A common phrase heard from employees who have worked at start-ups from the beginning is ‘It used to be so much fun’.
Just because your business now has more employees and offices, this doesn’t mean it should lose the excitement and atmosphere of the early days. In fact, it’s really important to keep this culture throughout your growth to ensure committed and happy employees. We outline 4 ways in which you can ensure your growing startup can maintain its company culture.
1. Recognise Employee Contributions
It’s easy to personally praise employees who make contributions to your business in the early days as you pass them in the hallway or sit across the desk from them. As your company grows and potentially has various offices, how do you ensure this stays consistent? We recommend tasking individual members of the management team with keeping track of this and feeding this back at a weekly or monthly meeting. Alternatively implement a system that encourages employees to recommend a particular member of staff they felt helped them or made a real input in that week or month. Reward these employees with fun gifts, lunches and even all expenses paid trips away.
2. Have A Solid Hiring Process
This is an essential part of maintaining your company culture as your start up grows. Hiring the wrong people can have a serious impact on the culture and happiness of your existing employees. One way to ensure you don’t hire the wrong people is to have a solid hiring process. Have a hiring strategy in place and stick to it. This should include both the interview process and the types of personalities you feel would fit well into your existing team.
Your existing team should be at the forefront of your mind when bringing in a new hire. Think about how well this new person would fit in and be sure to include varying members of your team in the hiring process. For example, the first stage interview might be with the HR department or a member of the Senior Management Team and then the second stage interview might be with the hiring manager. For the third stage, it’s a good idea to make this more personal and informal. Invite your potential new employee for a drink with a good selection of the team and be sure to get their feedback after. This not only ensures your new recruit will be a good fit but it also allows employees to be involved in the hiring process.
3. Maintain Company Traditions
Your company traditions are what sets you apart from other companies when it comes to recruiting new members for your team. It is therefore important to maintain these traditions. Whether it is a departmental night out or Friday afternoon beer and snacks, there’s no reason why these traditions should stop. It might take more work from the management team to keep them going but if they are done on a consistent basis, it will soon form part of a weekly or monthly routine.
4. Encourage an Open-Door Policy
When your company is small it’s easy to keep the levels of communication open and free flowing with weekly company meetings, daily business conversations across the office and passing chats in the hallway however how do you maintain that as the company grows?
Easy, keep doing what you’ve been doing. Take time to stop and talk to employees in the hallway, hold weekly company meetings and encourage conversations on the office floor. Just because your company is now at 200 people instead of 20 people doesn’t mean these methods of conversations should stop.
FGS Recruitment is a boutique recruitment agency specialising in recruiting sales jobs and marketing jobs in our core markets of Digital Media, Learning & Development and Market Research. Keep up to date with our latest career advice articles and jobs by signing up to our newsletter and be sure to follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.
