How (not) to create a unified culture in a startup… 🌈

Not only our portfolio companies have something in common when it comes to the organizational structure. Usually, they have their tech teams (engineering & product) based distributively in Eastern Europe and the rest of the leadership team is based in either the East or West Coast.

Founders are repeatedly coming to me and keep asking the same mysterious questions.

• How to create a better-unified culture?
• How to scale their unique culture?
• How to maintain the culture?

I don’t think that you want to force unifying any culture within a global organization. But you should try to build a company on your core values — that makes your company what you are.

You should try to build a company on your core values — that makes your company what you are.

Founders and the executive teams based in the US see cultural & communication clashes between these regions. And literally on the other side, the European folks feel that the most important decisions are being made while they sleep. Sometimes they see new policies, new initiatives coming from the US — but with these, they feel that they did not actually contribute. They feel excluded despite the fact that the new policy is called Inclusion.

Sometimes you can say that the decision-maker really did not put in so much time and did not take the right context, history of the region into their consideration. One example can be making a decision about a new diversity initiative that will impact your sourcing strategy and the sourcing team in the Czech republic. With zero context about history no feel for Czech demography, it will only make you look stupid once you require to increase the talent pool by African engineering women. You could probably first look at what are the real diversity issues in the Czech republic that are the priority such are poverty, education disparity, or populism.

I shared these 9 tips with our VC community recently that worked for us to strengthen the positive culture and improve communication.

9 tips on how (not) to create a unified culture in a startup 🧤

1. Regular team offsites

We usually organized one per quarter. If there are offices one in Prague and one in San Francisco, we would meet in Lisbon, Portugal for example — halfway. Don’t skip them — even if Covid hits you can be creative.

2. Team rotation

We would be renting an apartment in San Francisco and one in Prague that would be available for our employees anytime. We would make so-called team exchanges regularly. A Czech designer from Prague would go and work with the US team for quite some time and the opposite way — the US sales director would travel to Prague. The magic happens when these teams meet for lunch with the rest of the office, and talk about life, organize dinners, see the rituals, learn the standards about the other parts of the organization.

Once we had a team member who asked my Czech colleague if there is a concept of shopping malls in the Czech Republic, so it really felt like they cannot make decisions without having a context and understanding for our country. So making them actually visit real people, having real conversations — officially scheduled meetings SUCKS.

Senior managers and leaders should travel with even more frequency to the other offices so that employees based remotely felt connected, got to know major decision makers, and felt like the success of their office was important to the success of the company.

3. AMA Slack channel.

The easiest way is to create a slack channel that focuses on this topic and let your colleagues ask questions. You can explain what is appropriate and why this topic is important.

4. Internal event focusing on this topic

You can hold a live panel discussion or organize an internal reading club to drive a healthy and candid environment. We tried to organize one with my former colleagues Zbyněk and Maria from the people team. The Americans and CEE folks can provide more history and context about the issues/historical challenges in our both regions on a “diversity” “anti-harassment” and other topics since sometimes the communication was handled poorly and the CEE folks were perceived as “non-sensitive” but on the other hand, the CEE folks felt that something/policies/important culture decision is only made in the US.

5. Founders care. Almost every All Hands.

Talking about building a global company on almost every all-hands helps — this is not our local scrappy startup anymore. By joining this company and seeing it grow, you are becoming a multiplier with such a huge impact. You’re being a part of this great success. Not many people see a growing rocket. But you have to be sensitive and the founder should be really clear about the expectations and set up the border — what is acceptable what is not.

6. Culture ambassadors

Some companies defined their own culture ambassadors or evangelists in each location or from each department. I experienced this while in Hilton, we had a “Blue Energy Committee” where we would have one representative from each department meeting and discussing what to do to be united. We discussed the highest priorities, urgent needs, and plans of each department and at the same time, we brought unique insights from the rest of our colleagues. Surprisingly, however it may sound corporate, it really worked well. It provided necessary context why things that other departments did not like about other departments happened and what is behind that and it helped us drive a positive change and made us more united.

7. Hire for values fit rather than culture fit

In the fast-moving world of tech startups, it’s easy to become obsessed with growth, sales figures, and valuations. But really, everything is about people. If you don’t hire the right people, everything else will fall short. To avoid losing sight of who you are, you should hire for values fit. In simple terms, this means you screen each candidate to see whether they naturally exhibit or align with your core values. If they don’t, it doesn’t matter how talented they are, or how amazing their experience is — they aren’t the right person to bring into the group. But this is not the same as hiring for culture fit.

Hiring for culture fit has become a popular approach in recent years, as the focus on workplace culture, employee engagement, and social issues has intensified. But this approach has many issues. First, hiring for culture fit reinforces unconscious bias. The metrics used to assess whether or not someone ‘fits’ a company’s culture are rarely objective. Often, they can exclude diverse skills, abilities, and personality types.

8. Empower autonomous teams

You need to make sure it still feels like a small company. It feels like several more startups working together side by side. Not only when it comes to the organizational structure and decision making, but also when it comes to the architecture of the system and how the code is written. There needs to be clear ownership that is distributed between the teams and people. That is scalable. You can optimize for a structure — that you have these several startups — by having Tribes (e.g. Spotify model). This is your unity. Mini Startups in a company. You should continuously make them feel more autonomous. Still, what you should have on your mind is that you have to avoid creating silos. By creating silos, you’re diminishing user impact per engineer over time, you would have a limited ability to change how quickly you work to respond to changing user needs. You can create cross-functional teams — with PMs, designers, engineers, recruiters, and more functions where everyone works towards the same goal.

9. Rotated All Hands or other meetings This tip comes from the team at Twilio. It’s a small thing, but easy to feel like you’re not prioritized when the big team meeting is at midnight local time.

Make your company what you are

I wouldn’t drive a global movement to drive a unified culture. Instead, I’d try to build a company on your core values — that makes your company what you are.

I’d love to know what your thoughts are on this!

More resources

Interesting reads & thoughts on this topic:

• Why we hire for values fit at Productboard
• High Growth Handbook
• Change for values fit Forbes
• Ben Horowitz
• Basecamp new rules

People you should talk to to learn more!

• Jakub Nesetril & Jan Moravec — founders with CZ roots with offices in the US & EU (Apiary is an exited Credo Ventures portfolio company)
• Daniel Hejl & Hubert Palan, Productboard — founders with CZ roots with offices in the US & EU
• Melissa — attorney. She helped many of the companies in our portfolio to craft the cultural and employee handbooks and she delivered a bunch of cross-cultural training and assisted the managers with how to address these during their one on. She lives in the US but comes from England and she focuses on these US & vs. European cultural clashes and communication.
• Ramona — an amazing leadership coach living in San Francisco with roots in Central Europe