving on to better opportunities that provided more balance and fulfillment. No matter how much you love Waffle Wednesday, it doesn’t matter if your voice isn’t respected or your professional growth isn’t valued.
As our team at Friday advises clients on company strategy and innovation, we recognize that team buy-in and engagement is essential to any organizational change effort. Culture is not about employee perks or special events, it’s the simple day-to-day stuff that isn’t particularly exciting when written on a list. Below we’ve identified four essential lessons that create a positive company culture — one that’s people-focused, guided by cultural norms, championed by leaders, and informed by vulnerability and openness.
1. Always remember we are people first.
We believe that to “walk the talk” of a positive culture is to genuinely care about each other’s personal well-being. At Friday, this means we simply ask staff what they need and want, encouraging folks to bring their whole selves to work, and celebrating each person’s unique value.
In our onboarding process, we ask new team members to create and share a User Manual — an overview of how you are best equipped to go about your work. We revisit our User Manuals several times throughout the year and when onboarding new team members. Everyone’s User Manual is shared company-wide in Dropbox, and includes answers to the following questions:
- How do you communicate?
- What is your work style?
- How do you like to receive feedback?
- When do you feel validated?
- When are you at your best?
- When are you at your worst?
For example, we know that as a former University of Wisconsin basketball player, Annie has been coached all her life and appreciates direct feedback and is big on celebrations. We know that Austin front-loads his most important work in the morning and gets a second creative wind late at night. Hillary thrives when she can switch gears between tasks to refresh and reanalyze, and thus enjoys working on multiple projects simultaneously. We know that Scott does his best work when he can step away from a project for a day or two, and come back to it with fresh eyes and ideas. And we all have acknowledged individually how important it is to rest and recharge in the evenings and weekends.
Once the unique needs of individual team members are understood, it’s important to support and respect them. For example, we encourage team members to set their Slack status to “busy” and block off their calendars to protect heads-down time when they need it. We know that taking a mid-day break to exercise or take a nap can make for a more productive day in total. While we often find ourselves declaring, “This is going to be a big week,” we’re quick to reassess priorities and make adjustments that will support the needs of our team.
2. Cultural norms guide how your team interacts.
When we founded Friday, we were determined to intentionally shape the company culture from day one. Mirroring the practices we use with clients in workshops and strategic planning sessions, we regularly begin our own team retreats sharing intentions for how we’d work together during that session.
While companies often tout their core values — the overarching morals that drive their work — focusing on cultural norms directs attention inward to tangible, specific declarations which guide us daily. We define our cultural norms as “the expectations that guide our behaviors, interactions, and communication practices — from internal team meetings, informal brainstorms, to one-on-ones, and client engagements.”
Documenting our norms from sticky notes into a shared Google Doc allowed us to revisit and adjust our running list each time our strategy sessions reconvened. After a handful of sessions we took note of the rising themes, and ultimately narrowed in on our company’s set of ten cultural norms. A few that stand out:
- We trust each other. We practice radical ownership, shared leadership, and believe in each other’s expertise and decisions.
- We talk it out. We jump into quick debriefs and give each other real-time feedback. We are open and upfront about what we need, what we want, what’s working, and what’s not. We prefer video and phone calls over email and Slack messages.
- We create time for creativity. We encourage time and space for activities that spark creativity individually, and together.
- We treat internal deadlines like client deadlines. We commit and we communicate. We are accountable for agreed-upon processes, create realistic deadlines, monitor progress, and raise and communicate challenges.
We continue to revisit our norms at our quarterly staff retreats and during performance reviews, reflecting on where we are thriving and the areas that need attention or adjustment. We weave norms into team shout-outs and staff recognition, and in doing so aim to keep these commitments top of mind for everyone on our team.
3. Committees alone cannot create lasting improvements in org culture.
Many organizations attempt to implement a bottom-up culture by creating planning committees and crowd-sourcing ideas to engage staff at every level. By avoiding a top-down approach, we tell ourselves that company culture is developed from within. Engaging staff is important for surfacing challenges and ideas, but regardless of who participates in a committee, the precedent of how we work is always set by the example of an organization’s leaders. Leaders must be as committed to the working norms as they expect everyone else to be, and show up authentically when adjustments are needed.
For example, maintaining staff wellness is a persistent challenge for many growing organizations, and the concept of “Wellness Week” is a common remedy. Perks like Fitbit challenges, lunchtime yoga classes, and office kitchens stocked with healthy snacks can be fun to plan and nice to have, but such activities don’t address the reasons staff are overwhelmed, anxious and sedentary.
Instead, an earnest assessment of how team dynamics, project structure, and company policies contribute to the well-being of the staff, paired with top-down adjustments to implement changes, demonstrate a more authentic — and likely more effective — attempt to prioritize physical and mental health, and improve the company culture. Support from leadership will make it or break it.
4. Opportunities for feedback are important; responding with vulnerability is critical.
At Friday, we’re pretty obsessed with documenting processes and aiming for constant improvement, as a team and as individuals. We schedule time to check in with each other and with our clients to understand opportunities to improve. We send a short survey to prospective clients who don’t ultimately choose to move forward with our project proposal. We also strongly encourage real-time feedback, jumping on a call to talk it out when a piece of feedback is top of mind, rather than waiting for months and dumping complaints into an annual review, which people soon learn to dread.
We believe it’s especially important for leaders to receive and act upon feedback with vulnerability and openness. As researcher and author Brené Brown noted in a 2016 keynote, “If you don’t understand vulnerability, you cannot manage and lead people. If you’re not showing up vulnerably as a leader, you can’t expect anyone to follow you — period.”
We strive to engage teams in open conversation about where we need to improve, and how we can better support each other in doing so. Whether it’s identifying the bottlenecks that stifle individual empowerment or recognizing that we aren’t living up to our responsibility to be actively anti-racist, acknowledging where we’ve fallen short is the first step. Then we must show a commitment to do better through honest reflection, difficult conversations, and consistent, ongoing efforts to change.
While we believe these four practices will help improve empathy and understanding among colleagues, we also recognize that there is no standard list of ingredients, and you should always be re-assessing the experience of individuals and team dynamics. In addition, factors such as industry, geography, number of staff — and adaptations and adjustments required in response to a global pandemic — will most certainly change the types of cultural norms and practices your team adopts. Assuming what has worked at your past company will work at your current company will probably set you up for disappointment.
For example, at Friday we recognized that by working 100% remotely, we needed to introduce more “human” moments that would normally unfold on the elevator or at the coffee machine. So we commit to quarterly retreats (in-person, when safe to do so). On Wednesdays we eat lunch together on Zoom and engage in exercises or discuss articles to understand different perspectives. And we assign a team member to spin a virtual wheel to lead a half-hour team reflection at the end of each week. We’re also fans of Playworks’ Work Play Balance Playbook to incorporate movement and play into our workday. We believe that there’s room for work and play, and that serious work requires a creative approach to open up new ways of thinking.
The current movement for racial justice also reminds us that, though we have worked hard to build our culture, we have much work to do to combat bias and racism. No organizational culture can call itself “good” unless it is fully inclusive of all team members. We are grateful that we have a solid foundation to work from as we engage this important work.
As we look to the future, many workplaces will look very different — but strong culture that is informed by the unique aspects of a team, demonstrated with vulnerability by leaders, and acted out every day will always be foundational, wherever we may be working.
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