Creating a culture in your startup (free download)

At a loss about being a boss? Part 4 of 4: Set your culture

What to do when you find yourself leading a team, without ever managing a single person

Your company culture is the personality of your business. Culture defines the environment you and your employees work in. Whether environment, mission, vision and values or ultimate goals, all will have an impact on how you do things and how your employees fit within the business.

There are typically two ways we’ve seen businesses set their culture. The first is for the founders to define their culture early on, even before they have established a team.  The second is to do that work once they have a small team in place.  Although it might be important to define the foundations of your culture early on, it can be easier to embed if it is refined and developed with a larger team , a little later down the line.

Once you have set the core components of your culture, these are some fundamentals of how you can embed them into the business:

• At the end of your recruitment process ask yourself: “Does this candidate reflect our values and why?” before making a hiring decision. This works best if you have an articulated framework which sets out the behaviours you are looking for.

•  Find ways to describe and bring to life your culture for your new joiners. This could be through how you welcome them to the team, the induction and the office set up etc. All of this will help them understand what behaviours will make them successful in your business.

•  When providing feedback on team performance, try and link it back to your values. By making sure objectives are set that link to those values in the first place, you reinforce (and potentially reward) the performance that is most aligned to your values. 

•  Share client or customer stories that reflect your values with your teams. This will help employees build a picture of how and what you expect. Clarity is a great motivator.

We know this can be hard to do so we have put together a simple framework to help you set your culture, which you can download for free here

This article is part of our “at a loss about being a boss” series four-part guide aimed at new startup founders. Check out the other blogs in that series: 

Part one: The HR Basics for startups

Part two: Leading a startup

Part three: How to recruit in a startup

Part four: How to create a culture in your startup

You can also download the full guide, along with all of the worksheets here or, if you have questions book a call with one of the team, we love questions!

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