As a fast growing organization, building the right company culture is integral to your business success. It practically impacts every part of your employee lifecycle. If you are able to create an empowering and positive company culture, you will be able to attract and retain top performers, promote employee satisfaction and lay the foundation for an engaged workforce. According to a study, 46% of job seekers cite company culture as very important when choosing to apply to a company.

Clearly, the right company culture has the potential to transform the people you attract, how they perform and how long they stay. This article will comprehensively discuss three major ways that fast growing organizations like yours can build a thriving culture. 

A) Identify, communicate and practice core values

Whether you are an HR professional or the founder of your company, the knowledge of core values of your organization is integral to building the right company culture. To put simply, core values are beliefs and principles that represent the mission and vision of the organization. They reflect the attributes that the company stands for. 

Why are core values important?

In most organizations, the onus of upholding the core values falls on the HR professionals. In case of new companies, the responsibility lies on the shoulder of the founder. If you have been entrusted with building the right company culture with core values, you must understand that core values play a critical role in: 

1. Setting priorities

Core values can effectively help your organization from getting distracted with multiple changing priorities in a dynamic market ecosystem. Having strong core values ensures that key priorities that align with the larger vision of the organization are given more importance over anything else.

2. Ensuring organization wide alignment

As your organization keeps growing, it will eventually become difficult to get everyone on the same page. Core values can help you create a culture where everyone inherently understands and personifies behavior that is directed towards a collective goal.

3. Facilitating decision making

If you are conflicted about a decision and unable to make a choice, reflecting on your company’s core values can facilitate the process. This can further help you create a culture of aligned decision making as upholding core values becomes the foundation for every decision.

How to leverage core values to build the right culture?

As a fast growing organization, you can seamlessly leverage your core values to build the right culture with a few simple steps:

1. Determine the values

Start the process by making a list of values that your company stands for. Most companies use attributes that they desire to be associated with their brand. Therefore, to identify your core values, undertake collective brainstorming to answer, ‘which are the values we would want our employees and customers to think of when they hear our name?’ Some of the top values that organizations have are integrity, innovation, customer success, passion, etc. 

2. Communicate and ingrain the values

Simply having a set of core values is not enough to create the right company culture. As the custodian of building a culture, the onus is on you to put those values into words, constantly communicate them across the organization and ingrain them in every team member. 

However, simply sending emails on the list of values will not drive the company culture. Explore different ways to facilitate the same. For instance, you can reward employees who best personify one or more values. 

3. Promote values aligned hiring

If you try to ingrain new values in employees who may hold conflicting personal values, you will find yourself rowing in two different directions. Therefore, it is best if you take care of the same before a new employee gets onboard. 

During the hiring phase, share what values your organization stands for and the company culture you promote. While during the interview, it is rare that someone will say they don’t align with your company values, however, deep conversations can help you get a fair idea. 

For instance, if your company culture promotes agility as a value, someone who likes to work in a very structured environment is unlikely to be the right fit. 

4. Ensure values driven decision making

Finally, make sure the values are not simply a tick in the box, but you manifest them in every company decision. The right company culture ascertains that every decision reflects the values the organization stands for. 

As an example, you can’t say that you have a company culture that promotes innovation, but in practice do not give your employees the freedom to reinvent processes and unleash their creativity. 

One of the top companies to follow the core values path to company culture has been Amazon. For instance, one of its core values has been boldness, and the company encourages its employees to take risks with an openness towards new ideas. 

Therefore, focusing on core values can help you create a company culture that is authentic and promotes an enriching employee experience. 

B) Follow the Competing Values Framework

As a people manager, you must have come across the Competing Values Framework or the CVF. According to this approach, the right company culture is based on a fair mix of four attributes or quadrants, including:

Innovate

This enables companies to be pioneers in their field to do something first and become market leaders. Creativity, risk taking, adaptability, etc. are key characteristics here.

Compete 

This attribute refers to a company’s ability to fight and successfully capture market share. Leaders here are generally focused on profitability, productivity and customer success to gain competitive advantage.

Control

This quadrant comes into play when companies are focused on driving standardized procedures and uniform structures. Timeliness, processes and a structured approach defined this attribute. 

Collaborate

Finally, the last attribute or quadrant pays attention to the art of working together to create shared value. This happens when everyone in the organization comes together to achieve a collective goal.

