When you stumble on a problem, find out how others have solved it before you. We conducted a study to understand how small technology startups, fast-growing companies, and market leaders solve such problems.

The results of the study showed that they all paid great attention to internal culture, and that company culture was a foundation for many processes, from hiring and promoting professional growth people, to product development. A cool product without a company culture behind it isn’t enough.

The first step for us was to describe the current company culture to create a starting point to work with:

The culture DNA can be made into an Employee handbook or a Culture code: it can be a simple text document like Basecamp’s, or a full-fledged book with illustrations like Valve’s. These documents are based on the company values, how the company understands its culture, mission, guiding principles, team rituals, and accepted behavioral norms.

If you are interested in seeing more examples, I recommend a huge selection of materials from my colleague Anna Dvornikova.

Every company defines culture differently. There’s no correct answer.

For us, culture is:

• The principles we abide by when we make decisions;
• The way we treat people inside and outside the company: colleagues, candidates, users;
• The way we work;
• The behavior that makes us successful.

We include culture in all important processes: it acts as the “glue” of the company. Culture also has a control function; Andy Grove described it very well in his book High output management. When everything is changing rapidly in the face of uncertainty, and the company is growing, culture is the only thing that allows you to be sure that the right decisions will be made, including hiring. It’s impossible to describe everything in instructions, and culture works where instructions and regulations don’t work.

Culture doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it relies on something. Usually, it’s the mission and vision, the company history, its goals, and market trends.

Does business care about culture? Does the culture help achieve company goals? Culture in itself isn’t the goal of business, but it allows you to assemble a strong team that can achieve business goals.

Tyler Palmer, VR Operations on Patreon, writes that their culture is based on team, culture, and business. It’s in this order, because culture is an indicator of business success:

PandaDoc start their Culture Code with the history of the founders and the reasons why they created the company.

While working on our culture, we started with mission and vision statements. At one of the strategic sessions, top management asked themselves: “What’s happening in the world of collaboration? What do we have to do with this?” We want to do our part to change the way people around the world interact.

Based on the answers, they formulated the mission and vision, showed them to the whole team, collected feedback, conducted several iterations, and got the final result, which has been with the company for several years now:

Analyzing the culture of technology companies, we learned about the approach of Asana: culture as a product (“We decided to treat culture as a product”). It does represent the basic cycle of product development:

As a product company, this approach is close to us, so we took it as a basis for working with culture. We started researching the user experience of employees, created a minimum working version of the product, tested it, refined it based on feedback, fixed “cultural bugs”, and improved the product and its “delivery” to users. We repeat this cycle as long as it brings value.

This approach focuses on the end-user, gives the right to make mistakes, and the possibility to make improvements. It was important for us to involve the whole company in the work on culture. When we started working on formulating our core values ​​in 2018, the company employed 70+ people in Russia, Europe, and the US. We got everyone on board.

As a first step, we collected the opinion of each employee about the culture of the company. To do this, we asked everyone to answer 5 questions in a Google form. We phrased them as open questions to encourage people to tell stories. The survey was anonymous, but in the end, we gave the opportunity to subscribe to those who wanted it; almost everyone signed up.

We collected the answers in the course of a week; everyone participated. Instead of dry numbers, we got a lot of stories that revealed the culture of the company and how each employee felt about it. The downside of it is that it was a lot of unstructured text.

Moving forward, the working group analyzed each answer and added semantic tags. This process yielded 30+ tags. Then we grouped tags into clusters, ranked them, and formed the first version of values based on the most frequent ones.

After drawing the final list of values, we added two levels to each of them: a short conceptual description and observed examples of the related behavior.

Here are three levels with an example:

• Value: Embrace trust to turn failures into wins
• Description: We trust and help each other. It’s ok to make mistakes and not scary to experiment because we create a safe and supportive environment.
• Behaviors (True Miro team members behave like this): Problem-solving oriented, instead of searching for someone to blame. Asks for help and openly admits mistakes. Helps others, approachable. Trusts others. Promotes an easy-going, informal, democratic atmosphere in the team.

We validated the resulting list: we hung the values around in the offices, and we asked people to write what they thought of them; we conducted personal and team interviews with employees, and we asked the following questions:

• Is this aspect of company life important to our long-term success?
• Does this aspect relate to all departments of the company and all employees?
• Will this aspect help us make influential decisions in the future?
• Is this aspect part of a cause-and-effect relationship with another one on the list?
• Is this aspect part of another one?

We fixed all “cultural bugs” in multiple iterations. Examples of “cultural bugs”: we say one thing and do another; the described value inspires actions that aren’t important to us; it’s not about us at all.

