Company culture matters at every stage in the employment process — from prospective new hires to long-term employees. Take, for example, the fact that a staggering 74 percent of employees say that company culture is important to them, according to business solutions company Greenthumbs.
Many leaders know this — 94 percent of executives surveyed reported that culture was important — but it can be difficult to implement. Even startups that establish a strong company culture to begin with can have difficulty preserving it as the company scales. With growth comes a new host of problems to solve and concerns to address. Keeping a strong company culture takes work, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed and let that work fall by the wayside. It’s important to avoid falling into that trap, or a startup risks losing what made it great in the first place.
With a little bit of mindful effort, though, an organization can absolutely hold on to its culture as it scales.
Built In San Francisco sat down with two such companies. Founder and CEO of UJET Anand Janefalkar and Life360’s VP of People and Culture Heather Houston spoke to Built In about the work they put in to keep their culture thriving as they grow.
Tell us about the growth UJET INC. has been experiencing recently.
We have seen over 25 percent growth year over year, and expect to see continued growth in the coming months. We are hiring in all areas of the business – from engineering to marketing to finance. In fact, we have several exciting requisitions open right now!
Our recruiting goals in the coming year are focused on building a strong team across the organization — one that can continue to deliver amazing solutions for our customers, help those customers successfully implement our technology and build upon the great partnerships and alliances we have to deliver the best possible integrated solution for our customers.
If you’ve ever had a bad customer support call, you know the importance of great customer service. We are looking for individuals who want to dramatically improve experiences across all industries, in all regions of the globe. We have recently expanded our presence in Europe and expect to see new career opportunities opening in that area soon.
How would you describe your company culture? What’s changed since the early days and what’s stayed the same?
We recognize that as a business grows and matures it can be hard to keep our original spirit and culture alive. We have made It a top priority to nurture and protect the cherished attributes and cultural values of our organization.
We believe that our employees are at their best when they collaborate and work together on our shared aspiration — delivering innovative, disruptive solutions that help our clients deliver exceptional customer and employee experiences. Our approach from the very beginning has been to enable our employees to flourish in their career goals.
We realize that how we work together is as important as what we do.”
We realize that how we work together is as important as what we do. Our company values are being human, accountable, respectful, transparent and always speaking up (BARTS). These values ensure we are consistently honest with one another, clear in our common goals and empathetic with one another through daily opportunities and challenges.
Our mutual respect for one another is an incredibly strong foundation, and with continued leadership and focus on our culture, we continue to find new ways to have fun, enjoy the work we do and create an atmosphere of success for our employees.
What are you doing to keep company culture strong through this period of rapid growth?
Every employee touchpoint is an opportunity to strengthen our culture and live the values we’ve embraced as an organization — from the interview process to onboarding to an employee’s daily interaction with their team. Our recent hires have said they want to work here because we recognize an individual’s whole self — that we understand and support the many facets of an individual’s life.
We are proud that our development programs focus on the human element as much as the technical skills. Our company wide channel and monthly virtual events celebrate each employee’s personal milestones to encourage greater engagement across teams. We use the latest technology to help employees stay in touch, including direct access to our leaders.
Employees have a voice and a choice in how to accomplish their work, including influencing key decisions such as what strategies to pursue or products to develop.
Even as we grow, we strive to retain the best of our culture as we know it is the foundation for a great employee experience and our long-term success.
Tell us about the growth Life360 has been experiencing recently.
We started the year with 270 employees and contractors — and through organic growth and the acquisition of Tile and Jiobit we will be at more than 500. We are continuing to grow and have plans to hire over 100 new teammates next year. We are hiring across all functions. But as a company that is approximately 70 percent engineering, much of hiring will be technical talent.
How would you describe your company culture? What’s changed since the early days and what’s stayed the same?
As the company has grown, our culture has had to evolve with that growth. Our cultural themes are as follows: First, make things happen — which encourages us to not become complacent and to think about making decisions that pay off long term. Second, deliver an exceptional experience — to help us keep focus on our users and employees and create an amazing end-to-end experience for them. Third, be a high-performing team — we believe that we perform best when we work together as a team to achieve our company goals.
As the company has grown, we’ve had to become more intentional with defining roles and responsibilities, how we set goals, how we make decisions and how we communicate within the company. Being a remote-first company, we are committed to creating opportunities for employees to form strong bonds and relationships via companywide get-togethers. While many things have changed, there are a few core tenets that haven’t. A value that has been a part of the company since the beginning is to be a good person. This means we expect everyone at Life360 to respect each other and maintain a high sense of integrity. Another aspect that hasn’t changed much with growth is our desire to be as transparent as possible.
Culture is how people interact with each other every day — it is the unspoken behaviors, mindsets and beliefs that people hold.”
What are you doing to keep company culture strong through this period of rapid growth?
Culture is how people interact with each other every day — it is the unspoken behaviors, mindsets and beliefs that people hold. Culture is also continually evolving, and we’ve tried to be very intentional about helping to shape the culture as the company grows.
We recently created the Culture Code, taking a page from companies like Netflix and Hubspot and codifying our culture and values. We share this with candidates to give them an idea of what it’s like to work here — and we also share it again with new hires once they join. We also have monthly values case studies where we discuss a real or credible situation we might encounter at work and how to use our values to shape how we would react to that situation.
We also ask employees to think of themselves as owners of the company culture. We encourage them to give praise or high fives to each other in our performance system, Lattice, and have created values tags so people can identify the values being demonstrated in day-to-day work.
