Culture is the soul of the company and it takes more than sleeping pods to make it work.
In today’s age of high-tech companies, high growth is a necessary requirement for success. As Circles.Life has grown from 100 to 500 people in 5 countries, what keeps us up at night is: how do we retain the culture that got us to succeed in the first place?
We built our company’s culture from day one to be one of empowerment, trust, and high-performance. One magic moment that demonstrated that we had the right culture was a few months after launching Circles.Life. I remember the time when one of our customers had trouble with his Circles.Life app because of his phone model.
One of our engineers (all on his own) decided to travel down to the customer’s house to resolve the issue. The customer was completely taken by surprise with how far we would go to help him and for us, this moment showed us that our culture is something special – and we need to spread this magic across!
Launching in 2 countries 3 months apart this year meant that our team doubled almost overnight. I wondered if our culture was at risk if we grew too fast.
In reality, I was asking the wrong question. Growth itself is at risk if you can’t get the culture right.
While we are still learning, here are some things that have worked really well for us:
Cloning founders – aka the Space Explorers
When we first launched, the founders and early leaders led by example and shaped the culture that ultimately allowed us to succeed. As we continued to grow and expand, ensuring that the leadership team across all markets was getting the culture right was difficult. Our realization that we had employees who truly lived by our company values and demonstrated consistently high performance led us to launch our Space Explorers program.
These employees became our extension- our next round of founders who could uphold the same culture that our early leaders cultivated.
The company rewards Space Explorers generously, with up to six months’ worth of salary in stock options annually, an additional cash bonus, sponsored training courses of their choice, and exclusive access to the founders and stakeholders.
Transparent pulse check
Many companies think about using a net promoter score (NPS) to measure customer experience and predict business growth; likewise, you can think about creating an internal NPS to better understand how your employees feel and to work towards using valuable feedback to improve the workplace environment. At Circles.Life, we launched an initiative called monthly pulse check (quick rating of 1 to 5) that helps us evaluate how our employees feel.
Also Read: Company culture is more than just a foosball table
Understanding how each individual feels is very important, but so is taking action where it makes sense. Each quarter, we present the actual feedback and data transparently to all, highlighting what we have done, what’s in progress and why we can’t do some things. But that’s not all, the pulse check KPI is every manager, leader and founder’s KPI that gets measured and graded on. Everyone owns this outcome, to contribute towards building a great workplace for all.
Town Hall “founders for all”
All companies have town halls, but what makes ours different? We host a weekly “Circle of Trust” town hall that we use to update employees on the business and provide confidential numbers – not something that other companies typically do.
Ahead of these, we also send out a link for employees to anonymously submit a question, feedback or concerns that are then addressed at a company-wide quarterly meeting. Each survey question that comes in is carefully addressed and acknowledged in future weekly updates.
Employees are also invited to raise any questions or feedback they may have on the spot, so that leaders and founders have a chance to address it right away.
Psychological safety to fail and learn
If you want to create a high-performance culture, you need to allow space for growth, innovation and …. failure. This needs to be built into your culture. Setting up a root cause analysis (RCA) initiative allows people to understand that every failure is a learning process.
We use every opportunity to hold an RCA sharing session to allow employees to learn about what worked and what didn’t, to avoid repeating the same mistake. That learning becomes the focus rather than who is to blame for the failure. Owning up to failure is looked upon with pride, and is something we encourage for each of us to grow.
Ultimately, as a leader in the organization, you need more than words to fuel this culture beyond the words in your speeches.
Also Read: A guide to navigating, and hopefully saving, a struggling startup
I believe strongly in action-oriented work. In fact, some commandments that I live by are:
1. Thou shall lead by example, not 99 per cent but 100 per cent of the time
2. Thou shall recognise publicly and reprimand privately but ALWAYS specifically behaviour that leads to good or bad culture
3. Thou shall enforce a strong culture screen for new hires and set up a culture keeper test for existing folks (culture fit is least likely to be fixed)
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