On Our Platform: Sarah Rice On Building A Healthy Company Culture
Culture is the pulse of your business - it sets your business apart and is what attracts the right kind of people to your business.
It can also be toxic and serve little to no purpose for what you want to achieve as a business.
As a founder, you have to be deliberate about how you go about creating a culture for your company.
In 10 incredibly useful bites, Skynamo Chief People Officer Sarah Rice reveals the makings of a healthy company culture.
To access her recipe, and more from other Heavy Chefs, sign up to our learning platform HERE.
The culture of your business is a key selling point. It attracts like-minded people to your business and has even been known to be the reason why the general public engages with a particular business. The culture of a business is at the core of all interactions within a business - it reflects values and expectations, and guides everyone on the acceptable way to behave within the business.
Basically, the culture of your business is critical to your success. As a business owner or founder, it’s your responsibility to keep your finger on the pulse of the culture and to steer it in the right direction. ‘Follow the leader’ may seem outdated but that is literally what employees do in the workplace. They look to the leader, in this case the founder or business owner, for what is acceptable behaviour within that particular environment. As an entrepreneur who is passionate about people and culture, Skynamo Chief People Officer Sarah Rice knows this all too well.
“As a founder, you are the culture. The culture and the founder are so strongly linked and the idea that you can have a culture that is different to how your founder is showing up to work every day is completely wrong.”
While no one voluntarily wants to be anyone’s role model (the pressure!), there’s no two ways about it - as a business owner, you need to be accountable for your actions and realise the impact they have on the behaviour of your staff and the general vibe within your company.
Sarah got her introduction to great company culture just a little over 10 years ago when an offer letter completely changed the way she’d thought about what culture entails.
“I didn't really know that culture was a thing until I started working with Christo Davel at 22seven - he's obsessed with culture and how you can craft it. The first thing that I realized was that my offer letter was not an offer letter I'd had ever read before. I'm used to offer letters being very transactional but this offer letter was all about me. A lot of it was around what they could offer me, which is so different. Mostly when you join a company, it's all about, ‘Great, this is what we need you to do’, whereas this was very much about what I could expect from them and the sort of growth I could experience at 22seven - it made me feel really good. The way he structured the layout of the offices, the food we ate on Fridays, the fact that the lunch on Fridays was called family lunch - all of those were signals about the culture that we were getting into. And it's very intentional. Before then, I hadn't got that culture is something you can craft, it's something you can nurture and grow.”
Her time at 22seven led Sarah on the people journey she’s on today. At Skynamo, Sarah is right at the heart of the company’s culture, where she drives recruitment, coaches on team leadership, helps to resolve employee relations issues and manages programs that help develop staff. Being at the centre of the organisation’s culture machine, Sarah understands that growing an effective culture is a dynamic, somewhat complex process and no one size fits all.
“If your culture doesn't support your business to do the stuff it wants to do, your culture isn't working. You can have a high-performance culture that holds people extremely accountable for what you need them to do and it can still be a great culture. Some cultures aren't nice, but they still work for the business - just because your culture isn't nice doesn't mean it's bad for the business.”
At the same time, Sarah reminds us to be wary of the expectation that organisational cultures should be overly joyful, playful casual spaces à la #StartupCulture.
“#StartupCulture is some myth that we've imported from Silicon Valley. That's not true - I don't even know if startups in Silicon Valley ever had that culture. I think it was designed by PR people to try and sell ‘Come work for a startup where you're going to work too hard and not get paid enough’. #StartupCulture is a myth - foosball, beer and pizza, fatsacks, ping pong. It's like getting to work at 12 pm and then coding till 4 am. It's around micro-dosing mushrooms so that you can really, like, plan and get your strategy right. I think it's just 'bros' with whiteboards and sticky notes.”
It’s a cliche and is rarely a sustainable way to run a business. So, by all means, be intentional about it but keep it authentic. Allow your culture to reflect your true values without the influence of startup culture rhetoric.
And if you’re waiting for the right time to implement a culture in your business, Sarah has news for you:
“Culture is not something that can happen later. Culture happens the moment you start your business. Even if you're alone in your kitchen, culture is happening because the founder is the culture. So you can't wait - it's happening organically anyway so you may as well just make it intentional from the beginning.”
On our learning platform this week, Sarah shares her top advice for growing a company culture that is healthy and productive in a recipe on Culture And Teams here.
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