Company Culture

At the best companies, "company culture" is more than just a buzzword. Here's how the most innovative companies make company culture real.

To get started, you may want to read articles about specific companies like Zappos, Amazon, Shopify, Wistia, and Buffer.

For a comprehensive look at company culture, read our guide Company Culture for Startups.

Asynchronous Communication Is The Future Of Work

August 31, 2018 by Blake Thorne 5 Comments

Synchronous Communication

Add this to the long list of things about working that will puzzle your grandkids.

“Tell us about fax machines again, grandpa.”

“And what about synchronous communication?”

Well just have a seat, sonny. Let me tell you a story.

Synchronous communication meant when I exchanged information at the office, you had to send and receive the information at the same time. So I would call someone on the phone, wait for them to pick up, say some information while at the exact same moment they received that information. It happened all the time. Even way back in 2015 when we had all sorts of tools to stop it, it happened all the time.

How to cultivate a culture of open feedback

August 14, 2018 by Walker Donohue Leave a Comment

Giving feedback can be terrifying. You’re often afraid of being too direct and setting a team member on the defensive. Or you’re worried that you’ll temper criticism with too much praise — losing your message in translation. Because giving feedback is difficult, people often do the exact wrong thing and avoid giving feedback altogether.

That’s one of the worst decisions you can make. When you withhold feedback not only do you risk the team member making the same mistake over and over again — but you deprive them of the opportunity to improve.

When you create an organizational culture around clear, open feedback, you’re making a promise between team members to compound and learn from past mistakes.

How to Build Company Culture with No Time, Money, or Experience

October 3, 2017 by Sasha Rezvina Leave a Comment

Startups are depicted as workplaces with pool tables, lego-speckled break rooms, desks adorned with Star Wars memorabilia and even in-house cafeterias. In reality, startups are two sleep-deprived founders squeezed into a co-working space with a small team and a bunch of strangers, trying to make something out of nothing.

build-company-culture

In the early days, it’s difficult to focus on how to build company culture. You don’t have the cash to invest in an office space, the time to invest in employee growth, or the experience to deal with interpersonal problems. Under these constraints, most founders focus on everything but culture and leave it as a problem to be addressed later down the line.

But the biggest existential threat to your company isn’t lack of planning or lack of resources — it’s people problems. Two-thirds of early-stage startups fail from interpersonal issues, according to Harvard Business Professor Noam Wasserman. If you don’t put effort into cementing a strong team relationship now, your company will fall apart at the first stumbling block.

Here’s how you can lay the foundation for a healthy culture early on.

12 Startup Leaders on What They Love about Their Company Cultures

September 19, 2017 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

Startup founders begin with building new products and end up building new companies. Ultimately, some of the most successful companies not only reinvent a product or market, they change the way people work in a way that’s reflective of what they value most, and that’s embodied in their company culture.

To find out how startup leaders think about building companies that they themselves enjoy working in, we surveyed the founders of some of the most innovative startups out there to ask them one simple question:

What do you value most about your company culture, and what’s one important way that you contribute to it?

We received some amazing, proud and insightful responses from startup founders personally, another individual within the company who was eager to chip in, and the PR or marketing team.

How to Focus on the Magic Even When Scaling Up

April 10, 2017 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

Onfleet Product Design and Strategy Director Ivan Tolmachev (right) discusses a prototype with Vice President of Sales Andrew Travis.

Teams of all sizes struggle with their processes at some point in their lifetime. If you’re a startup, one of the your advantages is how quickly you can move in a space where the big boys take a while. But what happens when your team is in transition mode and needs to keep scaling up as quickly as it did in the beginning? And how do you this in a design capacity?

How A Team of 3 Needed I Done This to Stay In Sync and Prioritize Work

January 17, 2017 by Evan Leave a Comment

The Brief

Productivity is everything at startups. And, with all the chaos that happens at startups (growth, hiring, legal – you name it), it’s easy to lose sight on tracking your productivity.

That’s where Markitors found themselves last year.

Markitors is a growing digital marketing agency in Scottsdale, Arizona with 3 full time employees and 15 small business clients. If you Google “digital marketing company”, Markitors usually appears on the first page of the search engine results. As a result, you’ll find a lot of the chaos at Markitors that you’d find in a typical startup. Onboarding new employees. Finding new office space. Delivering results for clients. Making sure deliverables are met. And, ensuring that the company is operating at max productivity to bring on employee #4.

How We Host Meetups

January 12, 2017 by Willa Rubin Leave a Comment

When we first started I Done This, getting to know our customers was easy. We also didn’t have a ton of customers.

As our subscriber list grew, getting to know our new customers became challenging. But we didn’t want to give up the close relationships we were developing with our customers. Our customers’ insights have been super valuable. And frankly, we genuinely like our customers and love connecting with them in a casual environment.

I Done This users are now based all around the world—so when we travel, we jump at the chance to get to know local users and have started hosting customer meetups. We carefully plan each step of the way, so that we set ourselves up for success. And by success, we mean having great conversations, really connecting, and positioning ourselves to maintain new customer relationships in the future.

Here’s how we plan our meetups to grow our customer relationships.

Lessons From A Year In A Remote Team Culture

December 15, 2016 by Ben Mulholland 1 Comment

Every remote worker I’ve seen stumble and fail over the last year has had one thing in common. They weren’t involved in the team culture.

I don’t just mean water cooler talk – culture includes almost everything aside from your actual output. The system you work by, the amount of meetings you have, the very structure of your teams is governed by your culture.

So when an employee doesn’t engage in culture it causes three things:

A feeling of isolation
A communication barrier
A lack of motivation
Lower productivity

However, when culture is done right, it powers motivation, encourages communication, and forms a solid, centralized base for your entire workforce to draw from.

Over the last year of remote work the practices I’ve seen benefit our team the most have been:

Assigning mentors
Hosting competitions
Posing problems instead of solutions
Centralizing information
Documenting processes
Giving structured freedom

Let’s dive right in!

The Science of Trust in the Workplace

November 1, 2016 by Willa Rubin Leave a Comment

A 2015 study at NYU Langone showed that when mice were given oxytocin—the hormone that enhances bonding—they started caring for other mices’ babies, as if they were their own. This behavior continued even after the mices’ oxytocin receptors were shut off.

trust in the workplace

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could give some to your manager?

It turns out oxytocin can actually teach us a lot about working together as a team and building great work relationships leading to more trust in the workplace. Here’s how it works.

3 Project Management Methodologies That Create Better Work Culture

August 23, 2016 by David Zha 1 Comment

People like to dismiss project management methodologies (PMM) as frivolous techniques that won’t really improve their business’s productivity. While they’re wrong on that account, they actually miss the point completely.

project management methodologies

What people don’t realize is that PMMs are more than just process-improvement tools. Project management is really about changing attitudes to create a trusting, collaborative company culture. By adopting practices that encourage communication, unity, and openness, a company can instill positive values within itself and become a great place to work.

We’ll take a look at how companies can use project management methodologies to unify teams and encourage collaborative attitudes for a better work culture.

Company Culture

Asynchronous Communication Is The Future Of Work

Synchronous Communication

How to cultivate a culture of open feedback

How to Build Company Culture with No Time, Money, or Experience

12 Startup Leaders on What They Love about Their Company Cultures

How to Focus on the Magic Even When Scaling Up

How A Team of 3 Needed I Done This to Stay In Sync and Prioritize Work

The Brief

How We Host Meetups

Lessons From A Year In A Remote Team Culture

The Science of Trust in the Workplace

3 Project Management Methodologies That Create Better Work Culture

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