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.

A scientific guide to creative juices [what they are and how to summon them]

August 24, 2015 by Blake Thorne 1 Comment

Does this happen to you?

It’s Friday and you’re sitting in an all-hands-on-deck staff meeting. The boss needs creative ideas for next quarter. “Concentrate!” You’re told. “Be creative!”

You concentrate with all your might, but you’ve got nothing.

The next day you’re outside cutting the grass. There’s the steady hum of the lawnmower engine, the rhythmic predictability of the mowing pattern. Your mind slows down, wanders. Drifts off. But suddenly.

Lightbulb.

Some creative idea nearly knocks you over. It’s brilliant. Where was that kind of thinking when you needed it in yesterday’s meeting?

The answer has to do with our creative juices. And the science behind them. And although “creative juices” isn’t exactly a scientific term, there’s plenty of science behind what we understand to be creative juices.

Why Remote Companies Are Doing Employee Perks Better Than Google

August 19, 2015 by Blake Thorne 2 Comments

Employee perks. The idea rushed into our vocabulary sometime around the year 2000. The world feared Y2K, it got foosball and laundry service. Since then perks at tech companies have covered all positions on the field, from the practical (catered lunch) to the silly (birthday parties).

Some perks — casual dress, equity — are so common in Silicon Valley that they don’t even seem like perks anymore. We take them for granted.

In your parents’ or grandparents’ day, insurance and sick days were the only perks needed. Even weekends and holidays started out as a wacky and progressive idea. Those days are gone. Today’s employees expect ping pong, pizza Fridays and bring your dog to work policies. Or at least that’s what we’re told.

In reality, many companies are evolving their understanding of what a good employee perk really is. We’ve gone from the early perks of the dot-com bubble (ping pong tables to seem cool and attract press attention) to the perks designed to help keep you sitting on your squishy exercise ball writing code all night. Now, a new kind of perk is emerging, and remote companies are leading the way.

How To Solve The 8 Causes Of Workplace Conflict

August 10, 2015 by Blake Thorne Leave a Comment

The workplace is for work. You’re here to get things done, grow the business, improve the world and get better at whatever it is that you do.

It’s not a place for squabbling with coworkers, managers and subordinates. But that’s what seems to happen. Workplace conflict is everywhere, eating up productivity and taking precious time away from the things that really matter.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The causes of workplace conflict are recognizable. In separate articles on workplace conflict, psychologists Art Bell and Brett Hart identified eight common causes of conflict in the workplace. Think about the conflicts you’ve had in the workplace. You’d be hard-pressed to find on you can’t trace back to one of these root causes.

It’s important to see workplace conflict this way, as a symptom of a great structural problem. That argument with the boss over coming in on Saturday isn’t really about coming in on Saturday. It’s about the misaligned expectations and poor communication that led you to have to come in on Saturday. In other words, the problem is bigger than the problem.

Thankfully, smart and innovative companies are changing the way we work — and eradicating the causes of workplace conflict at the source. Here’s a look at the eight causes and what great companies are doing about them.

How To Obsess Over Customers Like Jeff Bezos

August 6, 2015 by Blake Thorne 1 Comment

What external metric is your company most proud of? Facebook likes? SEO ranking?

For Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, it just might be this: each year, the company is ranked at the top of its category and often top overall on a national index measuring customer satisfaction among America’s largest companies.

Sounds a little dry, a little technical. But it reflects Amazon’s mission in the strongest way possible.

Bezos is famously customer-focused. “Obsess over customers,” he has said. While some companies chose to obsess over competition (or default to obsessing over competition because it feels right) Bezos has consistently chose to push Amazon to obsess over the customer.

Asynchronous Communication Is The Future Of Work

August 4, 2015 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.

Why I Ignored a Late-Night Email From My New Boss (And You Should Too)

July 17, 2015 by Blake Thorne 3 Comments

late-night-emails

It came, like most terrible and dangerous things, in the night.

OK so like 9:30.

