3 Key Steps to Building a Stellar Company Culture from the Start. (And Why You Should do it NOW).

Candidates – “I want a company I love to work at.” There is more to life than bringing home the biggest paycheck. More than working 60 hours/week for something we do not believe in. Paying the bills is no longer enough. Important? Yes. Enough? No. GREAT culture matters.

“By about 2020, nearly half the working population will be composed of millennials…Putting their individual work habits and personality traits aside, millennial values (as a generation) are having a drastic impact on the shape of company culture. Not only are millennial professionals getting choosier about the businesses they work for, they’re also looking deeper into the values of the companies they buy from.” – Forbes, Larry Alton (1)

Companies – “We have an amazing company culture!” Why are those words so hard to believe? They are painted on company walls, websites and bragged about in interviews. Companies even compete to win “Best Company to Work For” awards (my company does – and we are proud of our results). The fact is – this phrase is overused so much that prospective employees ignore it when they hear it. They do not believe it. They think – of course you do. Just like every other company trying to recruit the best of the best. Whatever. (Eye roll)

Spend some time hanging out with your friends, at your local coffee shop, bar, restaurant, etc. and listen to how many people complain about their job. Overworked. Under appreciated. Micro managed. Lack of true compassion. Drama. Politics. It pays the bills but I see no way to grow professionally. Will I be unexpectedly fired? I am just waiting for the next great opportunity.

Average or poor culture has become the norm – despite what that recruiter told you. And candidates know this. We are skeptical because we don’t believe it. We feel slighted by the people who sold us on the culture of the company we now dread to go to work at on Mondays.

I mean, what company says,

“Our culture sucks. Unfair politics. People are caddy. Brilliant jerks will get promoted first. Our bosses will micromanage you. You will have no opportunity to grow your career – especially if you appear to be the only one who can do your current job as well as you do. When you take a day off your manager will make you feel guilty. You will only stay because you have health insurance, 401k and a steady paycheck.” – Said no company ever – out loud at least

Why don’t companies just change their culture? Because it is hard and hardly seems worth it – on the surface. Add to that the longer a company has been in business the harder it is to redirect the culture trains.

A company cannot one day say,

“Hey, I saw on LinkedIn that the best employees want to work for a company with amazing culture. Let’s change ours today.” (Insert potion, magic wand and some fairy dust. Done.) 

Company culture is not a “magic wand” invention you can fast track in your development pipeline. Often it ends up going into the backlog along with other well intended great ideas – left to collect dust. Likely die. Plus, remember “the longer a company has been in business the harder it is to redirect the culture trains.”

BUT – AS A STARTUP YOU ARE STARTING WITH A CLEAN SLATE! 

Heck Yeah!

KEY ONE: UNDERSTAND THE VALUE

Want to start now? Sweet! So let’s all pretend we are building our own startup. Today we sit down with some awesome peeps. We have a brilliant idea and working prototype. We talked some cool friends and family into investing. We found a few eager and amazing people to join our team. Livin’ the dream. The world is our oyster – what do we do first?

Startup companies hit the ground running with the mindset to build a product and sell it. Those are their priorities. Their investors want them to succeed. They want to succeed. No one wants to run out of runway and send everyone home and see their dreams and money die. With those priorities culture is an afterthought. Can you blame them?

No.

But that doesn’t mean YOUR startup has to fall into this “average culture” trap. Absolutely not! Consider:

• Retained employees mean you spend less money recruiting and training. Lost time is lost money. Employees who love their job stay there. They recruit their friends – who by the way also stay there. (2)

• Great culture makes recruiting high calibre employees easier. People WANT to work somewhere they are appreciated. Where they see themselves growing. Where they are empowered to crush it. Where they can push hard without fear of repercussions from making mistakes along the way. I have recruited some “best of the best” employees thanks to our culture which includes the support to grow their careers. I also aim to hire people MUCH smarter than I am. I also desire to help grow them.

• As a leader your job is easier! You have brilliant people on your team and have learned to trust and empower them. You spend less time micromanaging them and more time driving corporate strategy for the future.

Truth is – retained employees save you a lot of money. How much? Gallup did a poll, “This Fixable Problem Costs U.S. Businesses $1 Trillion” (2), showing that the US loses $1 TRILLION Dollars due to retention struggles. 

“A trillion dollars.That’s what U.S. businesses are losing every year due to voluntary turnover. And the most astounding part is that most of this damage is self-inflicted. Here’s how it breaks down for an individual organization:

• The annual overall turnover rate in the U.S. in 2017 was 26.3%, based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• The cost of replacing an individual employee can range from one-half to two times the employee’s annual salary – and that’s a conservative estimate.
• So, a 100-person organization that provides an average salary of $50,000 could have turnover and replacement costs of approximately $660,000 to $2.6 million per year.”

