Corporate culture

Corporate culture is usually declared as a set of "core values" - moral and business principles that are declared by the leadership.

These principles are enforced either implicitly using the system of reward and punishment or explicitly during hiring, performance evaluation processes and through organizational structure.

There are many ideas about good and bad company cultures, suggestions on how to build one and many stories about different experiments conducted by companies, very often conflicting with each other.

For example, some consider "Customer first" to be a bad core value while "No Bullshit" to be a good one. Why is that so?

I wrote down my main concerns about the general idea, some cautionary tales and personal experiences I had with implementations of corporate cultures that go wrong and propose an alternative approach.

Why have special corporate culture at all?

Why company needs somewhat special culture or core values different from the culture of the society it exists in?

There is a perception that special culture somehow contributes to the company success or failure, differentiates the company from the competition and makes it a good or a bad place to work.

However I have never read the actual study that measured positive effects of corporate culture on the company success. In the ones that I have read, folks came to realization that basic common sense principles still worked the best.

The other argument is that culture could be used to attract like-minded people, however in my opinion it is hard to quantify what "like mindedness" usually means and whether it leads to good results.

At companies I worked at or co-founded we were sometimes stating implicit culture "hints" aiming to attract like-minded folks, that were successfully challenged by new team members and were proven to be wrong. For example in some of our hiring ads we mentioned that we are "hackers using emacs or vim" because we thought that it would attract some special people - hackers, who as we imagined, like using their text-based editors and digging kernel sources all day long.

People joining the team found this line in the ad ridiculous, as they were using Microsoft VS or Eclipse. Turned out they were great hackers after all, and just laughed at this part of the ad. Later I realized it was a pretty stupid idea that editor choice somehow reflects personality of an engineer, but this is a good example of how our biases are masquerading as "culture" statements.

The third argument is that company culture can be used to signal that company is a safe work environment for people of all groups.

This argument resonates with me, mostly because in current by-defaut-hostile tech environment any company has to declare conformance to basic common principles to signal that it is a safe and reasonable place to work.

Dangers of implementing company culture

Implementing any corporate culture is a social experiment on the people working at the company, sometimes conducted with a limited time span and resources while simultaneously trying to find product-market-fit and reach real business goals.

Here are some dangers I see when implementing and enforcing company culture, especially in a startup:

Implementation is usually done and promoted by the leadership and there is a strong incentive to everyone to "play along" even if people disagree.

Even when declared as collaborative process it is usually enforced and implemented by the top management. Middle management can use see this as an opportunity to get rid of folks who disagree or seen as a threat to someone's career.

The failure of such experiment can result in high churn churn rates like in Zappos or Github with their experiments on flat hierarchies.

Leaders often find that well-intentioned culture statements, can lead to processes that are very dangerous for the team.

Methods of establishing such cultures are scientifically unproven, for example folks conduct special "culture panels" filtering out candidates, but how do they know they have succeeded? In the blog posts CEOs implementing such cultures, never mention if they have a control group for this experiment, or how they measure success or failure and whether they conduct anonymous interviews and studies to check effects.

When I read these articles that don't mention any research or any phisophical and sociological basis, I see a set of aspirational statements and naive practices that founders consider to be important at this particular moment of their lives, set of biases or beliefs stated as core values with undefined effect on the company.

A larger company implementing corporate culture attracts "business consultants" - six sigma-style folks who often distract and annoy employees by introducing rigid processes and artificial terms. Or even worse like in "Pacific Bell Story" from 1987, when company used some obscure half mystic techniques and imposed them as a cult. Some even suggest that running company like a cult is a good idea.

How it all can go wrong

Several times I have encountered the cases of company culture going wrong and leading to strange and unintended consequences.

One of the companies I worked at declared that it "treated every employee as friends and family". This core value did not work at all when company had to do a round of layoffs. Who fires their friends and family when things go bad? This tells me that while being well intentioned this value does not work in a professional setting when company has sometimes to fire people who underperform and reward high performers.

Another company wanted to foster techical leadership and invited workers in the training session, where at some point coach asked us to write our own obituaries and read them out loud. It did not resonate well with me as I was not ready for this very-personal exposure in a setting with folks who I met a day ago.

