There are successful companies with good cultures and successful companies with terrible cultures. I’ve read the excellent Elon Musk and Steve Jobs biographies written by Walter Isaacson. 

Some of it is genuinely eye-watering. If you look at Apple under Steve Jobs, many today will argue that the company had a terrible culture. 

• When he fired people at Pixar, he made their notice period ‘retroactive.’ 
• In interviews, he’d ask incredibly inappropriate questions like ‘How old were you when you lost your virginity?’ or ‘How many times have you taken LSD?’
• Steve Jobs fired the employee in charge of MobileMe in front of a group of employees.
• He regularly screamed aggressive aphorisms at staff, such as ‘We only want ‘A’ players at Apple. You aren’t good enough to be a ‘B’ player!’

Similarly, Elon Musk has received considerable criticism for axing 6,000 employees, or 80% of X’s workforce. Then, he told his advertisers that ‘he didn’t care what they think’—this is the base that generates Twitter’s revenue. 

The Share price of X has collapsed since then. Sales have fallen for Tesla for the first year, and its share price has also plummeted. 

Founders tend to have a set of characteristics that can make them unbeatable initially. Still, eventually, those characteristics can hold the company back from growth (think about Apple’s new CEO Tim Cook’s empathetic management style versus its founder Steve Jobs’ aggressive and emotionally tone-deaf approach).

Of course, a healthy work culture is more likely to foster a sustainable, successful company. There is now abundant research showing that companies with happy employees perform, on average, better than those with miserable employees. 

There are plenty of companies out there with good work cultures. I’ve worked at numerous companies, and most of my time there, I was given free rein to develop marketing ideas unhindered by micromanagement. Some of those companies are worth billions of dollars now. 

My wife, Catherine, worked at Akamai Technologies, and for most of her 12 years there, the culture was exceptional. Akamai treated her with great respect and valued her ideas and contributions. 

She developed considerably at this company, starting as a contract recruiter and managing a team of 25 recruiters as head of EMEA Talent Acquisition. So, we both also know about good company cultures……..and bad ones!

Values & Culture

• It’s not what you put up on your wall, coffee cups, or even necessarily what a CEO says about its culture at events.
• It’s how your employees feel on a Sunday night thinking about work the next day. 
• It’s what two employees who are good friends say about your company when they’re having a couple of beers at the end of the day, or while having lunch together.
• It’s what people write about you on social media and employee review sites (although some well-known review sites are no longer transparent or reliable indicators of company culture – more to follow!)
• It’s how many referrals you get from existing employees.

Culture is a living, breathing entity, an animal spirit. In my experience, it develops top-down. So, no matter what management says about the values, your company culture will be how the C-level conducts themselves.

If the C level manages by intimidation, bullying, and fear, then that is how everyone in the organization will behave. If the C level is managed by positive affirmation (five times more effective than negative) and creating psychological safety, then that is also how the company will turn out. 

When scaling a startup, all of these ideas are even more pertinent. Since you are creating the base of your culture from the first few employees you hire, just adding a few employees will make a big difference. 

If you are a company of twenty employees and hire five new employees from Microsoft, your culture will shift somewhat to Microsoft’s values and culture.

In the last decade, HR departments have moved away from talking about ‘culture fit’ (very traditionally ‘corporate’) to ‘culture add’ (more inclusive). Every employee in a startup will alter your culture since your numbers are still small.

Moving to remote work and the increased demand for a values-driven company are other essential aspects of effectively scaling a good culture at your startup.

When I first joined the workforce, we worked five days a week at the company offices. Office life was almost exclusively inside the building (think the UK or the US show Office). Even six or seven years before the pandemic, many of us started working remotely, albeit usually just one day a week. 

But since the pandemic, the world of work has been revolutionized. Many employees are fully remote, and the rest are typically hybrid. Heads of HR and the C level have struggled to maintain a strong culture when employees rarely connect in person. 

Secondly, the new generations of workers care much more about the culture. They scour the internet and review sites for indications of how a company works. They have become incredibly cynical about corporate life. 

For example, 60% of Gen Z’s will regularly ‘ghost’ recruiters since it makes this generation feel ’empowered.’ 70% of Gen Zs would only work for a company whose values align with theirs. So, make sure the culture your company intends to scale with is appealing.