Changing Company Culture at Any Size

Changing Company Culture at Any Size

Ping pong tables, kegerators, and catered lunches, oh my! Is this what we think of when we think of start-up companies? Sadly, the answer is probably yes, but these employee perks don’t define or even contribute to the culture for which start-ups should be most known. 

Rather, the open, often casual communication, transparency, and people-first focus is what sets start-up culture apart from its corporate counterpart. It’s true…the foosball tables and bring-your-dog-to-work days might help you attract more applicants for your roles. But what’s more important is a uniquely defined culture aligned to the company’s strategy — and flip flops, ping pong, and the notion of having fun on tap all the time is not what keeps employees engaged and ultimately helps you grow. FYI…culture is also not employee engagement surveys. They only measure happiness/satisfaction and cannot tell you if you have a culture aligned to your strategy — one that drives performances and fosters results. 

In the newly released guide, Creating a Start-up Culture at Any Size,  those who’ve launched new businesses, lead start-ups, or have recruited for them share their unique insights on the importance of and how to build a start-up-like culture for a business of any size. When you download this best practice guide, you’ll find strategies and recommendations for building, re-building, or strengthening culture, what to address and pay attention to early on, how to address culture as you grow, and how technology fits into the equation. This guide focuses on:

  • Defining your Culture before it Defines You
  • Laying a Strong Foundation
  • Evolving into a Unique Culture
  • Optimizing Culture with Technology
  • Sustaining Culture for the Long Haul

According to Deloitte, culture drives strategy. When aligned with business strategy, organizational culture can drive results, without having to rely on command and control — it’s how things get done in your organization. Similarly, for Juan Betancourt, Chief Executive Officer of Humantelligence — a culture intelligence software start-up with 18 employees — culture is your company’s B-M-W: the sustained patterns of (1) Behaviors over time that are supported by the shared experiences, (2) the values or Motivators, and beliefs of the organization, and (3) the way work happens or Work energizers of its people. Together, culture is what transforms individual employees into a collective, cohesive whole.

It’s important to define your culture because by defining it, you — and your employees — can commit to better supporting the work itself, improving operations, and making valuable as well as impactful contributions to the market you serve. All too often, business leaders fail to realize that not defining their cultures will have a negative impact on the operational side of their businesses, while being able to define it from the start ensures less culture-related stress down the road.

Before defining it, it’s also important to note what culture is not. As Don Sull tells us in When It Comes to Culture, Does Your Company Walk the Talk?, it’s not the values you post on your website or the laminated one-pager you give to employees. He goes on to explain that company practices often conflict with corporate values — with data demonstrating little to no correlation between official company values and actual culture as perceived and lived by employees. Closing that gap starts with communication and a plan to address culture at its core.

In fact, Senior Human Resources Director Tiffany Davis-Ransom, who led recruiting for a SaaS start-up serving higher education, notes that when potential new hires are considering coming aboard, what they’ll really be looking at when it comes to culture is:

  • The team’s work habits
  • What and how the team is motivated
  • How the team interacts or socializes
  • Diversity or lack thereof
  • Mentorship opportunities to build knowledge, skills, and abilities
  • How the team collaborates and communicates
  • Where and how new ideas are fostered
  • How feedback is solicited, acknowledged, and implemented
  • Company and team planning processes
  • Recognition for work well done

“That is…they’ll be looking at how work gets done, who makes the decisions and why, how people are rewarded, and opportunities to grow through leadership and mentorship — all of the expectations, values, and norms associated with working at your company — that is your culture defined.”

In some aspects and unlike corporate cultures, a start-up culture — because teams begin small — typically and inevitably reflects the personalities of early team members and becomes an output of the people who work there. A company with a large sales team might have a more customer-centric and extroverted-style culture. If you have a team that hates conflict, the culture will probably be indecisive and passive aggressive. A company with more experienced people will draw on established best practices, where a company full of greener hires may tackle problems based on intuition and require more oversight. Matthew Bartel, who founded Digital Measures — a faculty activity reporting software start-up — in 1999 — tells us that this should be a deliberate activity.

“While it’s difficult to know where to start when it comes to creating a company’s culture, a key exercise we did early on was to identify our rockstar teammates and then think about each of their positive attributes. It was a helpful exercise to define a short but specific list of traits we value in our teammates. Once a company has a set of values, you almost can’t talk about them enough. We ensured our values were reinforced when hiring, conducting performance reviews, in monthly all-hands meetings, during team recognition ceremonies, and even in front of clients. It’s important to consistently recognize and call out when team members exemplify your company’s values because it reinforces and better defines these behaviors and encourages your full team to follow suit.” 

