Our Path to Company Culture.
-My notes on creating Santora Nakama’s values.
Our company is still in an early stage, and it’s way too early to high five each other, but I wanted to write down some notes on the process we’ve gone through so far in the creation of Santora Nakama`s core values. And some of the learnings from it.
Why is company culture important?
Company culture has always been important to me. In part because I want to wake up in the morning and look forward to going into the office. I don’t want to waste my life working with assholes, or teams without passion.
But more importantly:
-It helps create sustainable business; especially in a market with a limited talent pool, and with an early stage ecosystem like Bangkok.
-It attracts talent. The second biggest reason why startups fails in general is wrong hiring. We want to attract smart, driven people, culture is an important part of that.
People see company culture as soft talk, or think it can be solved with pizza and beers, which is risky — sure - do those things, but just dont’ stop there.
“Culture is simply a shared way of doing something with a passion.”
– Brian Chesky, Co-Founder, CEO, Airbnb
Company core values impact on culture
Who you hire in the early days will have the most impact on culture. Knowing your core values lets you set the stage and guide you when screening your candidates. Or ‘cast’ them as I tend to say. I use the tools and learnings from my years in film school and apply them to building startups and products. Sorry, I’m a film nerd.
While studying script writing in film school, a challenge would be to bring the premise of the story into every single scene of the movie. Creating a deeper understanding of what the writer actually wanted to convey without shouting it out loud.
It’s the same when it comes to a company’s core values.
Values are not something to hang up on a wall so we all can remember them. We want them to be such a strong part of our DNA that you might know them without ever being told what they are. Like getting the subtle meaning of an amazing movie without reading about it on IMDB first.
The difference between movies and startups however is that the latter never stops changing.
Teams change, missions change, everything changes. That’s why we also do our best to work on our values frequently at Santora Nakama.
So far, our company values have evolved through three stages:
First stage — Values to prevent co-founder conflict.
Working on values with our three partners early on brought up practical questions and dilemmas. It allowed us to discuss and resolve potential conflicts before they actually appeared. If every relationship started like this, most people would save themselves a lot of trouble over the years. Getting into business together can easily be a bigger commitment than marriage.
Talking practically about values sets expectations with each other, and will lower the chances of surprises later on, when the honeymoon period is over. Make sure you talk about values while still dating.
Second stage — Using values to build the team.
The next review came only two months later, with our first team. After spending half a day on a workshop — including constructive talks where everyone shared their thoughts, we failed in boiling it down to something clear and memorable.
This had me questioning myself. Was I over-thinking culture and values this early on? Some people would criticise this focus in the early stages. Making points on how this would be more important later on, and to instead focus on the business. Again, I believe the team is the core pillar of any business.
We kept on bringing the early stage vision with us into every interview. And slowly it manifested in the core team we have built.
Talking about our values and culture in the early interviews helped communicate who we wanted to be, and attract the people we wanted to work with, before we established ourselves in the scene.
Third stage — Using values to create accountability and ownership in new team-members.
Three months later, with our core team established, we used a framework with elements from our design sprint scheme. Executing an efficient process, yet inclusive, with everyone attending.
We use the “10 x 10” — a facilitated ideation process developed by Gordon Candelin, who advise our teams on UX, branding and interface design, and who also does workshops on design sprints and innovation.
Rather than using a typical brainstorming session, where those shouting the loudest usually get to influence the most, the 10 x 10 helps participants move from an open and collaborative environment to a focused and strategic one, in a way that allows for individual voices as well as constructive group work. The ultimate purpose of the 10x10 is to move from a broad range of ideas towards a more workable set of practical directions.
Having an inclusive and focused framework for this process gave instant results. Most valuable time spent ever.
It was an awesome 1.5 hour session. One of the most efficient workshops I’ve been to.
What has it all come down to?
We went from a full Word page, boiled our values down to three single words. It also made me both proud of the team, and satisfied to see that the early stage work had manifested itself and grown into something quite awesome.
For me the process itself already reflected what we agreed upon together:
Execute. Collaborate. Learn.
The words stand by themselves, but this is my take on it.
Execute — we need to move to survive.
Collaboration — we need to share our challenges, wins, learnings and skills to be stronger.
Learn — we need to analyse and educate ourselves to make sure we’re moving forward.
What could we have done better?
Our path has just started, there is a lot to improve. I dedicated this post to values, but the company’s vision and mission deserves the same attention. For sure, it’s been discussed, and they exist, but we didn’t process and communicate them to the team on the same level as we’ve done with values. The main reason is because we’re constantly moving and changing. As startups do.
Looking forward to giving it deserved attention in the coming weeks. Making sure all become even more aligned in creating the workspace we want to go to when waking up in the morning.