Geez. It would take a lot of sales to balance this off. Do you see anything wrong with this? That is like NEGATIVE money!! I feel the runway shortening by the minute…

This seems obvious. Why would all companies not do it? Because it is hard to see the immediate ROI.

• A sales contract doesn’t come in to show that you saved $100k by retaining that awesome employee. No one rings the sales bell! Culture can cost money without a PO from a customer.

• Encouraged vacations may mean that deliverables, which by the way show up in paying contracts, are “delayed”. Note – this is also self inflicted because those deadlines are frequently too aggressive which by the way leads to employee turnover and burnout.

• Money spent in leadership training, mentoring and team building events depletes that treasured runway. The brain power needed to kick this off can be exhausting and seem like a waste. Who has the time, or extra money, and there are plenty of “successful” companies who have average and even shitty cultures. They aren’t going out of business…note, they also aren’t trying to recruit with the risk you have as a startup.

Companies do not do it because they do not believe its value. So, you should do a few more Google Machine searches to read:

“Successfully fostered, culture can improve your team’s health and well-being, increase engagement, and create a more collaborative and supportive work environment.” – John Hall (3)

Need more articles to read? Trust me there are a lot!!

We kept using the Google Machine to find:

• Company Culture Doesn’t Just Impact Well-Being — It Also Impacts Productivity (3)
• How to Build a Steadfast Company Culture  – cheating because this is my article. (4)
• 10 Shocking Workplace Stats You Need To Know (5)
• How To Maintain A “People-First” Company Culture – Even During A Crisis (6)
• Why A Positive Company Culture Is Especially Critical Today. (7

• Company Culture Doesn’t Just Impact Well-Being — It Also Impacts Productivity (8)
• 10 Shocking Workplace Stats You Need To Know (9)
• How To Maintain A “People-First” Company Culture – Even During A Crisis (10)
• Why A Positive Company Culture Is Especially Critical Today. (11)

OKAY, OKAY – There is value. You get it. Now what?

KEY TWO: BELIEVE THE VALUE

There is value. It seems like a win:win. So what is the freakin’ problem? Stellar culture is hard. It takes determination, dedication and believing its value at your CORE. Surface level, advertising and/or outward facing marketing does not work. To share one of my favorite quotes:

“Of course it’s hard. It’s supposed to be hard. If it were easy, everyone would do it. Hard it what makes it great.” – Tom Hanks, A League of Their Own.

DON’T RUN! I know what you are thinking. “Startups are hard enough. I don’t need to add this hard to it.” And all I keep saying is how hard it is. Not doing a great sales job am I? Are you forgetting that money saving part I shared with you? If so rewind this post and reread that section until you BELIEVE THE VALUE. Otherwise I wasted my time continuing to write and you continuing to read.

But – as I said – it is worth it! If you are still reading you should just trust me. (Note: I have collaborated to build a great company with an amazing culture. Hired amazing people who could have gone anywhere. Including places where their paycheck would have been bigger. Check us out at www.florencehc.com).

KEY THREE: MAKE IT HAPPEN

Be decisive. Be disciplined. Make it happen. Forbes has a lot of articles talking about the value of company culture such as this:

“Organizational culture comes about in one of two ways. It’s either decisively defined, nurtured and protected from the inception of the organization; or — more typically — it comes about haphazardly as a collective sum of the beliefs, experiences and behaviors of those on the team. Either way, you will have a culture. For better or worse.“ –  How Important Is Culture Fit For Employee Retention? Brent Gleeson (1),

Decide to choose the “better culture”.

Be decisive. Be disciplined. Make it happen. Don’t let it “fade to grey”. Don’t let it fall into the Hawthorne Effect trap. Consider it daily in:

• Every hiring decision. Not just the current culture but also the future culture. Do not settle because you MUST have another resource NOW.

• Every promotion decision.

• Every decision to transition someone out of the company. Have a “brilliant jerk” (someone who is awesome but treats their colleagues like crap?) – transition them out. Now. Not when it is convenient. Waiting until then is “using” them to accomplish your own needs. The ONLY exception to this is when you let them know and then help them to find their next opportunity. Which, by the way, I highly encourage this approach when possible.

• You need to save every dollar you can in the pandemic – what can we do to tighten the purse strings without negatively impacting your team? Read my blog post here to see what we did at Florence. Cutting pay. Laying people off. That all sucks. They should be last resorts. If for no other reason than the cost of voluntary turnover (read above the stats). Instead, be creative in all other areas of your company to reduce expenses. And by the way – be transparent during a hard time. Trust me – you will build culture this way. Not lose it.

