7 Steps to Writing a Culture Handbook, Not an Employee Handbook
There are a few companies that have written at length about their culture. Companies like Netflix and Hubspot articulate clearly what their culture is and communicate what behaviors they want to encourage (and which they want to discourage). Less well known are a few companies like the SAS Institute and Bridgewater that have equally strong cultures, and a similar commitment to educating their current and incoming employees about ‘the way they want to get work done.’
In most cases there is a document, a living breathing touchstone that captures the essence of each organization’s mission and its values. This is a company culture handbook.
Unlike the employee handbook that you are handed on your first day at any job, the culture handbook is something new hires should want to read. It should have information that is valuable to new hires and current employees alike. If an employee handbook is a document that collects dust at the back of someone’s desk drawer, a culture handbooks should be something that employees are constantly interacting with and contributing to.
Of course, this is easier said than done. So here’s how Pomello is going about the process of writing our own culture handbook:
Step One: Get out of the office
Even though your culture is something that takes place in the office, it’s really about who everyone is even when they aren’t working. It’s also really hard to break away from the mindset of putting out fires when you are in a normal conference room.
Now this doesn’t mean you have to do an expensive offsite. You simply have to get everyone away from their computers, off their smartphones, and present at the same time. Pick a day and time that works for your team, and make sure that everyone knows it is priority.
Step Two: Define a mission
The cornerstone of your culture is your mission. This goes beyond your product and your strategic goals, and instead speaks to the impact that you want to have on the world. Some questions to ask yourself in thinking about your mission are as follows: What will be people be able to do that they weren’t able to before? Why do they care about this? How will your work change how they feel?
Step Three: Define your values
Underlying your mission are your values. These are beliefs about what is important (and what is not important). In order for your mission to be at the center of your work, you must define your beliefs. Many organizations choose their values from a list, identifying the ones that sound the best.
This is one way to go about it, but we’d recommend that instead you spend time exploring what your mission says about your beliefs. The impact that you expect to have tells you something about what you believe is most important.
Step Four: Define what success looks like
Now that you have your mission and your values it’s time to make these concepts concrete. What does it look like to be successful? What are your expectations for how your team members will react to real-life situations.
This step is so critical to making your culture tangible, because otherwise your mission and values become very easy to pay lip service to. We recommend talking through real-life examples of living up to or not living up to your values as a way of highlighting expectations for how work gets done.
Step Five: Define traditions and artifacts
We wrote about defining traditions for your culture, but it bears repeating. The act of defining traditions or having ‘artifacts’ of your culture is a method for making it tangible to everyone on your team. We’ve all heard about companies that have ping pong tables and team lunches. These are traditions when done right, otherwise they are just distractions.
When building your own traditions, be sure to tie them to the values that are the foundation of your mission and your team’s sense of purpose. Importantly, traditions don’t have to involve expensive perks, and they can be as informal as jokes that are shared amongst your team members.
Step Six: Decide how your culture will evolve
No culture remains set in stone. Cultures live and change as your team grows, and employees join and leave the team. Sometimes external forces instigate change. Sometimes change is driven by positive forces like success, but change can also be driven by negative developments.
Regardless of the situation that you find yourself in, maintaining a strong culture is critical to your success and survival. Letting your culture evolve while maintaining its strength is most difficult part of this process. It requires regular timeouts from the hectic day-to-day to talk about culture as a goal in and of itself. Your team must be able to pitch ideas for how to change and improve culture.
Step Seven: Own your handbook
So you have a mission, your values, your vision of success, traditions, and a process for evolving. So you are ready to write your handbook. We recommend making it fun! Include photos of your team and take time to tell stories about wins and losses, and how your team responded. Have all new hires read it in their first week so that they have stories to talk about when they are getting to know all their new teammates.
The biggest challenge will be keeping your handbook from getting stale. To prevent this from happening to us, we are thinking of having a quarterly culture offsite, and putting ourselves on an editorial schedule for updating the handbook with new material and changes twice per year.
