Culture code in 4 hours
A practical guide for busy founders
"We are excited to spend several hours to create our company's culture code," are words we will not expect any young startup employee to say. Yet, that is what everyone at Rocketium was saying at a recent internal hackathon dedicated to creating our culture code. And 4 hours later, they actually created an aspirational yet practical code to live by. This is the story of why we did this, the process we followed, and the outcome we saw.
Why does a startup need a culture code? And when?
Why should we define our company’s culture?
Business literature and successful leaders talk nonstop about the importance of company culture. We are jaded from our corporate experience and do not believe that some words on a wall determine our success. Nonetheless, every company has a culture that emerges from how everyone behaves, what we care about, and what we reward or punish. The founder and CEO of Airbnb says that culture is a thousand things done a thousand times. It is how our team behaves even when no one is looking. Regardless of how they are in their personal life, culture dictates how they will behave at the workplace with each other, vendors, partners, customers, and other stakeholders. For this reason, it is important to pause, reflect on what our company is really about, and actually write it down so it is known to everyone in our company.
The right time to define the company culture
It is no surprise that how we run a startup changes as our team grows. A good rule of thumb is to change our approach when our team size crosses specific thresholds - 10 employees, 25 employees, 100 employees, 500 employees, and so on. Each stage roughly corresponds to the addition of a management layer or departments. Early team members get a lot of face-time with the founders and absorb their behaviours like a sponge. As the team size crosses the thresholds mentioned above, it becomes harder for founders to spend time with the team and a well-documented culture document becomes more and more important. We decided it was time to define our culture when we crossed 25 team members.
Common pitfalls of company culture
The most common mistake companies make with their culture is that they do not have a clearly documented culture code. Founders and early team members assume that everyone knows what is expected or will take the initiative to find out. The reality is that as a company grows, new team members learn from the 5-10 people around them. If those 5-10 people do not know the company culture or believe in it, the new team members will be the same way.
Just as common is the mistake of creating a culture code that is nothing like what people do on a daily basis. This is usually the result of an executive offsite or a small group of people dreaming about what they want to be but forgetting what they actually are. Handing down a tablet with 10 irrelevant commandments is as ineffective as not having a culture code at all.
The last mistake is assuming that people will follow a culture code just because it exists. Human behaviour is hard to change. Most of us are lazy, especially when it comes to changing habits and prejudices. A good set of culture principles are useless if they are not accompanied by rewards for adherence to the culture and reprimands for failing to do so.
The process of creating culture code
Start with the people who matter
Every company cares about certain types of people, its stakeholders. Company culture should keep these people in mind because our actions and decisions affect them. We should start our culture code process by listing these groups of people. It is important to take a broad view of the stakeholders. After all, our families, neighborhoods, and the global community are all touched by our work.
For example, the people who matter to Amazon's e-commerce business could be employees, sellers, buyers, and partners. For Airbnb, it could be employees, home owners, guests, and neighbourhoods.
At Rocketium, we came up with 3 groups of people who matter to us - Self, Team, Community. “Community” includes everyone from our customers to the startup ecosystem to the larger communities on whom we rely. We wanted our culture code to remind us to prioritise in this order. Charity, as they say, begins at home and we want every one of us to begin by working on ourselves before the team we work with and the community in which we operate.
Brainstorm the right way
We were clear that our culture code had to be created in a democratic way. With a team of 25, this can mean that not everyone will contribute, the loudest voice will drown out others, or the smoothest talkers will win. We used a combination of brainstorming and competition to solve this problem.
We split ourselves into 3 groups with equal representation from all departments. Everyone wrote down ideas individually then discussed with their group. Each group spent an hour to come up with a list of culture principles. Groups then presented to each other, debated each point, and narrowed down the list. The groups split up again and made the final list of principles. We repeated the group discussion to come up with the final principles for our culture code.
Coming up with specific principles
Finding the right guiding principles for a company is an art. We ensured the success of our exercise with these simple steps.
Look at the culture code of companies like Amazon and Netflix. They are very well thought out and their teams live their culture every day.
Think about the behaviours we already exhibit. It is easiest to create a culture code from what most of us already do.
List down aspirational qualities that we want to have. This holds us to a higher standard and lets individuals uniquely contribute to the code.
Our culture code as a guide for yours
As with everything we do at Rocketium, our culture code had a few unique aspects. Firstly, we called it our "Prime Directives". Quite a few of us are science fiction fans. Prime Directives are a reference to the guiding principle of Star Trek's Starfleet. Secondly, we wanted an emoji to represent each Prime Directive. Rocketium products help businesses communicate visually and concisely and emoji are a great way to do both. Thirdly, we wanted our Prime Directives in groups of 3. Things in 3s are easier to share and remember.
These were our 9 Prime Directives.
Self
Strive to be better every day 📈
Move fast ⚡️
Do exceptional work 🏅
Team
Set and achieve audacious goals 🎯
Be honest and transparent 🔍
Win with your team 👫
Community
Make customers your North Star 🌟
Imagine a better future and create it 🔮
Pay it forward 🌎
The thought behind cool-sounding one-liners can be lost or misinterpreted. We added details for each Prime Directive so this does not happen. For example, the behaviours for "Strive to be better every day 📈" are:-
Have a growth mindset - Believe that anything can be achieved through hard work.
Love learning - Be curious about how things work and keep learning.
Sharpen your skills - Learning is an iterative process. Keep at it.
Approach obstacles with positivity - Be resilient when faced with challenges.
Living our culture
Our 9 Prime Directives were the result of several hours of discussion between 25 team members. The structured process certainly helped us complete this process quickly. However, the biggest win was that most principles are things we already do daily. This, more than anything else, is a strong predictor that we will actually live by our culture code. Otherwise, no amount of T-shirts, posters, mugs, and calendars will make the culture code a reality. How can we ensure that new team members also live our culture?
Below are a few things we do.
Publish Prime Directives on our website so potential candidates know what we stand for.
Talk about our culture during on-boarding and feature it prominently in our employee handbook.
Use Prime Directives in decision-making and conversations. Emoji are a great way to do this.
Reward employees who live up to the culture code and reprimand those who do not in monthly performance check-ins and bi-annual salary appraisals.
Culture is one of those touchy-feely concepts that we know is important but are not quite sure how to tackle practically. We hope this guide emphasised the importance of a culture code and gave you tactics for creating one for your company. I would love to see startups being more aware of their culture and using it to move faster and deliver more success. 📈🚀
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