Every company has a culture of some sort but when it’s clearly defined it makes decision making better, makes hiring easier, and acts as a marketing tool. Defining company culture early can be the difference between success and failure. 

Decision Making 

A company is built by making an incredibly large number of small decisions over time. At the beginning, when the team is small it’s possible to have an influence over every decision. But as your company starts to grow and there are more streams of activity, more decisions need to be made.

Dealing with dispersed decision making is challenging unless you have a consistent rubric for problem solving, a.k.a. a strong company culture. A strong company culture can help every employee learn how to categorize a decision in a couple of basic ways.

For example, at Wistia everyone knows how to prioritize the current task based on: 

• How the decision will effect the customer experience
• How the decision will effect the support process
• How the decision will effect revenue growth 

Hiring

Bringing more people onto your team is one of the riskiest things you can do. The wrong hires will suck up time, resources, and will certainly damage the customer experience through bad decision making.

Having a strong company culture makes it much easier to screen applicants so that you can stop the hurt in advance. If defined properly, it will also help the right people find you.

Example: Zappos’ $2,000 to Quit campaign.

Zappos’s offers new employees $2,000 to quit after they’ve been with the company for two weeks. If the employee values the money over the work environment then they know they’ve hired the wrong person. Zappos’ hack helps determine the commitment and value system of new hires. It also highlights to the outside world that everyone who works at Zappos wants to be there. Sounds like a great place to me!

Marketing

People like to work with companies they can trust and understand. If you know how a company is run, you’re more likely to predict their actions and understand your place in their world.

If your business is obsessed with delighting customers, prospects will be more likely to give you a try. For further insight here, see point 7 of Joel Spolsky’s post on customer service (hat tip to Paul Farnell).

Example: Hubspot customer happiness index

Hubspot, the marketing software company, has such a laser focus on customer happiness that they publish a customer happiness index. Hubspot’s emphasis on customer happiness is so strong that it’s spilled over the company wall for the world to see. Ever wondered if Hubspot customers are happy? Now you know they are. 

Finally, how do you know when your culture is strong?

You know your culture is strong when people understand what you mean when you say, “that’s a very COMPANYNAME thing to do” or “this should be more COMPANYNAMEish.” Think about the companies that you look up to for design inspiration (Apple), customer service (Zappos), or small business acumen (37Signals). Their company cultures are so strong that they permeate company walls and you and I now know what it means to handle a support request the Zappos way. 

For us, it took us about 2 years before we started saying “that’s not a very Wistia thing to do” and about 3 years before we started saying “if only COMPANYNAME was a little more Wistia, then we’d definitely sign up!”