All that to say, the composition of your team is important in how your culture plays out day to day. But ultimately, culture is set first by its leaders, starting with the founders or CEO. Alexander Nicolaus, Chief People Officer at Paysend and author of Startup Culture: Your Superpower for Sustainable Growth, recommends getting specific from the start: define your organization’s why, who you are, and who you want to be. 

“You design the operating structure, organizational chart, and put together the team. You decide who, when, and how to reward and promote. You either welcome feedback and challenges or are threatened by such. Your behavior sets the example for the rest of the team, and the rest of the team ends up modeling it, which then builds culture from the bottom up.”

He also reminds us that if you’ve missed the opportunity to align your culture to your business strategy, there’s still hope! When you download the eBook, you’ll read what our contributors suggest starting, stopping, and changing today in order to get back on track. Once back on track, it’s time to figure out how to sustain your positive changes. While your core values and the why for which you exist shouldn’t change much, if at all, the way you do it, the way you achieve it, might have to change. Continue to communicate, engage, embed, and actively evaluate — and keep these elements top of mind to preserve your strong company culture as your organization grows.

A few tips from the experts on changing company culture:

Monitor & Re-evaluate Often: Start-up cultures often value adaptability and are highly flexible, so change is not something to shy away from. The most important part is to clearly explain the why behind these changes to your team. Nicolaus recommends soliciting feedback at least quarterly or monthly — annually is insufficient — and to save time automate it and leverage technology — because frequent and ongoing employee inputs are key.

Reinforce Positive Behavior: Reinforce positive behaviors by recognizing and rewarding your culture champions. These are the individuals who continually live out your core values and go above and beyond both within and outside of their roles. Create and centralize team member spotlights about standout contributors (like a Slack channel) for peer-to-peer culture champ shout-outs.

Walk the Talk: Culture is not something to set and forget, and start-up culture is particularly susceptible to change as the team grows. Reinforce value-based actions and a mission-driven culture by continually embodying the core values you set forth. Doing so encourages the same behavior from team members and builds trust between employees and leadership.

Recruit and Replace Intentionally: Culture fit does not only mean hiring who you like but rather being open to hiring people unlike you or any others in your organization. For each role, region/geo, and industry, the needs will be different and there is no out-of-the-box formula. Avoid recruiting cookie-cutter replicas of your current employees and rather hire for culture adds and gap fillers — those are candidates who will enhance your culture, as well as bring unique and valuable experiences and diversity of thought to the team.

As your company grows and changes, as new faces join, and as roles and teams shift focus, remember so too does your culture. Use this guide as a reminder to regularly assess your culture and consider the changes you can make in communication and organizational structure, as well as how Culture-as-a-Service technology can help you foster improved collaboration and performance in order to sustain — and more importantly — scale your company for success.

Culture building is an area of expertise in its own, not unlike being a solutions architect for an IT company. And like any other expertise comes with its own required set of know-hows and past experience. So if you are a founder, CEO, or business leader and not very good at this culture building thing yet, you just need practice.

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Toxic Workplaces: What, Who and How to Fix it
Toxic Workplaces: What, Who and How to Fix it

