We talk a lot about culture around here, obviously. We talk about what makes great culture, and where building great culture starts. We really suggest thinking about culture as early as when you are an individual founder seeking a partner. One of the biggest reasons why startups fail, often, has to do with their team. Think about it this way, when you are building a company and the entire company is only made up of five people, when one person is gone, then technically 20% of the company is gone. When one of your team members doesn’t get along with others, the result is the same. You lose 20% of your company. Identifying good culture vs bad culture is so easy especially with smaller teams. When it’s bad, your productivity drops, efficiency, organization, communication, and more. Your whole business suffers.
You better check yourself before you wreck yourself.
Here are some things to keep in mind when trying to determine if your office has poor company culture:
Results
Look at them. Are your departments or teams hitting their goals? Are they missing them by just a tad or are they way off? Are the goals realistic or unrealistic? If your goals are realistic goals, yet your team isn’t able to achieve them, you may want to start getting answers. There could be a big issue with culture here.
Relationships
How is your relationship with your staff? When you delegate tasks, are they met with blank faces and silence or are they met with excitement and enthusiasm to take on new challenges? How your employees communicate with you, or don’t communicate with you, is a clear sign of how well you are keeping them engaged. Great ways to make sure this is not an issue is to always communicate to your team, be transparent about company goals and vision, show respect for ideas and hard work, and in return you will probably get hard work.
Gossip
Every company has it. This is almost completely unavoidable, but, you can at least do yourself a favor and keep your eyes and ears open and be aware of how your employees feel about one another. You need your team to get along with each other. It only takes one bad hire to ruin it for the rest of us. Address peer-to-peer situations early before they become a serious problem for the workplace environment.
Lack of feedback
When’s the last time you actually asked your employees how they are feel about working there? Ever ask them how their day is going, or if they learned anything from a recent project? If you can’t remember the last time you got feedback from your team, then you are in big trouble. Don’t even think about annual surveys. Those are a thing of the past! We need to be getting constant feedback. The more you know about your team, real-time, consistently throughout the year, the easier it will be to tackle problems as they happen, and continue to build great culture every day.
Do yourself a favor and spend this weekend thinking about your company culture. Do you have it good or bad? Are you noticing the symptoms of bad company culture mentioned above? If so, give us a shout. In fact, even if your culture is already great, reach out to us anyways. Chances are you aren’t getting feedback and learning about your team as often as you should. We can make that easy for you, so let's talk and see how to get started with VibeCatch in the best way for your company