But late enough. It arrived through the buzz of my phone. A new message in my inbox. A message from my new boss. And on week two of my tenure here at iDoneThis. The subject matter was nothing time sensitive, he wanted to introduce me to Jimmy Daly, an excellent writer and content marketer (whom you can find here).

I immediately opened the email and started typing a reply. I was excited. I felt that rush of opportunity. That ah-ha here’s my chance moment. Then I stopped myself. I deleted the draft and put my phone in my pocket. This is dangerous, I realized.

Company Culture for Startups

January 26, 2015 by Walter Chen 3 Comments

The Practical Guide to Company Culture for Startups

Company culture can be an enigmatic idea to a first-time startup founder, but it’s an absolutely vital resource that can buoy your company in tough times, that’s like jet fuel when times are good, and that can mean the difference between survival and giving up.

In this guide, we want to make company culture a concrete concept to you that you can make real in your company today. We use practical examples from leading companies and entrepreneurs that are on the bleeding edge of innovating company culture into a competitive advantage.

Let us know on Twitter at @idonethis what you think about this guide and share with us how your company is developing and cultivating its culture.

Transparency for Startups—A Practical Guide

January 19, 2015 by Walter Chen 4 Comments

A Practical Guide to Transparency for Startups

Join the movement that’s changing how companies are grown and run

By law, a public company can’t be transparent about how it operates, but a startup can. The ability to be transparent is an advantage unique to startups and, done right, it can drive company culture, employee happiness & retention, marketing, community building, and all other aspects of your business.

Moreover, transparency is an essential movement that’s changing the way that companies are built because it has the potential to make work more human and fulfilling.

In this guide, we cover why transparency is so valuable and important, and we give you concrete advice on how to make transparency real in your company using examples from how the best startups are doing it today. After you get a chance to read our guide, we’d love to hear what you think on Twitter at @idonethis.

Don’t Just Build Product, Build the Machine that Builds the Product

October 7, 2014 by Walter Chen Leave a Comment

First-time entrepreneurs often think building a product is the same as building a company, but experienced entrepreneurs know better.

To 3 seasoned entrepreneurs, building product is just the first step in a long journey, and it’s not even the hard part. Building product is hard, but building the machine that builds the product is even harder.

“The hard part is building the machine that builds the product.”

—Dennis Crowley, Co-Founder/CEO of Foursquare

Are You an Unwitting Audience to Productivity Theater?

September 17, 2014 by Janet Choi 3 Comments

A productive office is supposed to be a buzzing hive of activity, right?

But as a manager, a workplace that’s always humming with constant activity is not what you want to see — because it’s a sign that something has gone awry. It means that people are putting on a show to look busy all the time.

You know the trick: when someone walks by, you quickly switch tabs to bring up the spreadsheet or report you’re supposed to be working on, or engage in theatrics like looking very annoyed or walking briskly like you’re a very important person who can’t be bothered.

Welcome to Productivity Theater. Even though it’s impossible for human beings to be working nonstop, that’s what’s expected at the workplace. Looking busy becomes how you get recognized for doing a good job. The result is a show put on for the managers — and proceeds largely according to their expectations, scripts, and direction.

Company Culture

A scientific guide to creative juices [what they are and how to summon them]

Why Remote Companies Are Doing Employee Perks Better Than Google

How To Solve The 8 Causes Of Workplace Conflict

How To Obsess Over Customers Like Jeff Bezos

Asynchronous Communication Is The Future Of Work

Synchronous Communication

Why I Ignored a Late-Night Email From My New Boss (And You Should Too)

Company Culture for Startups

The Practical Guide to Company Culture for Startups

Transparency for Startups—A Practical Guide

A Practical Guide to Transparency for Startups

Join the movement that’s changing how companies are grown and run

Don’t Just Build Product, Build the Machine that Builds the Product

“The hard part is building the machine that builds the product.”

Are You an Unwitting Audience to Productivity Theater?

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