At many companies, workplace culture is becoming increasingly toxic, and recent layoffs in the tech industry are only worsening the problem. In fact, 45% of employees agree that recent layoffs have intensified a climate of toxicity across companies, according to a new research report on toxic workplaces by TalentLMS and Culture Amp. But what exactly leads to the development of a toxic workplace culture – and what can be done to address the toxicity? In this article, we’ll explore what constitutes toxic workplaces, how to address it, and the main drivers that lead to toxic workplaces.  What Do Toxic Workplaces Look Like? Many of us feel frustrated or stressed at work from time to time, but there’s a difference between a frustrating work environment and a toxic one. “Toxic” is a powerful word, but it’s also ambiguous, so we’ll start by defining what we mean by toxic workplaces. A report, which surveyed 1,000 employees across U.S. tech companies who self-identified as working in toxic workplaces, leverages MIT Sloan’s The Toxic Five framework. This framework examines a toxic work environment through the eyes of employees working at a toxic company. While each company has its own set of unique challenges, MIT found that these five culture attributes have by far the largest negative impact on how employees rate their company culture: disrespectful, non inclusive, unethical, cutthroat, and abusive. Employees who believe they work in a toxic environment also agree that their organization is:Disrespectful: Employees want – and need – respect from their managers and peers. 42% of respondents experiencing toxic culture at work agree that managers are often disrespectful to employees. Non inclusive: Even in 2023, inclusivity is still a challenge. 40% of respondents who work in toxic workplaces state that there are still barriers to overcome due to discrimination. Whether it’s on the basis of age, race, gender, or something else, discrimination is commonplace in toxic work environments. Unethical: Ethics and trust go hand in hand, and in an unethical workplace, a lack of trust surfaces. 43% of those surveyed agree they’re expected to work outside of what they’re recognized – or contracted – for. When consistently treated unethically, employees are far more likely to criticize the culture and eventually leave the company. Cutthroat: Throwing a colleague under the bus, stealing credit, and refusing to collaborate are all indicators of a cutthroat, competitive environment. 44% of respondents working in toxic workplaces agree that it is common for employees at their company to be left out of key projects, calls, and decisions. Abusive: More than 60% of survey respondents claim that abuse at work happens regularly or sometimes.What’s even more confronting is that 49% of those surveyed in the TalentLMS & Culture Amp survey say they don’t really say or do anything when falling victim to toxic behaviors – and 29% say it’s because they don’t believe it will make any real difference. How to Address a Toxic Workplace Culture Your corporate culture is the heart of your organization. A toxic culture will only yield dire outcomes, so it’s important to take proactive steps to identify, address, and mitigate any signs of toxicity at work. It is important to recognize that the toxic behaviors described in this research can have serious negative impacts on both employees and organizations. In their most extreme form, they can put the mental health of employees seriously at risk. But even moderate levels of these toxic behaviors can severely impact organizational performance by undermining employee motivation, diminishing the strength of the employer brand, and increasing regrettable attrition. The best way to address a toxic work culture is to start at the top – with leadership. The Role of Leadership Leadership plays a critical role in shaping culture at work. Leaders have a considerable influence over employees, as they are responsible for cascading desired behaviors or decisions across the company. When leaders are honest, accountable, kind, and considerate, employees will strive to embody those characteristics. But unfortunately, the survey found that:43% of survey respondents feel that leaders are turning a blind eye to toxic behaviors 45% believe executive-level leaders promote unhealthy competition among their workforce 47% agree that there’s a lack of leadership and accountability within their companyWhen leaders lack accountability, aren’t considerate to employees, or exhibit distasteful behaviors, employees will amplify these actions across the organization. Senior leaders are role models, whether they like it or not. The way they behave at work creates powerful social norms that can impact how the rest of the organization behaves. Additionally, their decisions can lead to the creation of structures and incentives that result in, often unintended, harmful consequences to employees. What is a Toxic Leader A toxic leader is a person who has responsibility for a group of people or an organization, and who abuses the leader–follower relationship by leaving the group or organization in a worse condition than when they first found them. Toxic leaders must not be confused with leaders who make mistakes. We all make mistakes and get things wrong from time to time. The difference is whether we treat it as a learning opportunity or keep doing the same thing over and over again. According to Leadership Forces, toxic Leaders are self-serving. They do not care about the organization or the people within it. They treat them as a vehicle to help them get where they want. They are motivated by personal ambition and usually lack self-awareness. Leadership Forces categorize the following six key characteristics of toxic leadership: Autocratic The leader makes the most out of their position and authority to make things happen. They impose their will without stopping to consider the ideas and opinions that come from their team. They are focused on maintaining tight control and are intolerant of mistakes. Communication tends to be directive and top-down rather than ‘two-way’. You can spot people who have a tendency towards these characteristics through their language. They might say things like:‘We don’t have time to discuss this…’ ‘This is the situation and this is what you are going to do’ ‘I’ve got so much on my plate…’They complain about not having enough time because they are poor at delegation. The only jobs they delegate are the ones they don’t want to do. They view delegation as a way of ‘making life easier for me’ rather than developing their team members. Narcissistic Narcissistic leaders have an exaggerated sense of their own importance. They believe that they are special in some way. They have an excessive need for admiration from other people and lack empathy when dealing with others. They might say things like:‘I did/achieved this…’ They rarely point to the work of the team that contributed to the success. “Your personal problems should be left at home, you’re here to work.’ Like all toxic leaders, these traits can deliver success in the short-term.Manipulative The manipulative leader is similar to the narcissist as their focus is still on themselves. These individuals will abuse their position, relationships, and organizational systems for their own gain. They’re harder to spot than the narcissistic leaders as they are often sneaky and hide their activities. They know deep down that what they are doing is wrong but they will justify their behavior by saying things like ‘it’s not personal, it’s business.’ Intimidating The intimidating leader will bully their subordinates and those around them to achieve their aim. They are manipulative and have a tendency towards ‘ruling with an iron fist’. Their subordinates will not offer ideas or challenge them for fear of disapproval or ridicule. Overly Competitive The overly competitive leader has a ‘win at all costs’ attitude often leaving a trail of damaged and broken individuals who have failed to keep up with their pace. They have a win at all costs attitude that means that they are quick to make decisions and rarely have time for input. They think that they have high standards and are inspiring. In reality, they create more losers than winners. Discriminatory The last toxic characteristic is that of the discriminatory leader. They do not value diversity and surround themselves with people of the same ilk. These leaders do not want to be challenged by people with different points of view so they surround themselves with ’yes’ men. Damian Hughes describes these people well. In his work with professional sports teams, he’s found managers who surround themselves with ‘truth tellers’ or ‘time tellers.’ When down 1-0 in a 60-minute game, a coach might turn to his coaching staff and say, ‘what do you guys think?’ The time tellers will purse their lips and say ‘there is 30 minutes to go.’ The truth tellers will tell them what they think they should do – even if it is the message they don’t want to hear. For example, ‘take your son off, he’s having a bad game…’ There is a significant difference. One of these people has courage and provides value. These six characteristics rarely live in isolation. Toxic leaders tend to lean towards being a combination of a few of these behaviors. Either way, they are focused on the short-term game and what they can get out of a situation as opposed to the long-term game and what is best for the organization and the team. If left unchecked, toxic leadership is what leads to a toxic culture. Fixing Toxic Workplaces Fixing a toxic work environment requires leadership to intentionally reverse toxicity. In other words, to develop a healthy workplace culture, they need to model healthy behaviors. However, toxic behaviors and norms can be hard to unlearn, especially if they’ve become ingrained in the wider culture. That’s where training can help. Employees upskill and develop as part of their roles, and many expect leaders to do the same. Training specific to managers and leaders would effectively combat toxicity, which could potentially inspire other employees to change behaviors, too – leading to a company-wide transformation. For example, Humantelligence is a tool for daily coaching that uses behavioral science to drive real change by helping managers better understand their own and their team’s behaviors, motivators, and ideal work energizers. Managers often have busy schedules, so HT embeds these insights into existing workflows (like Slack or email) to make learning a daily practice. The Keys to Culprits of a Toxic Workplace We’ve explored what a toxic workplace looks like and how leaders can step up to address toxicity at work – but what causes this toxicity? With 46% of software industry employees suffering burnout due to a toxic work environment, it’s critical to understand how toxicity surfaces. Understanding what leads to a toxic work culture is crucial to preserving your bottom line, keeping employees engaged, and retaining your best talent. Although toxicity emerges in different ways and from different places depending on the organization, research has found that the most common drivers are:Off-the-clock work: Work-life balance is crucial to employee wellbeing, and when employees are expected to be available at all hours, their trust and motivation diminish. They feel like their humanity isn’t being recognized, and stress begins to mount. Without the ability to truly disconnect from work, employees’ behavior and mindset will likely become more negative. This negativity slowly grows and spreads, creating a toxic environment. Poor leadership communication: A highly toxic environment is created when leaders withhold information. Without transparency around the business, employees may become anxious and lose direction and trust in the company. They feel like important decisions are being made without considering their viewpoint, which can leave a big divide between employees and leaders. A lack of consideration for colleagues: When employees feel that colleagues aren’t considering their feelings, the work environment can quickly turn toxic. A lack of empathy in interactions can translate into dismissive or rude behaviors, leading to animosity among employees.All this said, the best way to take action and identify the drivers of toxicity in your organization is to survey your employees. The only people who can tell you how your employees feel are the employees themselves. When provided a channel for feedback, employees are more likely to share candid thoughts about their experience at your organization. If toxicity is brewing in certain areas, a survey with open-ended questions and free response fields can be a safe space for employees to let you know what’s going on – beyond the simple ‘agree’ or ‘disagree’ that most surveys offer. If you’re looking to create a more positive employee experience, we can help.

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