I’ve worked for 6 startup companies in the past 12 years and never for a company (or business unit) larger than 50 people. As a startup veteran, I feel like I should have learned a ton about forming corporate culture. Unfortunately, I think I’ve learned more about what doesn’t work than what does. But I will start with the good stuff…

Companies that tried

My current employer was just spun off from a larger entity and is all of 5 weeks old, although I have worked there for a year. Ten years ago, the founders of the original company began the company by defining a mission and set of values that would shape the company’s future. It was quite a culture shock for me to see the following ideas put into practice:

• Every employee takes the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator test and attends follow-up training workshops about communication style based on the different types of team members. Company offsites incorporate this into team exercises and the whole language of MBTI is core to corporate culture: everyone knows and/or tries to guess your type. As a shared framework of understanding, it really helps people work through communication issues instead of degenerating into frustration and unresolved conflict. It’s not so much about identifying your type and what that means about you, but how your type influences the way you communicate with others.
  
• The company has a set of Values that were created during the founding and which are shared with all new employees in small group discussions during the first months of employment. The Values are “how we get there” issues—the day to day ideals of what the founders wanted it to be like to work in this company. In those meetings, the CEO/founder sits there with you, the new-hire peon and actually discusses what they were trying to create as a workplace. Wow.
  
• Employee recognition is frequent and peer-driven. Early on, committees were formed and programs were designed so that employees could recognize each other with various types of awards. No pro-forma “employee of the month” awards, instead, peer-nominated, specific recognition of both project efforts and larger, values-oriented awards. An employee might receive an award for going “above and beyond the call of duty,” but an even greater award goes to employees who provide leadership to help others serve the core values of the company.
  

These efforts make this company unique in my experience, not so much because of the substance of the programs themselves, but because they demonstrate that the company and its senior leadership care about building an organization. I don’t think you can take programs like this and just drop them on a dysfunctional organization because there would be a huge hurdle of cynacism to overcome. But it seems to work for us—both from an employee satisfaction perspective and a business effectiveness perspective.

Only two of the companies I worked for made any active effort to develop a culture. The other company that made an effort was a true startup where I was one of the first employees. Our CEO talked regularly about building the company—not just our product—and scheduled time to work on building towards that purpose.

A teambuilding facilitator was brought in early on to lead us through exercises to define core values and engage in fun exercises like improv comedy. We spent a day on that. It was painful. The company also stocked a fridge with food and soda and gave employees nice gifts upon the launch of our product. These efforts, in retrospect, pale in comparison to the relative largess of dotcoms in the late 1990s, but we all knew that we had only about $100,000 in the bank, so it was a big deal to do these little things. Our CEO met with us regularly and discussed the company’s financial situation, her vision for what we were doing and her desire to create a long term company.

That company grew for a couple of years and was then acquired. I cannot say the culture was tremendously successful; I left because I was frustrated with the work I was doing and no amount of team building would have mattered. But while I was there, I worked constantly to improve our situation and solve problems.

Companies that did not try

The other companies I worked with developed their own strong, dysfunctional cultures based primarily on the personalities of the CEOs.

In one case, there was hardly any time to actively develop a culture because the CEO was fired, a new interim CEO ran things for while, then an outsider was brought in after laying off 1/3 of the company. Teambuilding, training, etc., were luxuries for bigger companies. We were a startup and the culture was based on the work hard, drink hard mindset. Today I’m a web developer. Tomorrow I’m the Director of Engineering. Next year I quit.

In another case, I came into a stable dotcom with lots of VC money…but that was gone, along with the CEO, after they blew through nearly 20 million dollars on marketing consultants, partnerships with companies that didn’t go anywhere, and expensive technolgies no one knew how to use. The irony, in retrospect, was that there was actually a fun culture based on the core founder and people who are still there today. Much of the conflict I experienced was part of the expansion frenzy of dotcoms and the reality check that followed. So I was able to take over engineering and lead the team… to a series of layoffs and ultimate acquisition. The imperative was to make money out of this thing, not to create a company. And there were many casualties along the way. But when the dust cleared, the core team survived.

Finally, there was my longest-tenured company. The idea of having an offsite, or even a team planning exercise, was a completely foreign and irrational concept to our CEO. There were no performance reviews, no significant organized acts of employee recognition, and in general, an attitude of if you don’t like it, leave. Our CEO did communicate certain values of fairness and responsibility to employees—I believe he genuinely cared about the employees and in many ways, I could appreciate the difficulty of his role in dealing with a prima donna founder and difficult board of directors. But the company was very “personal” and I don’t think his goal was ever about creating the organization—it was all about making the idea work. It did work, based largely on the quality and commitment of a core team. But some employees spent a lot of time planning how to leave.

Lessons learned… or at least observations

I respect the authenticity of efforts to build culture. But there are no guarantees for retention. We all have our own motivations and it is impossible to satisfy everyone. I was effectively retained at one job because of my salary and circumstances, despite a complete lack of any retention strategy by the employer. Another employer had a strategy, but my role just did not fit. In my current job, I am optimistic because of the track record of culture that preceded me, but frankly, I wish we spent more time talking about the bottom line than scheduling offsites or analyzing personality types. However, if I step back and consider the overall impact of working at these companies, the authenticity of interraction is at least a huge compensator for external pressures. The companies that felt there was no time for actively shaping culture disintegrated under pressure.

I question the value of retention anyway. Someone working at the same company for 5 years is not necessarily a good thing for the person or the company. I think a better goal is sustained engagement. It is ludicrous to schedule months of time for a new employee to “settle in” then to expect they will be around in 3 years when the busines model may have changed 3 times. Better to have 2 years of intense engagement and contribution. If the company is committed to listening to employees and actively working to build supportive structures and practices, then that culture can be one based on trust and respect where the length of service is less relevent. As long as I believe, “This is a place where we can work things out,” I’m going to stay engaged in looking for solutions instead of complaining.

Everyone is a key employee and everyone is replaceable. It’s insulting to talk about strategies to retain the “key employees.” The most critical employee may decide to move to France tomorrow. If he is “engaged” then he’ll help the company deal with it. If not, then the company is in trouble. Neither company nor employee should become obsessed with their relative importance—that is the kind of dysfunction that happens in a company where there is no authenticity. Instead, companies should recognize that they cannot read every employee’s mind and create all-inclusive retention strategies. But they can care and demonstrate that they care through concrete actions. That’s the difference between two-weeks notice—combined with your unused vacation—and a conversation about how you will transition your responsibilities and be reachable in the future.

It is difficult to generalize from a few personal experiences, but I find most analysis by outsiders fails to take into account the reality of the uniqueness of perspective of each employee. There is no one set of practices that make a difference. Even in my current company, it’s not clear the things that worked 10 years ago when founding a service-based company that grew to nearly 800 employees are the right things for our new group of a dozen people. But what is right is the effort and commitment to create a company, not just a product.

 

 

 

 

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