5 Elements Of A Great Tech Company Culture

A great startup culture doesn’t materialize out of thin air.

It’s up to the leaders in the company to make the culture a priority.

When you’re a small team, that can be especially difficult. There isn’t a lot of downtime at an early stage startup, so finding time to schedule culture-building events can be quite challenging.

With everyone working their tails off, it can feel like a burden to halt work for fun while everyone is trying to stay focused on the tasks at hand and move the company forward.

But the reward is that the more time the team spends together, the more everyone bonds and lets their hair down a little.

You have to make time for people to get to know each other if you want to build a great culture.

And honestly, there is so much more to cultivating a healthy workplace than just getting to know each other.

That’s why every tech company with a standout culture goes beyond happy hours and retreats to focus on five core elements:

1. Communication

At Chronicled, our open office feels a lot like a classroom.

Communicating back and forth feels similar to passing notes in grammar school — it’s lighthearted and fun.

Flashbacks to grade school may sound trivial to some people, but it’s a big part of what gets our team excited to go to work every day.

No one wants to spend time at an office without any camaraderie.

Even with our remote employees, we make it a priority to have them at every core team-building event. We rearrange schedules so everyone can make it to holiday parties.

Every person should feel like they’re truly a part of the team.

These open and transparent lines of communication are a huge part of building your culture. They establish trust and familiarity between people — even when they’re hundreds of miles away.

2. Recruitment

Most companies have a similar process for interviewing.

First, they do a quick phone screening to identify any obvious red flags. And if everything checks out, they bring the candidate in for a longer, in-person interview.

Our system is a little different.

The phone interviews themselves are actually pretty lengthy. Usually, they’re half as long as our technical interviews.

We do that because we want to spend time getting to know people before we bring them in for the technical interviews. We want to know if they’re going to be a good fit for the team, if they’re going to have the right energy.

You can’t get that from a 10-minute phone call.

But if you speak with someone for 30 or 40 minutes, the dialogue really starts to expand.

You move past their education and their work history. You begin to get a real gauge of who they are as a person.

If you want a great company culture, you have to spend time upfront making sure that the people you bring on share your values and can contribute to the culture you’re trying to build.

3. Leadership

Leaders are the force behind a company’s culture.

Once a month, our leaders have a one-on-one meeting with every employee. Even though we have group communications daily, that one-on-one time is essential to our culture. It creates a relationship of honest and open feedback. It builds trust.

For instance, our CTO has regular meetings with every member of the engineering team. He listens to them and learns what’s going on in their work and life.

How are they doing? Are they bogged down? Frustrated?

There’s no way to know any of that unless you really make a point of finding out. The return in this connection with the leadership team is that every employee feels a vested interest in their development.

4. Integrity

Working with integrity is essential because everyone has to be held accountable.

You have to know that each individual contributes to the culture and the values, and that they’ll continue to pass those on as the company grows.

For example, our CEO orchestrates everyone and everything. He encourages the team and rallies us together, like a band of pirates with him as captain. Then, there’s our CMO. She runs our fully distributed team of people who have been hand-selected based on their natural gifts. And our Senior Engineer plays a crucial role in setting a tone of excellence throughout our entire team.

Every team needs leaders like this, because it’s very difficult to create a strong company culture without buy-in from everyone.

That’s why everyone should be involved in writing your company’s values and figuring out the vision. And when you begin to scale, it will be up to individual leaders in the company to keep that vision and those values at the forefront of everything you do.

When the entire team is involved — and working with integrity and dedication — there’s no limit to what you can achieve.

5. Execution

I have friends who work for startups that are a little bigger than us.

Their cultures are also a little more party-oriented. Instead of creating a really tight-knit group based around certain values, they’re more focused on getting together and partying as often as possible.

There’s nothing wrong with doing that occasionally, but it can’t be the focus of your time and energy every week.

Values have to be practiced. They can’t just be written down and forgotten.

Ultimately, every part of a culture comes back to paying attention to your people. Your core values can’t be executed correctly if the team doesn’t feel they’re the right values — or if they’re not the front-and-center of your company every day.

Want to learn more?

Get in touch with the Chronicled team here.