Why Company Culture Is Important In A Startup

When starting a business the one area that gets little time or investment is company culture.

You know it’s important, but it’s at the bottom of the ‘to-do-list’.

After all, when you’ve got a small team juggling the work, the accounts and trying to secure clients, the last thing any leader feels they should be managing is the culture.

But the truth is, establishing a company culture early on can help you with many of the operations of the business. More than you may expect.

20% of businesses fail within the first year, 50% fail within the first five years; but these early days are vital in establishing a strong foundation from which your business can grow and prosper.

Whether you need to request an employee to oversee your culture, or put in the extra hours to make it work, don’t underestimate the power of a strong company culture from the get-go.

The current workforce yearns for a great place to work, and if you can’t offer a positive environment or practical perks, talented individuals are going to be won over by your competitors.

Finding the right people is one of the hardest things to do as a start-up. You need driven, hard-working people who can deal with the chaos and stress of start-up life. But as you’re a start-up many employees have concerns working for such a business, as it’s a massive risk.

Plus, let’s be honest, it’s not easy, and there are times when team members are often doing more than their key responsibilities.

So considering joining a start-up, to begin with, can be a hard sell, but offer an employee a great place to work and you’ll have a loyal employee who will help your start-up grow and prosper.

As mentioned above, start-up life is not for the faint-hearted. The pace is fast, the pressure is high, and the risk is great.

For many employees, the pressure and stress of such environments can have a detrimental effect on their mental health and their overall well-being. Leading to anxiety, burn out and in worst case scenarios depression.

As the millennials say – the struggle is real.

However, create a company culture that enables employees to de-stress and find headspace, can ensure their happier, healthier and more productive.

We’ve all heard workplace horror stories, they travel far and wide, and we all begin to know the places to work and the places not to work. Which is where your company culture holds the golden key.

Do you want your company to be bad mouthed at a dinner party? – I think not.

When a start-up is reliant on a positive brand reputation, getting bad press for being a crap employer isn’t going to do anything for your growth, as nobody will want to work for you.

This doesn’t just create trouble when you want to hire people, it becomes a problem when clients start hearing you’re a miserable place because at the end of the day, nobody wants to work for a company that treats their employees badly. They’ll be thinking, if they treat their own that way, how do they treat outsiders?

Respect works both ways, which means creating a company culture where your team rave about you, will not only ensure you’ve got an inbox full of CV’s when you’re hiring, but it will also mean that you have positive client relationships, increasing the likelihood of more work thanks to positive referrals.

What they never tell you when you start a business is that the company culture will drive everything.

It will drive how the processes and operations run within the company, it will influence the language people use about your company, and it will be the gentle stream that carries your business forward.

When businesses focus on profits first and people last, it becomes obvious to everyone. And when that happens, customers become unhappy, people leave and that incredible growth they saw in the initial set-up suddenly dwindles.

Many leaders believe that company culture is just the perks and the fun stuff, but that is as naive as believing in the tooth fairy.

Company culture should run seamlessly throughout your entire company – people might not even be able to put a finger on it, but they know it’s there and that it makes an impact.

Your company culture is greatly entwined in your vision of the organisation, which means if there isn’t one, you’re going nowhere fast.

If you want to know how to embed a unique company culture in your start-up, my company culture training provides you with the foundations and guidance to get started.