The End of Soul Crushing Work

Until recently, my thoughts on company culture have been an extension of personal preferences and values, be it something simple like having a library to facilitate continuous development or ensuring that My City Lives will create social value because of a strong belief in the economy of good. Although aware that one day I’d have to gather years of ideas and notes and hack together a manifesto of sorts, I hadn’t really felt as compelled until we made the decision to start hiring. At that point, motivated by the belief that community is paramount, it was clear that creating culture had become our most important priority.

Culture cannot be forced, however, and it’s an evolving entity. As such, to say that one is ‘creating culture’ is not as accurate as saying that we need to ‘facilitate culture’. The distinction is an important recognition of the value that your community brings (i.e. culture collaboration) and that there are simply too many variables that exist in a start-up environment to plan for something which should ideally organically develop.

Accordingly, I thought it would be valuable to share some things which we’ve learned or practiced while considering company culture. In every interview, we’ve said that our salient priority is to “recruit, retain and inspire great people”. Here are four approaches that we’re either learning or practicing that ultimately will ensure that we know exactly how to do that:

Studying the best: This one’s a given and accordingly, I won’t make a case for why it makes sense to do. While there a number of companies I studied, Zappos and I love Rewards stand out to because each is a young company that attributes its success to its strong focus on culture. Here’s a good story about each:

Zappos (source: Wikipedia): All employees that are hired for their corporate office, regardless of position, are required to undergo a 4-week customer loyalty training course, which includes at least 2 weeks of talking on the phone with customers in the call center at full salary. After a week of training, the new employees are offered $2,000 to leave the company immediately, no strings attached. This is to ensure people are there for the love of the job and not the money. Over 97% turn down the buyout.

ILR (source: Metro): Using the “A-players know A-players” strategy, I love Rewards motivated staff to spread the word about recruiting through their social networks by offering points that are redeemable for rewards. The company invited applicants to a wine-and-cheese open house. Resumes were not read but the company still guaranteed interviews that day and the ability to meet the senior leadership team and experience our office. The company estimates that it cut recruiting costs by 99.3%

Create a Philosophical Foundation: While a young company can avoid developing an exact document that outlines its guiding philosophy, it’s not excused from building a foundation of ideas to leverage from. For example, if you want your employees to value passion over their paycheck – you need to give them something to be passionate about. This requires the founders to consider for themselves why they’re doing what they’re doing.  Are you motivated primarily by passion or paycheck? Do you believe that great ideas inspire great people or the other way around? Ask yourself these questions as they’ll help you develop where you want to go while the next two points will help you get there (by the way, an example of laying the foundation is our belief that life is too short to work with jerks).

Create Opportunities for Culture to Develop: A city can point to its playhouses, performance centers and galleries as proof that culture exists – what are your organization’s equivalents?  Where and when can your team collaborate and create with one another? A community cannot develop without interaction and accordingly, leadership must find opportunities for this to occur. One approach that we’re adopting is having a monthly team meeting at a different location each time that will fuse together the company update, personal development and team collaboration concepts into a unique day of community and culture building. We’ll let you know how it goes.

Ask your community: During our interviews, we asked each applicant what they least liked about a previous job.  Asking this gave us some insight of one’s character but additionally helped us understand how previous employers failed to notice what they valued most. Knowing what your employees value is important in the culture development because you can works backwards on how to ensure that you’re a rock star at this. To do this though, you need to ask.

Speaking of which, what do you think? How would you facilitate culture? Do you have any examples of really great company culture to share?