The Importance of Investing Early in Culture
What is culture?
We see culture as the ‘how’ of everything we do. From how we arrange our office to how we treat our customers and teammates, the ‘how’ is what sets us apart from every other company in the world.
Having a cohesive culture both unites a team through the inevitable ups and downs of a company’s life-cycle, and serves to attract and retain the best teammates along the way.
What is cultural debt?
Similar to how there is financial and technical debt, there is also cultural debt. Cultural debt is essentially making a decision that borrows against the company culture. For example, hiring an all-star engineer who doesn’t align with the core company values.
Such decisions may seem manageable at first due to other benefits that person may bring, but they can have huge cumulative consequences long-term. It can hinder both personal and professional dissatisfaction amongst the whole team, creating divisions company-wide and ultimately risking turnover. While having some cultural debt can provide short-term relief and leverage (e.g., this all-star engineer can alleviate workloads for other engineers, improving their work-life-balance), the negative effects accumulate over time and you will need to pay it off eventually. The longer you wait to tackle it, the more difficult it is to address and larger the issue can become (ex: if this all-star is also hiring folks with a similar mindset).
The best strategy is to tackle your cultural debt early, or not accrue it in the first place.
Why does culture require investment?
By sticking to your company values and diversity goals, your hiring process will most likely take longer and can hamper your short-term growth. In order to achieve headcount goals effectively, you must be prepared to spend time and money on calibrating your recruiting and retention efforts. The end goal is to not only find the best employees, but to also help them build long-lasting careers within your company. Even from a purely monetary perspective, not taking the time and resources to invest in your culture and people can cost upwards of 2x the annual salary.
Of course, if you’re willing to sacrifice on company values or cost/time efficiency, you don’t need to be as critical upfront in investing in culture. My guess is if you’ve come this far into the blog post, you probably care about both.
How we invest in culture at rideOS
We established our company values early and refer back to them often: One of the first things our founders did when rideOS was founded was establish company values. These values include:
- We are good humans
- We, not me
- We value people
- We innovate and dream
- We optimize our time
Our values serve as a roadmap whenever we face important decisions. With everything from our investors to how we structure compensation, our values play a critical role in driving these decisions. Our interview process includes multiple assessments to determine if the candidate aligns with our core company values and we continue to monitor this alignment throughout the employee lifecycle.
We hire the best in the industry without compromising cultural impact or diversity: Two of our company values are “we are good humans” and “we value people”. We believe extraordinary things can be done with small groups of amazing people, which is why we need to be extra careful in selecting who joins our team. Our industry is a marathon, not a sprint, so we need the best folks who are in it for the long-run and want to grow in their careers at rideOS.
In order to assess cultural impact, we have several formal processes in place. From investment in company-wide LifeLabs trainings on unconscious bias and behavioral interviewing, to implementing detailed development rubrics, we ensure our team is aligned on expectations from day one.
We utilize multi-purpose tools to boast the professional recruiting and feedback processes of a much larger company: I have yet to run into a tech company who doesn’t think they have a higher-than-average bar when it comes to hiring. In order to have an efficient, high-quality pipeline, you need to have a good process in place.
Having good applicant tracking, benefit management and feedback tools are core building blocks of a people team that you can rarely invest in too early. Through investing in these essentials upfront, we can have the programs in place of a much larger company even though we have a much smaller scale. The longer you wait to implement these tools, the longer it will take for your processes to become a smoother experience for everyone involved.
We spend wisely, but generously on things we value: A big part of the rideOS working culture is fostering deep work which is great for focus and enabling folks to get into flow, but it can have the unfortunate consequence of making it harder to bond with each other. One of our first company surveys revealed that the team wished for more team events, so we looked for ways to foster informal team bonds while still enabling people to focus during work and enjoy a healthy work-life-balance outside of work.
Examples of how we did this include scheduling monthly team lunches outside the office and implementing bi-weekly “Random Rides.” These “Random Rides” are when two team members are randomly matched and encouraged to meet outside of the office for an activity of their own choosing. We’ve also re-arranged our whole office to include more casual working spaces so we can foster the idea of serendipitous collaboration.
We act and hold ourselves accountable to our values. We give feedback when people don’t act in accordance to the values. We teach people how to give and receive feedback so it’s understood. It’s important to recognize that the more proactively you invest in the continuous improvement of your company culture, the easier it will be to attract and retain a great team over the long-run.