Decoding CVF for fast growing organizations

On the first glance, you might claim that your organization resonates most with one of these quadrants and that’s what defines your company culture. However, while one of these culture types might be predominant, if you look closely, you will see manifestations of all. Therefore, a fair balance of each of these is critical for the right company culture. You may not see all of them at once, and some precede or succeed the other, but all of them do co-exist. 

The lifecycle approach for CVF will closely resonate with the story of your scaling organization. You may start with an innovation driven approach to become a pioneer in what you are doing, focused on incremental transformation. Once you develop your proof of concept, you will focus on competing with others in the market to create your position and gain customer confidence. Gradually, you will incorporate some aspects of control to ensure there are standard processes and structures to minimize the chaos and promote seamless operations. All through the course, you will need to facilitate organization wide collaboration for meaningful impact. 

Implementing CVF for a thriving culture

If you are contemplating the next steps from here, we have got your covered. You may be wondering how to step up your focus on one of these quadrants to create the right culture. Well, you can count on your managers for that, as they are the main point of contact between employees and the leadership and bear the onus of driving the right company culture. 

As an HR professional, your focus should be on identifying and investing in the right training and skills building for line managers to drive your company culture in the right direction. Fortunately, CVF also shares a comprehensive list of manager competencies and behaviors for each of the quadrants. 

However, even before you start the process of manager development, you need to start with employee feedback. This suggests that you should gather employee feedback on a continuous basis to understand your position and progress on each quadrant. Furthermore, employee pulse can also help you understand the employee sentiment in terms of job, team, managers and workplace as a whole. You can then compare it with the key characteristics as mentioned in CVF. 

Here, collaboration with SuperBeings can become instrumental. On the one hand, you can implement pulse surveys to capture employee feedback on a daily basis and get a comprehensive view of their sentiment. On the other hand, you can leverage their AI driven guided conversation templates and other resources to develop manager effectiveness around areas suggested by their team members. With SuperBeings, you can create a high performance company culture based on a fair balance of the competing values framework by leveraging employee pulse and promoting manager development. 

C) Manifest covert values and attributes

The final path to building the right company culture is what most fast growing organizations resonate with. In the initial phases of your growth journey, you may not have a concrete list of values or attributes that you stand for. This suggests that there is no overt reflection of the values that drive your company culture. However, the absence of overt expression doesn’t necessarily mean that your organization lacks values. It only lacks an overt manifestation. 

To put it simply, there will be behaviors and thoughts that will be common to all your team members which will be manifested and visible in their decision and actions. However, what may be lacking will be a concrete expression of the same. That’s where a collaboration with a platform like SuperBeings can be beneficial. 

How to translate covert values into company culture?

A simple and straightforward approach with SuperBeings can help you transition from covert beliefs to create the right company culture.

1. Gauge employee pulse

Start by leveraging employee pulse surveys to gauge what your team members think. Questions on different aspects of their work, workplace, engagement, experience, etc., can help you capture their opinion on different aspects. A continuous approach can also help you study trends and understand changes and transitions in behavior. 

2. Analyze the response 

Once you capture the employee responses, analyze the pulse survey responses to identify attributes and values that are common to most. SuperBeings’ real time analytics and insights can help you get a clear picture about what drives your employees.

3. Evaluate the heatmaps

A unique capability that SuperBeings brings to you is the creation of heatmaps. Based on the AI driven analytics and experience in working with fast growing organizations, SuperBeings will share with you a heatmap on what the key driving behaviors are for your organizations and which values are most common to all your employees, manifested in their feedback. With these heatmaps, you will understand the company culture that is currently the foundation of your organization. 

4. Create or change the values

Depending on the larger vision and mission of your organization, you can decide whether or not the company culture identified by the heatmaps aligns with your long term goals. If the answer is positive, you can codify your core values to drive a thriving company culture. If not, you may want to pause and reflect on what your ideal company culture should look like and make efforts to inculcate the same all across. 

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There is no competing view to the fact that the right company culture can help you drive high performance, promote customer success, capture market share and most importantly nurture a happy and engaged workforce.

As a fast growing organization, you have the flexibility and opportunity to create a futuristic and empowering company culture that promotes value and development for both the business and those who run it.