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.

Crowdsource Your Company’s Bonuses

May 30, 2012 by I Done This Support 1 Comment

I’m sure we’ve all worked at companies where the loudest guy gets the biggest bonus. In most companies, compensation is determined by a cabal of execs—guys that you may never have met—evaluating work that happened up to a whole year ago. Bonus compensation ends up being a function of politics, not performance.

51% of employees feel that the performance reviews upon which bonus compensation is based are inaccurate according to a 2011 survey by Globoforce. A 2010 literature survey in Psychology Today concluded that 87% to 90% of employees hate performance reviews because the feedback is not useful, the whole process is stressful, and they’re left demotivated as a result.

Creating a Productive Environment

May 3, 2012 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

Wise use of space means creating the right context for concentration, learning, communication, and collaboration—the building blocks of productivity.

Productivity is not just about you. It’s also about your environment.

The National Institute of Building Sciences takes a look at “productive building design.” Organizational effectiveness, or organizational productivity, is a fancy way of saying using space wisely. It makes sense to make a user-friendly work environment to cultivate an organization’s greatest resource and expense — the worker!

Teach People How To Learn

March 27, 2012 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

I was once asked: if an organization could teach only one thing to its employees, what single thing would have the most impact? My answer was immediate and clear: teach people how to learn. How to look at their past behavior, figure out what worked, and repeat it while admitting honestly what didn’t and change it.

A strategic advisor to CEOs and leadership teams, Peter Bregman writes that the most impactful thing that an organization can do for employees is to teach people how to learn by spending a few minutes reflecting at the end of the day.

As our iDoneThis users already know, there is indeed efficiency in slowing down!

How Sourceninja Gets an Extra 7 Hours of Productivity Every Week

March 20, 2012 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

We went through AngelPad with the guys at Sourceninja, so we’re proud that they’re one of our oldest and most loyal customers. Sourceninja is worry-free open source management made simple.

Sourceninja

One of the first lessons of AngelPad that the founder Thomas Korte impressed upon us was to maximize every minute of every meeting, because time spent in meetings has a multiplier effect. Every meeting costs the number of minutes it takes multiplied by the number of people in the meeting.

For the Sourceninja team, this used to mean 20 minute standups for their four-member team on a daily basis. 20 minutes five days a week for four people multiplies out to close to 7 hours per week spent in their daily standup.

How to Build the Machine that Builds the Product

February 28, 2012 by I Done This Support Leave a Comment

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

– Dennis Crowley

Successful entrepreneurs like Dennis Crowley and Mike Karnjanaprakorn at SkillShare have pointed that building a great product is only step one. The next, harder step is building the machine that builds the product which turns improvement into a repeatable process.

Mark Pincus, discussing his experience of growing Zynga, observed that products can be built “through the strength of your personality and lack of sleep,” but that doesn’t scale — and soon “you’ve got to find some way to keep everybody going in productive directions when you’re not in the room.”