Alexander in Team Leadership & Management — 5 min read

As a founder or CEO you probably know what sort of company you want to run. You know the company culture you want to preach and implement in the teams you run. However, making sure other people understand and share those values requires a lot of work.

You need to make sure your company has values and principles that motivate your employees and give guidance on how goals are accomplished. Having a coherent company culture makes it easier to hire the right employees and make sure your employees are engaged in their work. Failing to build a positive culture can break apart your team and reduce productivity to a halt. It can make or break your company. Luckily, if you are smart, you can easily avoid that and gain all the benefits that come with running a company in your image.

Use Weekdone to build an open and transparent company culture,

Building company culture from zero.

Darmesh Shah, Co-founder and CTO of the popular HubSpot has said that “The culture of a startup is defined by three things: 1. How the founders behave, 2. Who they recruit, reward and recognize. 3. Who they release (let go).”

If you are building a team from zero, it is a little easier as you can vet everyone during the hiring process. But more often than not, you need to impose your values on a team who has been working with different values for a long time. This requires good communication skills, trust and a clear understanding of how to “get” to those employees.

How we built our culture in Weekdone

Being employee nr 5 in Weekdone, I saw how our CEO built our company’s culture from the ground up. He spent an enormous amount of time coming up with our values and principals and countless hours discussing them with each of us. We also had 2 or 3 team events where we discussed it all a a group.

I was very young and inexperienced then. And it seemed like a terrible waste of time. Boy, was I wrong.

Over the years, I saw that the work that we put into defining our company’s culture has made sure, we understand each other. They help us work better as a team and feel more engaged in our work.

For our HR department, it is also much easier to choose new employees as it is pretty easy to see which of the candidates

Keeping your culture alive.

Joel Gascoigne, co-founder and CEO of Buffer has written about building a culture in his blog. He writes: “you can’t think too much about culture when you’re one or two founders, but you naturally need to think about it a lot more once you have a sizeable team. It’s certainly an evolutionary process, not something you just put in place once and never change.”

Building the culture is only the first step. This must be constantly enforced by leaders and managers to make sure employees don’t forget the values. A leader must always follow the 3 principles to make sure all the effort put into building the culture does not go to waste.

Always be an exemplary worker. Communicate the company’s vision constantly. Be open to feedback and be ready to change.

Benefits of building your culture with Weekdone.

Leaders must always be guiding their teams in accordance to their vision and principles. Weekdone will help you and your team with all three of those principles. You can build a transparent communication and performance management platform that helps you make sure your vision inspires everyone and you can get the feedback you need. You will have an open company culture and handle your goal setting and performance management at the same time.

Try out Weekdone performance management platform with your team right now.