This is how we formulated our values ↓↓↓

After that, we added internal memes and stories to these levels. They contribute to making our culture alive.

Build these values/principles into the key processes of the company: recruitment, new hire onboarding, training and development, feedback system, career planning, internal communications, and so on.

Let’s explore how culture helped us change our hiring process.

During interviews, it’s important for us to determine two key things: how the candidate fits the role (job fit) and our culture (culture fit). Everyone knows how to test professional skills, but culture fit is more difficult to deal with. That’s why we created a guide for hiring managers and for all interviewers. It contains values, examples of behavior for each, questions that you can ask to test the candidate’s compliance with each value, and recommendations for interpreting the answers.

The questions are open-ended and projective. For example, how do you know if a candidate matches the values “Yes to passion, no to bullshit”? We believe that a person with this value doesn’t create tons of instructions for their own sake, and doesn’t build formal barriers in communications and processes. We assess the candidate by asking them to talk about how a particular workflow was organized in their previous team, how they worked on the process, who built it, and how they relate to instructions and formalized procedures.

The questions are open-ended and projective. For example, how do you know if a candidate matches the values “Yes to passion, no to bullshit”? We believe that a person with this value doesn’t create tons of instructions for their own sake, and doesn’t build formal barriers in communications and processes. We assess the candidate by asking them to talk about how a particular workflow was organized in their previous team, how they worked on the process, who built it, and how they relate to instructions and formalized procedures.

Then you can interpret the candidate’s answers:

• Understands why the process looks like this, proposes a change if they see that the process is interfering
• Follows the process without thinking why it’s the way it is, or if it helps
• Actively collaborates in defining processes
• Phrases like: “It was there before me”
• There was no attempt to understand the reason behind it

It’s not possible to capture everything with questions, and the answers can be socially desirable ones. However, this approach works, and it’s great for teams in interviews. Moreover, it allows all interview participants to understand what’s happening: when one person asks a question, everyone else understands what we’re checking with this question and why.

After the interview, all participants fill out a questionnaire in the HR system. The aggregated results of the questionnaires help us make a hiring decision. Besides assessing experience and skills, the questionnaire contains a section on culture fit. The grades in this section are just as important in decision-making as the grades about skills.

A hiring manager is a new feature in the team, not a separate position. The hiring manager, like everyone else, participates in product development but at the same time understands the entire hiring process and knows the hiring priorities in the company and each team individually. Together with the recruiter, they lead the candidate to the offer. Usually, it’s team leads who take care of this task.

Before making an offer to a candidate, the hiring manager defends this decision with top management. To do this, they write a hiring decision: they briefly describe why we’re hiring the candidate, and what risks this decision brings with it. Culture fit is always a separate item here. To prepare this document, the manager and the recruiter analyze all scorecards, and they assess any potential outliers (for example, the whole team gives the candidate a high score, except for one participant).

During onboarding, it’s important for us to not only get a new hire to familiarize themselves with the processes as quickly as possible but also to check the risk items related to hiring decisions.

Each beginner has a daily task plan, a weekly list of goals phrased like “what I know by the end of this week” and “what I can do by the end of the week”; there are performance metrics so that the new hire, their team leader, and the whole team can assess how successful the onboarding period was. We have a well-developed feedback system: if something goes wrong, especially if a new hire does something that doesn’t fit in our company culture, colleagues and a mentor can discuss the problem and help the new hire adjust their behavior.

In addition to this, every few months we hold a Culture code meeting for newcomers; it’s an opportunity to learn and talk about the company culture, the history of our values, ​​and related behavioral examples. Once a quarter, the CEO holds a meeting with newcomers Founder talks, where he talks about the company’s history, mission, vision, strategy, and objectives.

This whole process allowed us to solve the difficulties that we faced at the beginning of our rapid growth:

• The bottleneck has disappeared from the hiring process. The CEO has handed over final hiring decisions to hiring managers because we set out values ​​and decision-making principles in the Culture code: the whole team agrees with our code, and everyone knows how to work with these principles.
• Interviews have become more transparent: we set in place a set of common evaluation criteria, and decisions are more balanced and consistent; rejection reasons are understandable; we address hiring risks at the offer stage, and we work out how to fix them during onboarding.
• As a result, since we started working on setting our company culture, the number of employees has increased 6 times, whereas turnover has fallen from 20–30% to 5%; at the moment, it’s only 2%. For an international company of 300 people, this is an excellent indicator.

Now, we’re working on the next stages of ingraining our culture deeper into our processes: we’re improving career planning, our reward system, and internal communications.