I don’t think my company has a culture at all

A reader writes:

This may not be an answerable question, but I’m interested in your views on what makes company culture. I ask because my very small (fewer than 10 people), 100%-remote company recently hired a new employee, and during the interview I anticipated that the candidate might ask about company culture and I realized that I would not know what to say.

This was an unusual hire for our company, because it was only the third time in our more than 10-year history that we’ve hired someone who had no previous connection to a current employee.

A quick overview of my company might provide helpful perspective: a couple of us have been here since the company’s inception; everyone else was brought in (usually without posting the open position) because one of the company leaders knew and liked them from previous jobs. Though I recognize the benefit of hiring known quantities, I’ve expressed discomfort about this trend, as my fear — borne out many times over — is that these employees would come in and just resume the relationship they had with the person they knew previously rather than get to know everyone as a new “cold” employee would need to do. The result, in my view, is that our workplace has, in place of its own culture, a bunch of separate 1:1 relationships—some of which overlap to the point of being cliques.

All of this got me wondering if there were certain essential components that go into what people think of as company culture—things like physical space or a critical mass of employees.

The new candidate never did ask about company culture, which may be a good thing, because I think my answer would have had to be, “We don’t have one.”

You have a company culture, whether you realize it or not. I bet if you asked non-leadership employees, they’d have an easy time describing how they view the culture. Of course, whether they’d be candid about it is a different question — and that’s also part of culture.

Culture is basically “how we do stuff here.” Here’s just a partial list of what it includes:

• • how most people communicate, both logistically (lots of Slack? video calls? texting? slower than other companies?) and stylistically (blunt and to the point? lots of softening expected? how deferential are people expected to be? are people more task-focused or relationship-focused, and what happens if someone is out of sync with that?)
  • how hierarchical vs. free-wheeling you are
  • how much people are expected to work within or without existing structures
  • how people provide feedback (and to who, and what it sounds like, and who gets listened to and why)
  • how fast-paced you are
  • what values you have about how you operate (for example, are you all about making life easier for your clients, no matter the inconvenience to you? do you reward or discourage speaking truth to power?)
  • how collaborative vs. siloed you are
  • how decision-making works
  • what meetings are like (do they start/end on time or drag on? do people feel they’re a good use of time or are they widely acknowledged not to be? do action items from them get captured and followed up on in a real way, or is it no big deal if they effectively disappear?)
  • what daily interactions look like
  • how much urgency people are expected to operate with and on what things
  • how much value you attach to process over outcomes
  • how information gets shared (do people generally know what’s happening and why?)
  • what the bar is for performance
  • how people are held accountable in their work
  • how appreciation is shown and experienced
  • how problems are addressed
  • how much time is set aside for reflection
  • how mistakes are viewed and handled
  • what office politics look like
  • how conflict gets handled
  • how much good will people have (and are expected to have) toward their colleagues
  • what hours people work
  • how time off is managed and perceived

… and on and on.

I once heard someone say, “Culture is what happens when the boss leaves the room,” and that’s a good description of it too.

In your case, it sounds like part of your culture might be that the team doesn’t feel cohesive — that it’s a team of individual relationships functioning independently of each other, without a lot of collaboration or trust outside of those silos. That’s a part of culture! (It’s also a part of your culture that you can work on changing if you want to. You’ll need to articulate what you’re seeing and how it affects the organization, name what you’d like to see instead, and figure out how to deliberately move toward that.)

For what it’s worth, hiring only people who you already know will bring additional problems too: you’re more likely to end up with a group of employees who are all very similar to each other (demographically and/or in world view), and you’re missing out on potentially stronger candidates just because you don’t already know them. When you’re very small, sometimes it can make sense to hire like that, but as the organization grows larger (and you’re probably at that point now), continuing to hire that way is very likely to hold you back and impact the results you get over time.

But bringing new people into a culture like you described risks being rough for those new people if you don’t first get more deliberate about what you want employees’ experience to be there.

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