Startup Series: Building your startup’s culture

By Shefaly Yogendra To be fair, building organisational culture is usually not on many founders’ radars in the early days, when much must be done in very little time. However as I have written in earlier columns, it is wise to consider building the scaffold of your startup for blazing success. Because while failure gives time to ponder, success rarely spares the time to do things over. How can one go about laying the right foundations for a startup’s culture? Culture is a catch-all term applied to business practices, processes, interactions and behaviours that make up the work environment in an organisation. Culture in a startup is how founders’ values manifest in practice. Particular business practices and behaviours may also be shaped by the founders’ personal pain points that they may be addressing with their startup. As ever, starting with the basics is a good first step. If you are lucky, you and your cofounders are on the same page as to the values that matter to you and that set the tone — both for the organisation you wish to build with your cofounders and for your cofounder relationship. The cofounder duo behind PostFold, whom I advise, created their fashion startup after noting that affordable fashion was often poor quality in materials and craftsmanship, or failed to understand the structure of modern life where one can seamlessly go from one’s desk at work to an evening do without an opportunity to change clothes. Their research also showed that regardless of poor quality, the markups on fashion labels were high but this did not necessarily mean that the master tailor and the machinists got paid decent wages. This, they noted, was a significant factor in poor retention of tailoring talent, which is crucial to the survival and success of a fashion business. Their shared values were quite simple but firm. They set out to deliver a high quality of materials and craftsmanship affordably to their customers, while delivering a superior customer experience. This was the idea at the centre of their business design. They also wanted to create an atmosphere of trust and respect in the workplace, which shaped how people interact with one another in the business. This idea is in line with their belief that happy employees ensure that customers are served well. Remarkably — and this may not be feasible for all startups — the organisational values are also their core brand values. In turn, these values shaped how they designed their business processes e.g. how customer complaints and returns are to be handled, how employees may be able to purchase the company’s products at a discount or borrow samples for occasional use, or how employees could choose work-from-home while delivering on deadlines and ensuring their collaborative projects did not get derailed. Further, the clearly articulated brand values have shaped their brand communication strategy. If something does not increase their brand’s prominence or does not better the customer experience they aim to deliver, they choose simply not to do it. Avoiding bandwagons allows them to focus on building the excellence in serving their customers and keeping their employees motivated and engaged. To recap, values guide our sense of what is important and what is right. Culture is how our values manifest in practice. Our daily decisions and behaviours align to our values. Processes and incentives can create reinforcement of the values on a day to day basis. A media entrepreneur I advise has found a creative way of reinforcing the organisational values and culture within the team. He has created rituals and shared experiences to enhance the sense of belonging and the belief in their shared values. These shared rituals and experiences allow the team to speak freely, raise concerns, thrash out things and return to work with a renewed sense of commitment to their work and its purpose. Like much else involving people and their interactions, the culture of an organisation evolves too, especially with growth and scaling. For instance, while the entire, currently small, team at the media startup I mentioned earlier can go on a shared experience, it will become harder even at twice the size. Similarly, nearly all startups learn quickly that the formality of communications and the accessibility of the founders both change as the team size grows. This subtle change in culture can upset early employees and founders alike. At least as founders, you may find it helpful to make peace with that possibility early on. In the next column, we shall talk about a specific aspect of building culture crucial to building a sustainable and well-run organisation. The author is a decision-making specialist, and advises founders and CEOs on technology, risk, branding and talent. She can be found on Twitter: @Shefaly. This is the ninth part in a series ( first,   second,   third,    fourth,   fifth ,  sixth ,  seventh  and **eighth** ) on the startup ecosystem.