Anil Stocker co-founder and CEO, MarketInvoice
Getting culture right in a scaleup business
In a startup’s early days, culture is easy to define. It’s set by the small team who are working together to get a company off the ground and the founders are very closely involved in all the details.
C
ulture becomes harder to shape as a company grows, generally because founders have more demands and physically can’t work with everyone regularly. But you can implement a great company culture no matter how fast you scale and it has nothing to do with a trendy office, ping pong table or beer fridge. I describe culture as intangible but crucial to authenticity. It has to be led by everybody,
particularly demonstrated from the people at the top. A company’s culture shows in behaviour externally and internally and can change over time. The first change is around the 20 people mark as founders can’t be with everyone all the time. It shifts again around 50 people because suddenly you have managers in place. And at 100 people you have a couple of layers of management and not everyone can
work with founders directly or interact with them frequently. However, culture will help retain employees for the long-term business cause and employees will want to go that extra mile to finish a particularly time-sensitive project. Your values should reflect what matters to you as a business. Values should be a combined effort from the whole team and embody the vision of the founders. The first step in defining your values is to get input from as many employees as possible. That way the process isn’t done in isolation and captures everyone’s views. Values are no use to your company if they are just a few platitudes on a wall. Empower everyone to live the values every day. At MarketInvoice, we decided early on that transparency is something we hold dear. Much of our daily business communication takes place over open Slack channels, so that information can be shared freely and easily. Although we’re rapidly reaching the 100 employees mark, we still have a town hall meeting every Friday over a couple of drinks to share the latest news. We also encourage employees to ask questions anonymously for the leadership team to tackle – the team can even vote in real-time whether they’re satisfied with the answer. Publicly praising and rewarding employees for living the values is also vitally important. Something as simple as some special branded merchandise or a gift voucher will really reward employees who go the extra mile for you – it makes them feel good and sets the bar for the team. Values and culture should be consistent but you don’t have to be constrained by them. It’s natural for business values to evolve over time. APRIL 2018 ELITEBUSINESSMAGAZINE.CO.UK
A.Stocker column.indd 1
31
09/04/2018 22:43