Scaling Culture as Your Company Grows

Businesses start with the people and are made with an objective for growth. As an effective leader, how can you scale your culture at the same rate that your company is growing?

Every successful brands and companies we know today started with a lean team.

  • Google started with 3 founders and had 21 employees on its early years as a Silicon Valley start-up. Since its birth 22 years ago, google now has more than 118,000 employees from all around the world.
  • Apple started with 10 employees; 2 of which founded the company in Steve Job’s parent’s home. Today,Apple employs approximately 137,000 people from around 25 countries in the world.
  • Microsoft, was founded by childhood buddies, Bill Gates and Paul Allen and had 11 more employees at its early years in 1978. This year, they have onboard a staggering 156,000 employees inside this multi-billion giant.

If your business objective is to grow to become even just a quarter of these giants, do not lose track of your organizational culture. Think of it as the soul of the company.

HOW DOES CULTURE IMPACT THE OVER-ALL SCALABILITY OF A COMPANY?

91% of executives believe improving their company’s culture would increase the company’s value.

And yet many top management professionals are still unsure,what, where and how to place efforts regarding culture.

Culture, just like technology, is an asset that is worth investing in. Although, in comparison to the other aspects of scaling a business such as product development, innovation, digitalization, financial strategy, and system integration, the establishment, maintenance and scaling of an organizational culture is harder to put a metric on.

Culture is a bigger umbrella where other values within an organization foster. This umbrella is where collaborative relationships are being born. The way that the culture is established, maintain and scaled is a big influence in keeping a positive employee morale, profitable productivity and attract and keep the best people on board.

CHALLENGES IN SCALING CULTURE AS YOUR COMPANY GROWS

  • Diversity. Workplaces nowadays embrace diversity because it provides a unique combination of skillsets, views and perspectives. This is particularly great to apply especially if your business is catering an international or global market. However, this poses a challenge to establishing and keeping the organizational culture on the track. The diverse environment and external cultures that each of these people were born from may result in conflicting opinions and communication problems.
  • Onboarding new hires. About20% of employees leave within their first 45 days in anew job. Some of the reasons for this can be a misrepresentation of the company culture by the job postings or ads, lack of onboarding training, or simply because a negative culture is showing early in the days of a rookie.
  • Communication. We spend most of our time communicating. A close and indirect line of communication is a challenge not only in scaling a corporate culture but also in almost every aspect of doing a business.
  • Growth. Growth itself can be a challenge in scaling culture inside the organization. Setting up a business for growth, often times, the part where plans for an employee-friendly process is being overlooked. As the company grows, more and more issues are being factored in but without culture implementation, scaling a culture as your company grows might be hard to reach and might set the company out of track int he long-run.

HOW CAN THE MANAGEMENT IMPROVE IT OR SET IT UP IN THE FIRST PLACE?

  • What is your story? Tell your story among your employees. What are your mission and vision?  Why you’re doing what you are doing. What parts of your organization culture and traditions makes people inspired?

“19% of employees don’t understand their core values or simply don’t know them.” -OfficeVibe’sState of Employee Engagement poll

  • Have a culture influencer to do the storytelling. Build a culture that empowers everyone from top to bottom or from left to right. Having one ambassador to start with is good enough as this practice can be passed down from the pioneers of the business up to the rookies. Soon enough, everyone will be guardians of this culture.
  • Prepare for growth. Business growth preparation does not only mean finances, marketing, sales, engineering,etc., but also, and most importantly, people management. A growth strategy should also include a plan that includes the people behind it.
  • Keep an effective line of communication. An effective line of communication encourages feedback,support, straightforwardness, in both a horizontal or vertical organization structure.

CONCLUSION

To summarize simply: the center of any organizational culture is the people. As mentioned in our previous articles, employees are the forefront of any company. Employees are the bridge to making a profitable and scalable business. Any management who is designing and maintaining an excellent culture for a company that is fast-growing, should always keep it in mind to put people at the center.

Perhaps the easiest way to having a positive and progressive culture in business is by starting small and doing it at the very beginning. Having a solid culture and tradition set up in place as a company starts is easier to handle than having to fix the problems that arise as the company is on its way to sky-rocketing growth.

Ready to know how to achieve an excellent customer service with a great culture? Get in touch with us today.

Recent Blogs

Our Services
Share This Blog
Schedule A Call