Why you need to own your Company Culture
My experience guiding the culture at Rodati.com
“My job is great, I love it! We have an X-Box room and we can use it whenever we want it.”
Bean chairs, free unlimited meals, Nespresso coffee machines, a slide in the middle of the office… An endless list of cool perks that run the charm of the biggest startups and companies around the globe. A list that many confuse with culture.
A couple of months ago, Miguel, CEO at Rodati, told me: “Lu, I would like us to start working on Rodati’s culture. I think it’s a tad messed up.” It wasn’t because the people that work at Rodati were unhappy. They weren’t. It wasn’t because culture didn’t exist (it always does). But we weren’t sure if the people were happy because they had unlimited snacks or because of what they did. We weren’t sure that the culture that was surfacing reflected what we aspired.
At the time we assumed the challenge of guiding our culture I found an article by Bill Aulet that read: “culture eats strategy for breakfast, technology for lunch, and products for dinner, and soon thereafter everything else too.” It was clear to me, to us, that this was the right thing to do. We needed to own our culture, not the other way around.
In order to do that, we decided to start by re-building our core values, base of any culture.
I would like to say it all has turned up better than expected and I would like to tell how that happened step by step.
Step 1: Leave Behind What You Don’t Need
The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do
— Michael Porter
As any other company, we had a set of core values and we also had something called “the cornerstones of our culture”. They were set when Rodati was just 5 people and now we were almost 20, so things had changed a lot.
I remember all of that was sloppy. Some things didn't make much sense, many were reiterative and, most importantly, nobody even knew what it said.
So the first logical step was to organize that awful set of values and culture cornerstones. A lot of questions came up: “Did it still make sense for the company we were now? Was all of it important? Should it be this long?”.
We asked ourselves what we wanted to accomplish afterwards and the answer was that we wanted it to be something so essential and simple that it would reflect everything we are and aspire to be. So simple every person at Rodati could remember it effortlessly. So essential it would guide everything we did.
So we read and re-read everything over and over until we ended up with the set of concepts we thought were still important for us and the company. We deleted everything else and we added a few other things that were missing.
Of course, a bunch of concepts and lose words lack of cohesion. And that take us to step 2.
Step 2: Reach for Clarity and Document Everything
It’s not the first time I've noticed how much more power words have than ideas. — George Sand
It is very important that, when performing this task, you keep in mind your audience. Luckily, your audience is the people you work with and, even though you may not know every single one of them, generally companies tend to have very similar profiles among their employees. You know what drives them, what kind of intellect they have, what things may or may not impact them.
You need to work with all of that to complete this step successfully.
It wasn't easy to compile all of these ideas and transform them into a compelling speech. It took quite some brainstorming and writing skills.
Again, what mattered to us was that it became so simple every person at Rodati could remember it effortlessly and so essential it would guide everything we did.
We gathered all of those ideas and grouped into a limited number of concepts (seven, to be accurate). We created catchy, simple and short titles to title each group and wrote a short description of what that meant.
Since we are company that works to improve the car-buying experience in Latam, we usually try to relate everything to cars. And this was no exception.
What came out of this exercise was the Rodati Engine: our core, what defined us. The seven concepts I was mentioning previously, which are our core values, became the Attitudes That Turn On Our Engine. Also, because we have offices in Buenos Aires and São Paulo, we created a version in spanish and another one in portuguese.
Plus, we created a set of icons for each value, so that it would be easily identifiable.
You can have a look at it here: http://careers.rodati.com/#quienes-somos
All of this gained a section at our internal Wiki, so it would be properly documented and accessible for anyone in the company, with a video summary of the written part (for the people who have a more auditive memory or don’t really like reading).
Step 3: Over-Communicate
People are sceptical about what they hear unless they hear it repeatedly over time.
— Patrick Lencioni
Once everything was properly documented and had reached a good level of clarity, it was time that people knew about this. Moreover, it was time for people to embrace it.
In Patrick Lencioni’s The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive I found a discipline called “Over-Communicate”. Lencioni says that “healthy organizations align their employees by repetitively and comprehensively communicating all aspects of organizational clarity.”
At Rodati, we exploited numerous channels and tools of internal communication to do so.
First of all, we introduced the topic at our Weekly Newsletter within a tale story. Then, we held a Rodati Meeting (that is our staff meeting. Everyone at Rodati attends it) and told the people about what we had been working on and why. Afterwards, we sent a quiz to test how much people understood and learnt these remastered values. It didn’t score very well so we made a more agressive campaign: we revisited the subject in subsequent meetings, included a value in every Weekly Newsletter, prepared examples, sticked signs in our kitchen wall, bring up values while having daily conversations…
By the end of the quarter, we sent the quiz again and it scored 99% of values embrace.
Step 4: Iterate
“When you’re finished changing, you’re finished.”
— Benjamin Franklin
It is known that culture experiences transformation and change, adapting to internal or external factors. That also applies to company culture.
We have to keep in mind that this is not static, that this can and probably will need to change and adapt, and we must keep an open mind about it.
Last week we kept iterating with our values and culture and we found new ways to name them, using our own company slang (yes, we do have that!). We believe that would make them more approachable and they will reflect even more who we are. We haven’t tested this yet, but I would update to let you know :)
We believe that it is important to revisit what you created and go back to step 1 (and through all of the other steps if necessary) every once in a while.
As a final thought I would like to say that this is tip of the iceberg and there is much more to do in terms of culture. And it’s important that we do, because…
If you don’t design your culture, others will do it for you.
