What is the Corporate Culture in Startups and how to forming it?
Building a culture in a startup company is very interesting. Basically, in most startups, the startup culture is influenced by founders.
But what is Startup Culture?
Each startup has its own personality, just like people do. This unique personality of a startup is referred to as its culture which is an invisible but powerful force that influences the behavior of its employees.
The culture is a combination of shared values, shared vision, shared beliefs and the interactions among the internal team. These shared values have a strong influence on the people in the company and dictate how they act, dress, and do their job. Every startup develops its unique culture that defines guidelines for the behavior of employees.
Indeed, it takes time to find talent, assign them in groups and retain them as your future leader. Developing and retaining leaders in startups will become more difficult in comparison to attractive external employment. What’s the solution? “The Culture!”
Below, we are discussing the most important strategies to form your startup culture.
• Identify the “Culture”:
The organizational culture is composed of some characteristics. You have to measure these characteristics in your startup:
Stability: Stability defines how your startup acts predictable and task oriented.
Achievement Orientation: It’s not important how the results are achieved. Startups just focus on results.
Collaboration Orientation: The employees of startups tend to have a positive relationship with their managers and coworkers.
Competitive Orientation: Startups with competitive orientation rank the highest value on competitiveness and competition at all cost.
Fairness Orientation: How the decisions will affect the people in a startup? It’s about how to treat the employees with respect and dignity.
Risk Orientation: Encouraging the employees to take risks and innovate in the performance of jobs.
Precision Orientation: It determines the degree that employees are expected to be accurate.
• Enforce the culture via mission:
Nowadays, people want to be a part of a company that has a socially engaging corporate and meaningful mission. It doesn’t mean simply a collection of words, but the startups’ mission should be truly practiced and lived every day within the company and reinforced by employee actions.
• Think small to accomplish great matters! “Customize the job designs with more flexibility”:
Allowing employees to feel being “intra-preneurship”. Let’s employees find that idea ownership and developing it would be a successful factor in fulfilling their ordinary tasks. Also, let employees develop innovative skills, build internal relationships and develop a better appreciation of how various functions within the startup work together. Motivate to retain! Don’t be afraid! Let’s decentralize your company!
• Promote the innovation mindset by a competitive reward program:
Startups should develop their specific reward programs to not only attract new innovative talents but only retain their employees. It helps in creating a perfect employer branding that promotes the startup culture.
• Communication, Communication and more communication!:
Effective communication is about ensuring that employees choose the right message and channel for transmission. Without good communication, the internal and external structure of your startup would face many challenges that can ultimately lead to its demise.
Setting up effective communication across your startup could help to reinforce the internal and external messages, improving decision making and solving problems.
• Review to optimize the culture:
It is very important to maintain your startup culture effectively. Indeed, the culture updates over time. As a decision maker, you have to review the culture regularly and optimize it with considering the core values.
In summary, forming a strong culture at a startup is the most important way to ensure the longevity of your business. Startups try to create an attractive culture that facilitates the development of innovation that maintains a competitive advantage in a rapidly changing marketplace.
There are some strategies to create and optimize your Startup culture which was discussed in this article, however, it’s all about interacting with your people!
Good luck!
Published @ Techrasa