Feel like your employees want to work for Google, Twitter or Facebook because they have a better company culture than yours? Well you’d be right, even I want to work for Google – they have bowling alleys and rest pods!
But let’s get serious, the industrial revolution is behind us and startup culture is well and truly here.
Want to reshape your company culture to encompass more of a startup vibe with minimal risk?
Great, in this article I’ll show you how.
Why a change is needed
Digital media has changed life as we know it.
There is more opportunities at our fingertips than ever before and employees no longer want to live to work. In a recent study, 95% of employees said they would rather work for a business with a great culture than receive more compensation:
(Source)
A Gallup study found that only 31% of employees are actually engaged in the work they do, with over 65% disengaged or actively disengaged (yes 65%).
You’re paying two thirds of your workforce a salary for work they are not engaged in, if that doesn’t scare you as a business owner, nothing will.
But why are employees disengaged? there’s a number of reasons, such as working inflexible hours (referred to as the 9-5 grind), not feeling valued, work-life balance out sync and so many feel they are just a number in a bigger corporate entity.
In other words, the business they work for has no soul and fail (or disregard) to meet any of their personal and work needs. This is a common theme throughout businesses who are larger in size, rigged ideologies and cultures are pushed upon employees until they no longer care about the work they are being paid to do.
However, if we look at the top 100 companies most in-demand for employees, almost all are huge corporations with thousands of employees. If they can manage hundreds or thousands of employees while maintaining a strong company culture, so can you.
What is startup culture?
Before you even begin to implement startup culture in your business, you need to know what it is.
Startup culture compromises of many different traits, they include:
Passion – without passion there is no culture. Period.
Passion can only come from the founder and a business model must be created around it. Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs had the vision to “put a computer in the hands of everyday people”. Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook because he wanted to “create global connections and sharing through the Facebook platform”.
Startup culture starts with passion, why did you start your business, what was the goal? Did you want to focus on creating better experiences for people, profit, improve the environment or a combination of all three?
Go right back to the start and ask yourself why you started your business, what did you want to achieve?
Trust – today’s entrepreneurs want to create a work environment of trust, authenticity and happiness. Employees who come to work each day with these emotions are more likely to be engaged in work and do their best for your business.
Employees want work in happy conditions and not be scared to say or wear something that may get them into trouble. These changes can be made to any office by altering dress code policy, placing lounges around the office so employees can feel at home, or reducing restrictions such as banning all social media activity while at work.
Personality – culture directly impacts personality. People living in remote villages in rural India are going to have different personality traits compared to those living in Silicon Valley.
Office cubicles, ties, grey desks and tiered lunch breaks are all personality traits of dated corporate culture. Who actually enjoys them?
Change the layout of your office to make it more communication friendly, hang up art and photos of employees having fun together at company events. By changing the environment to reflect your passion and ideals, employees within that environment will change too.
Agility – startups work around their employees, not the other way around. Employees shouldn’t feel scared when booking their holidays or telling their superior about family problems and why they were an hour late to work. They allow employees to be open about family or personal issues and offer them support when needed.
If that means some of your employees working from home one day a week to look after their children or flexi-hours, if it doesn’t harm your business – encourage it.
Reduction of soils– the silo mentality is a plague infested into thousands of businesses all over the world. This is when different departments in a business refuse to talk or share information with each other, this tends to lead to the us versus them mentality between departments (sales and marketing is a perfect example).
Your business can still have departments and its current hierarchy structure, but the barriers of us versus them need to be gotten rid of for good.
Collaboration across the company should be the norm to reach a common goal instead of one department trying to ‘outdo’ another.
Now you know what goes into a successful startup culture, how do you transition that into your established business.
Ensuring Your Startup Has That Wow-Factor
1. Define your values
Before you jump on your soap box and spread the word of change, you first have to define your values and write them down. Ask yourself: what is most important for my company and what makes working here unique?
If you cannot come up with an answer, then rephrase the question to: what would I like to be most important for my business and what would I like to tell future employees about what is unique to working here.
Write down as many ideas you can think of and then sort them out in order of most importance to you. These ideas and values will be used as a reference point for leaders and everyone else in your business to refer to when making changes.
2. Get Your Leaders
A little over 80% of all culture change initiatives fail due to businesses not finding their leaders and communicating their new changes efficiently. Not everybody will be onboard with your new outlook, employees often fear change because they feel vulnerable that their job may be at risk if they cannot adapt, this may sometimes result in them sabotaging your efforts.
To counteract this you need to get your leaders onboard to push your changes to all team members.
Transforming company culture starts with its innovators (leaders):
(Source)
Your innovators will be the heads of your department, the CEOs, supervisors and department managers. Once they are onboard and given the correct instructions, the change should slowly seep through the office and into all areas of the business.
3. Change personal policies
A change in culture can only be successful if your employees choose to embrace it. With many fearing change, one way to win them over instantly is to change personal policies that affect them directly.
This could mean getting rid of things like docking employees if they arrive late to work by a few minutes, or demanding they stay another 7 minutes after their 5pm leave time to make up for it. You can write down your core values and send an email to everyone in your company, but making these types of changes is where your values are truly brought into the real word.
Actions speaks louder than words.
4. Go social and let your customers know
Changing company culture isn’t just beneficial to your employees and business, it’s also a great time to acquire new customers. There’s a reason Walmart’s Facebook page receives negative comments from its customers on a regular basis because of their work practices, yet Netflix receives praise (did you know their company manifesto has been viewed by over 14.6 million people?).
Let customers know about the new you through social media, blogging, videos and other forms of content you put out. Customers may not read your new company manifesto, but they’ll be following your social accounts, blogs and sharing your content if they love your new values and vision.
Revamping your culture is a great time to tap into new markets with tailored messages and content to your target market.
5. Listen to new ideas
Startup culture’s biggest enemy is the refusal of listening to ideas. Nothing is ever perfect and there is always room for improvement. When introducing new company values to your office, some things will work great, others will need to be worked on and some will just fail miserably.
The road to improvement and better culture is to listen to your employees. Employees who feel valued and listened to are the ones who will stick with you and grow your business. Ignoring them or refusing to be flexible is a great way to squash your new initiative and go back to ways the things were.
Summary
There’s no one-size fits all solution to changing company culture and I certainly don’t suggest you buy sleep pods or build a bowling alley to transform your culture. As the working world reacts to this digital transformation, so must your business if you want the best out of your employees and your future.
Culture change doesn’t happen overnight and requires everybody onboard to be successful. Culture change also doesn’t mean you need to throw out everything and start again from scratch, it can be slowly introduced and merged with your current office culture to get the best of both worlds.
Follow the insights given in this article and you’ll soon have Google and Facebook employees knocking on your door for work.
Kelly Shelton
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