Entrepreneur and philanthropist Jeremy Bloom reveals the five things you can include in your company culture to help create a thriving business.
Building a strong culture within a team is at the core of business success. You want a culture that recognizes and embraces shared values, attitudes, standards, and beliefs that characterise the goals of the organisation.
And it’s a good idea to make sure it suits the best people who work at the company while making a positive impression on customers and anyone else associated with the business.
Establishing a culture you believe in means having a clear and consistent vision and knowing how you’d like everyone, inside and outside, to view the company. Many old school CEOs and leaders were often ‘business operations first and people second’. But it’s the people that make a business successful.
The greater inclusion of people in the operation of the business has led to far more significant contributions by employees, which spill over to more appreciation from customers. So unless you are alone with nothing but technology, your business is built around people producing products and providing services for other people.
It’s a good idea to start by sitting down with your board of directors or co-founders to write down what your core values are and how you want to weave them into the DNA of your team. It’s important that the founders uphold the culture from the very beginning. To do so, the culture has to be more than just a shared vision. If you have a vision without a strategy, it will never be more than a vision.
Following are some things I believe to be the cornerstones of a solid business culture:
Transparency
At my company, we go over all the key metrics of the business with the entire company. The goal is for all employees to feel they know the thinking, responsibilities, and strategy at various levels of the company and can share ideas and feedback no matter who they are.
Time to disconnect
We all need to hit the reset button once in a while – people can’t come in early and leave late every single day without getting burnt out at some level. While you want employees to have a work-hard founder’s mentality, you need to recognise the work-life integration that exists and how significant it is to make sure you have personally fulfilled, clear-thinking people. It’s important to understand that sometimes life will get in the way of business and everyone should be allowed to take care of pressing personal matters.
Empowerment and a sense of freedom
You empower people by not micromanaging, erring on the side of giving people general guidelines rather than explicit, detailed directions.
Informed employees are more involved and empowered in a company. And the more freedom people have to take on tasks, manage them, find solutions, and execute them, the more they feel connected to and woven into the company’s culture.
Physical space
If you haven’t watched Susan Cain’s TED Talk on introverts, I highly recommend it. Although open spaces are great for some, other people need to be able to close the door to be at their most productive. It’s important to consider the comfort level of your employees before you decide how to lay out space or what type of office space to lease.
Your organisational design
Simply put, this is the processes, structure, and hierarchy you put into place that allow you to put your culture into practice. This will include your communication, company policies, team building, performance indicators, performance evaluations, division of responsibilities, and even how you schedule, and run, meetings. If designed well, everyone in the business can do his or her job more effectively. Your business culture will significantly be enhanced if the organisational design you put into place clarifies authority, responsibility, and accountability.
Jeremy Bloom is the co-founder & CEO of Integrate, a marketing software and media services provider. As a skier, he is a two-time Olympian and 11-time World Cup gold medalist as well as a former NFL player for the Philadelphia Eagles and the Pittsburgh Steelers. He is the author of Fueled by Failure: Using Detours and Defeats to Power Progress.
