Startups provide a very unique culture that’s nimble, transparent, competitive and cooperative. This environment is ripe for success, enabling a fast-paced setting where productivity is high and challenges are welcomed. This type of mentality creates a launchpad to success that can’t be beat.
But with additional success comes additional headcount, which requires additional structure. This begs the question: How can you keep that startup vibe when rapidly scaling an organization?
As a company that began with our founder coding websites in the bedroom of his parent’s house to an organization approaching 500 employees, we know what it means to retain that startup vibe. If your business is on a rapid upswing, take a look at these key strategies that allowed us to continue cultivating the “keep it simple, get it done” attitude behind our success.
1. Question your policies
The most important question growing companies should ask regarding their policies is, “Does this policy make sense for us, or are we just implementing because other companies have it?”
One issue that arose as our team expanded was the frequent request to work from home, often accompanied with anecdotes about friends from other companies having this ability. Naturally, with a more diverse set of employees, a more diverse set of working hours were needed. But after several discussions with department heads and our managers, we realized that, for us, a successful work from home policy varied greatly between teams. Because of this, instead of creating a blanket policy, we implemented a flexible program that provided managers discretion when granting work-from-home benefits, tying the privilege to performance and quality of work.
As was the case above, when it comes to creating and implementing policies, it’s important to vet the proposed changes to all stakeholders throughout the organization. This gives leaders and employees the opportunity to give feedback. A policy that may make sense and jive well with leadership may not sit so well with employees or negatively impact productivity in unexpected ways. Beyond that, it also helps build support for the policy with employees, making implementation easier.
2. Open the feedback process to everyone
Everyone’s opinions counts – whether you’re the frontline employee, the IT guy or the VP of Marketing. But as your company increases in size, so will the opinions that need to be considered.
To ensure that everyone’s voice is heard and valued, we initiated several low-barrier feedback mechanisms in the form of online and in-person surveys. For example, three months after onboarding a new team member, an HR manager has an open dialogue to receive feedback and ensure the employee understands their role and that it aligns with initial expectations. Equally important, this meeting enables our HR team to gain insights while the employee is still new to the business and retains an outside perspective.
To better facilitate a large amount of input, we also send out quarterly “Happy Surveys.” These surveys are fully anonymous and ask employees to share their thoughts about their work environment and our policies. For example, we ask team members to tell us to what level they agree with statements, like: “Is there someone at work who encourages your development?” and “In the last year, have you had opportunities to work and grow?” From there, we share results with the leadership team. This way, everyone in the organization, regardless of role or tenure, has the ability to easily take advantage of our open-door feedback policy.
Of course, it’s important to respond to the feedback to show employees they are being heard and their opinions are valued. In our experience, this has ranged from new amenities like outdoor seating all the way to larger benefits like overhauling our 401(k) provider and increasing our matching percentage.
3. Take a top-down, bottom-up approach to leadership
Your company’s culture is defined, embodied and defended by its people. It doesn’t just come from the top C-level executives, though they’re responsible for fostering and nurturing the right attitude and direction. Every single employee in the organization should be a key component. Developing and growing your staff and talent from within is vitally important to protecting the core of your culture as a company grows.
Culture is a two-way street: we want to invest in our people and we want our people to invest in the company – that’s why we aggressively promote from within, especially those who embody the startup vibe. In fact, we’ve already rewarded 55 internal promotions so far this year.
Our focus on promoting those with right attitudes has done wonders to keep the startup vibe going strong. Namely, it keeps team members at all levels in the organization, including entry-level roles, excited about their potential growth and contributions to the company, boosts morale, and most importantly, spurs further innovation. This approach to leadership has also assisted with overall retention, as it keeps up motivation for even our most tenured employees.
4. Break down work silos, build up personal connections
In the beginning, intercompany communications is easy. There aren’t that many people or different departments. As more employees join the team, walls go up between departments and communications silos form as people become more loyal to their immediate departments instead of the larger organization. There is a simple solution to breakdown the barriers: get people to interact outside of meetings and conference rooms.
Here at Volusion, we organized our office space to be as conducive to collaboration as possible by creating dozens of collaborative workspaces, having a communal eating area and organizing activities to get workers away from their desks and interacting with another. For example, our IT and Security teams are in frequent communication with our software developers to provide examples of vulnerable software code to proactively prevent security breaches – this wouldn’t be nearly as easy without our collaborative work settings.
Essentially, once your team gets to know people outside of their department, they’re more likely to feel a closer connection with the overall organization, leading them to focus on improving the whole instead of just their part.
5. Hire with culture in mind and an eye for vibe
Keeping the startup vibe with current employees is one thing, but to scale this mentality and keep it sustainable, you must also hire the right people. This piece lies directly with your organizational frontliners, ensuring that recruiters and hiring managers are fully trained to look beyond resumes and work experience to identify a true culture fit.
Fortunately, the solution is easy: build the hiring process around your organization’s mission and core values. The number one quality we look for and base our interview questions around is the following: how does the candidate handle ambiguity? What examples of new ideas have they brought to the table in previous roles? To thrive in a startup culture, workers must be able to deal with adversity while innovating and embracing change. If a candidate doesn’t demonstrate that quality, they’re not hired. We also take a look for ego – if a candidate doesn’t leave it at the door, we immediately know it won’t be a fit. And in cases where candidates are hired but not a good fit, we aren’t afraid to let them go.
Change can be a good thing, and it should keep a growing team energetic, effective and driven. As a company evolves, its culture will inevitably meet a new set of challenges. Growth is important but it’s equally important to defend the values and culture that you started with it – and continue to foster it with openness and transparency.