You are in the groove now. But, we aren’t done yet. You have more work to do (I did say it was hard…):

• You have to be transparent. (Read above). That is right. Gone are the days of the super secret behind the door meetings that lead to a “restructure” aka layoff where everyone goes home from an “all hands” meeting and wonders when their last day will be.

• You have to be humble. I wish I could count all of my mistakes helping to run a company. Seriously. I have lost count!! But mistakes are okay! You team should know this. How will they know it? When YOU are transparent and humble about your mistakes. When they make mistakes and your reaction is – okay let’s figure this out as a team. When the shit hits the fan and you say, “It is Saturday. Let’s figure this out on Monday together”. True story. Our CEO, Ryan Jones, said exactly this when we rolled out our first being customer facing, and SOW driven, update and we all watched it crash on a Saturday morning. Including the customer. That sucked. The ultimate outcome did not. It improved our employee loyalty and the trust the customer had in us. They are one of our most supportive customers now – years later.

• You have to forget the short term bottom line. Stop thinking about how much this will cost. By forgetting the short term bottom line you save the long term bottom line. Don’t believe me? Rewind this blog for the stats.

• Reputation. Imagine how your decision will look on the front page of the New York Times. I put this as last because I really want you to have an internal compass that drives you. But I have been known to think, “How can I sleep at night and what will it look like in the newspapers.” Why? Because sometimes you also need that affirmation that your unpopular, and often costly, decision is the best decision. For everyone.

Need help making it happen? I would love to chat with you about ideas to help your team – for free. I want more people to love their jobs. Full stop. I believe YOU have the power to do it and if I can help in any way it will make my day, week, month.

Cheers, a

“When you were born you were given one opportunity to be yourself, build a legacy, and make a difference.  Make It Count.”  – Angela Gill Nelms

AUTHOR/EDITOR’S NOTE: I am my own editor and I stress about rules, grammar and format. It stops me from posting blogs. So…I know I may have broken a “few” rules. I am – not sorry. Because this is not perfect but it is done! “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.” – Voltaire

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Angela is the Chief Operating Officer at Florence. Florence advances clinical research through software. As COO Angela is charged with strategically guiding the operational, financial and the innovation direction of the company, creating a “Best Place to Work” culture, ensuring successful product implementation, delivering unprecedented white glove customer service and making sure clinical teams around the world are successful. In 2016 Florence had one customer and now serves 7,300+ clinical researchers around the world. Florence has received “Best Places to Work” awards as well as recognition for being one of “Atlanta’s 100 Fastest Growing Private Companies”, “INCs 500 Fastest Growing Companies in America”, and “Georgia’s Top 40 Most Innovative Companies”. Angela also has extensive speaking experience on clinical research, FDA inspections, Lean Process Improvement as well as a motivational speaker on leadership and career growth. An experienced medical device technology and research professional excelling in employee growth focused corporate culture, strategic product planning and execution and team management. LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/angelagillnelms/

Cool references and links I used (geez – I hope I got the order of these correct as I did edits and rewrites):

(1) https://www.forbes.com/sites/larryalton/2017/06/20/how-millennials-are-reshaping-whats-important-in-corporate-culture/?sh=41b16bcd2dfb accessed 11 NOV 2020

(2) https://www.gallup.com/workplace/247391/fixable-problem-costs-businesses-trillion.aspx accessed 08 NOV 2020

(3) https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnhall/2020/03/13/company-culture-doesnt-just-impact-well-being—it-also-impacts-productivity/?sh=781b91ae4197 accessed 07 NOV 2020

(4) https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnhall/2020/03/13/company-culture-doesnt-just-impact-well-being—it-also-impacts-productivity/?sh=781b91ae4197 accessed 07 NOV 2020

(5) https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidsturt/2018/03/08/10-shocking-workplace-stats-you-need-to-know/?sh=480d69b1f3af accessed 07 NOV 2020

(6)https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinessdevelopmentcouncil/2020/05/20/how-to-maintain-a-people-first-company-culture-even-during-a-crisis/?sh=58de22908aa9 accessed 07 NOV 2020

(7) https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulmcdonald/2020/06/25/why-a-positive-company-culture-is-especially-critical-today/?sh=16cea8952e5b accessed 07 NOV 2020

(8) https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnhall/2020/03/13/company-culture-doesnt-just-impact-well-being—it-also-impacts-productivity/?sh=7daf23934197 accessed 07n NOV 2020

(9) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3123547/ Accessed 07 NOV 2020

(10) https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinessdevelopmentcouncil/2020/05/20/how-to-maintain-a-people-first-company-culture-even-during-a-crisis/?sh=62a1e1c88aa9 accessed 07 NOV 2020

(11) https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulmcdonald/2020/06/25/why-a-positive-company-culture-is-especially-critical-today/?sh=7918db92e5b8