I am sure that both the coach and the company were well-meaning, but often promoting moral values and principles in a rushed training session format leads to very strange and even ridiculous outcomes.

The best corporate trainings I had were all about basic, human interactions that promoted and helped to practice simple values like being respectful and polite, providing feedback and listening to each other. Those ones had big impact on me both in and outside of the company setting.

No special culture culture

The society we live in promotes many basic core values we all share, for example, be kind and respectful to each other, be polite, celebrate diversity and respect basic human rights.

U.S. also promotes the freedom of speech, the spirit of enterpreneurship, acceptance of failure and establishes the rule of the law - great values that are keys to it's success story.

Those basic principles are the fabric of our society, often invisible, ever changing, but we can feel their presence and we learn over time how to get in common agreement on them and develop new ones.

Why not stick to those principles, when society uses very complicated process to establish, verifies them through voting, philosophical debates, revolutions, economy ups and downs over hundreds, sometimes thousands of years, comes up through multi-national consensus?

I understand that having no special culture at all is a culture on it's own.

Company goals and practices as alternatives to company culture

Instead of calling something a culture, coming up with a set of core values and conducting social experiments using risky and unproven methods, I suggest to simply tie the moral core values of the company to basic principles of the modern society.

Companies should focus on specific goals and develop practices influenced by the markets they operate in, the products they are building and their stage, for example Amazon being a retailer has to be margin efficient, Google has to be smart when it comes to search and A.I.

I think that setting goals and practices is more objective and easier to understand because they don't try to step into complex world of moral values or personal traits, and could be changed over time as the company evolves without fear of sacrificing prior core values that had made sense before.

For example, every startup has to promote practices of being "nimble and agile", to "move fast and break things" but after it has evolved into a multi-national corporation and started building rockets, "moving fast and breaking things" as a corporate practice will be a problem, but changing a set of practices for a rocket-building division would be a reasonable thing to do.

Goals and practices are easier translated into processes and their efficienty can be quantified using metrics like support response times, customer satisfaction ratings, margins and growth ratios.

Service departments can focus more on support metrics and customer satisfaction, while engineering departments will be using different set of metrics such as defects and regressions ratios, metrics measuring product quality - regression ratios and bug report counts.

Companies can emphasize certain goals that are key to success at different stages of their lifetimes, e.g. startups should be obsessed about user adoption and will put customer acquisition and churn rates as the most important and stated company goals, while established companies may pick another metric, like increasing profit margins to protomote more effective sales and engineering processes.

In my experience when people understand the business goals, they get behind them, organize, measure, buld practices and methodics, optimize and braistorm - exactly the effect leaders would want to achieve.

Stating basic moral principles

As I mentioned before, our current tech culture is very toxic, that's why explicitly stating and communicating basic principles is a good idea and should not be just a part of some company moral culture, but a minimum qualifying checklist for any company.

Here are some good examples:

Stating that company is diverse and inclusive, for example as in Nylas case:

Diversity and inclusion are core to our culture, and we are actively committed to building a more inclusive work environment.

Nylas signals that they care about diversity, and are conscious of the problem in the tech space.

In case of our company, Gravitational we state:

We are also dedicated to our friends, families, and hobbies outside of work. Our past experiences building companies taught us about the importance of life and work balance. It matters even more when you are building a huge and lasting company, like Gravitational.

This is to signal that we are family-friendly and won't exploit people's time working with us.

Netflix's no brilliat jerks described in Brendan Gregg's blog declares:

Do not tolerate brilliant jerks. The cost of teamwork is too high.

This is a good way to signal that company cares about people being polite and professinal to each other.

I would argue again, that these are not differentiating company culture principles, but are in fact basic society moral principles reinforced by companies that care and translated to work environment terms.

I think that many companies get away with their corporate cultures, because they simply pick (semi-randomly) basic society principles, translate them to tech corporate speak and declare them corporate culture core values.

People who work at those companies of course agree with not hiring jerks, avoiding bullshit or caring about customers and choose to ignore the usual corporate speak while focusing on their daily jobs.

Thats what I was doing many times in my career anyways.