Published November 22, 2024 | Updated November 22, 2024 | 9 minute read
This blog was co-authored by Keara Mascareñaz and Alexis Gonzales-Black.
Culture design is a core challenge for fast-scaling companies.
Often these organizations begin with a scrappy, can-do culture that requires everyone to wear many hats and pull together as one. This type of culture can invigorate the company’s launch and early growth.
But the intimate, hands-on cultures that get so many innovative companies off the ground often aren’t equipped to propel them beyond the startup phase, into commercialization and scale.
August recently partnered with a rapidly scaling tech company that had reached this cultural pivot point. The company was disrupting a major industry and rapidly gaining market traction.
The stakes for trust and innovation at this company were very high; it was introducing new technology that needed to earn significant consumer trust in order to spur widespread adoption.
Internally, the organization wisely recognized that it needed to design an intentional culture of trust in order to support its next chapter of big growth, rather than relying on the accidental culture it organically developed in its early days.
Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of how we partnered with this company to successfully redesign its culture to support trust, agility, and innovation in its new chapter of growth.
Step 1: Understand the Risk of Trust Debt
When businesses swiftly adapt their operations without adapting their cultures in tandem, they can easily accrue an invisible trust debt with their teams that will ultimately undermine long-term success.
A hasty restructure, a relentless push for productivity, or a sudden priority shift can create organizational whiplash that can badly damage even a high-trust culture.
Organizations that are rapidly scaling and/or disrupting an industry are especially vulnerable to this sort of trust breach, particularly when they’re offering the “first and only” product of its kind in a highly complex and ambiguous space.
The tech company we worked with understood this vulnerability. By committing to a culture redesign at this pivotal stage, the organization was able to turn that vulnerability into an opportunity to build trust within the everyday actions of scaling the company.
The organization saw that if it didn’t adapt its culture early on, it would be a lot harder to course correct down the line when it was 10x, 100x, or 1000x bigger.
Organizations that scale up without redesigning their cultures often find, several years past the pivot point, that their culture no longer supports their stated values and vision.
This cultural mismatch isn’t just bad for business; it’s also bad for internal trust, which can lead to major cross-functional ruptures right when the stakes are at their highest.
We’ve seen this play out over the last year with Boeing. The organization was famous for its seemingly ironclad commitment to safety. But as it shifted its business focus to profitability, it internally “loosened the grips” on safety in its daily operations.
By continuing to proclaim a value of safety while not fostering a culture of safety (both customer safety and psychological safety) Boeing made itself vulnerable to a series of rupturing events that badly damaged trust, both internally and externally.
The work of culture redesign, then, is about aligning an organization’s stated ideals with its practical actions.
This helps protect the organization from trust debt, while mitigating burnout, driving engagement, and unlocking employee potential.
Step 2: Articulate Your Mission, Values & Behaviors
Often, rapidly scaling orgs operate on default mission and vision statements grandfathered in from the startup days.
Revisiting an organization’s “why” is essential for designing an intentional culture that reflects the company’s ambitious business objectives and employee needs.
This is a critical moment to slow down, seek out diverse perspectives, and really listen to folks across your organization – particularly those who know your organization differently than you do.
The goal isn’t to land on a punchy set of statements as quickly as possible; the goal is to articulate a deep, resonant set of guiding principles to unify and activate your people towards the culture change you seek.
Be generous in providing numerous opportunities and modalities for people to contribute to the formation of these guidelines. It’s especially important to reach out to people who might be hesitant to share, or whose perspectives might challenge the status quo.
At the tech organization August worked with, we used engagement survey data, met with key teams and leaders, and hosted focus groups to understand what was working best and what needed to shift in their current culture.
Finally, we took all of these diverse inputs and worked with a cross-functional team of leaders to codify these into a mission and a new set of values and behaviors that embodied what the organization needed to be successful in the next phase.
Step 3: Socialization & Adoption of Culture
Even the best designed culture and values, if they are just words on a page, are not enough to make lasting change.
Adopting the new mission requires a thoughtfully sequenced rollout experience – the AKDAR model (Awareness, Knowledge, Desire, Ability, and Reinforcement) is a great example – that recognizes that you first need to spark employee interest and awareness, before moving them towards operationalization and adoption.
Awareness building offers a chance to show folks that you listened to them during Step 2, incorporated their feedback, and took their thoughts and perspectives seriously.
It's also a great opportunity to get a group of champions for the culture out in front of the whole organization, so people can see that this culture change initiative isn't just coming from the CEOs or a small group, but is supported by many folks throughout the org.
In our real-life case study, our efforts to build Awareness and Knowledge lasted almost full year and included company-wide moments at all hands meetings; a first-ever live, unscripted Ask Me Anything with the CEOs and the senior leadership team; and frequent, engaging videos, communications, training, and opportunities to answer questions and share feedback.
We also facilitated company-wide and team-specific moments, including:
🔶 We offered all employees the opportunity to participate in culture foundations workshops to help build knowledge and buy in for the new mission, values, and behaviors.
🔶 We coached leaders to facilitate structured discussions with their teams, to reflect on specific strengths and opportunities in the cultural behaviors, and to commit to action.
🔶 We facilitated senior leaders through a highly focused culture sprint, focused on one behavior that was particularly relevant to their current needs as they prepared for the following year’s strategy and scale.
Step 4: Measuring Impacts
Measuring the impact of culture change can seem impossibly imprecise, but we’ve come up with a method that builds on existing measurements and reframes measurement as concentric circles of influence, rather than linear cause and effect. We call it the Impacts Measurement Tool.
Borrowing from the OKR framework, we set measurements in three categories: inputs - what we create and offer, outputs - the direct response to our inputs, and outcomes - the ultimate measures we seek to influence, but that are often driven by a confluence of factors, some out of our control.
The following data are example metrics of a successful culture redesign:
Input measurements:
🔶 # of team or company-wide culture sessions to build awareness
🔶 Creation of supporting materials for people managers
🔶 Development of a year-long culture communications campaign
🔶 New values are embedded into three critical systems: onboarding, development, and feedback
Output measurements:
% of employees participating in culture design and/or launch, including:
🔶 Focus groups
🔶 Culture foundation workshops
🔶 Leadership Q&A
🔶 Asynchronous learning resource views/downloads
Outcomes measurements:
Improved scores in existing employee engagement survey questions such as:
🔶 “We have the right culture to be successful”
🔶 “I am proud to work at this organization”
🔶 “I feel inspired by our mission and work”
🔶 “I believe in the mission, vision, and values of this organization.”
🔶“My manager/our leads model our values”
🔶 “I see myself at this organization in 3 years”
Talent
🔶 Increased employee retention
🔶 Hiring managers report increased quality of employee applicants and hires
Partnership
🔶 Clients cite your mission or values as a reason they value working with you
Summary: Design a Culture That Supports Your Scaling Business
Employees in rapidly growing organizations are susceptible to change fatigue, which can lead to disengagement and burnout.
But an intentional culture redesign can reverse that trend, and build an active culture of trust that supports the need for continual change while helping employees feel empowered, not beleaguered, by it.
To be sustainably competitive in a volatile marketplace, today’s cutting-edge organizations need high-trust cultures built for agility and innovation.
A well-executed culture redesign can help a naturally skeptical employee base feel like this culture shift uses their input, matters to them personally, and addresses current internal and external business challenges.