When is it Time to Codify the Culture of Your Startup?

The best time to codify your company culture is when you hire your first employee.
The second best time? Now.

Since you have that information now, let’s start from the basics.

Company Culture 

We’ll keep it brief - your company culture is what your people do when nobody is watching. Think beyond foosball tables and cappuccino machines - company culture is how your employees behave within the framework of your organization, with your core values in mind. 

Company Culture With a Growing Workforce

Founding members of a firm come together with a simple idea. Each of their expertise and experience helps fine tune this idea into a concrete product or service. They then handle the back-end work involved in setting up a startup, marketing to clients, and once they have signed on a few paying clients, they hire their first employee.

Up until this moment, founders are only working with each other to figure out how to run their business. With the addition of a new employee, they need to now induct said employee into the way their company works. In the initial stages of an expanding workforce the founders tend to work closely and spend a lot of time with their recruits. 

This allows for some osmosis to help the newcomers understand the ways of the startup and they are able to also think as an extension of the founders. 

The disclaimer associated with the above statement is this - without a clearly articulated culture document, some minor differences of thought and understanding will still exist among the team. When your team is small, this disconnect can be smoothed over relatively easily because founders are working with their employees one on one, but it is an unsustainable practice as the workforce grows. 

So, what can you do when you are ready to scale your workforce? 

When your company is ready to scale, you'll need to hire from outside the immediate network of the founders. At this point, you must have a well-defined culture document. New people bring in new ideas, new perspectives, new sets of values, and varying ethos to a firm. This can cause each employee to develop their own notion of what your company culture is, and this will result in your core values being fractured, if not entirely lost. 

Codifying your company culture before this inflection point (at 50 - 100 employees, when you are in a position to scale) ensures that you have a culture document in place that is consistent with how things actually operate in your company.. 

It is important to remember that minute deviations from the initial company culture are unavoidable. It is also important to acknowledge that when these newcomers join your company in leadership roles, they are in a position to influence the company culture in their own ways. This will result in the minute differences getting multiplied and very soon, you might even find that the actual company culture is significantly different from what the founders had envisioned.

So use a codified company culture like the valuable business driver it is. Articulate your company culture as early as possible; definitely before you start scaling your operations and staff to ensure that your core values are intact and easily communicated to every addition in your organization.