Reinforce

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How do you reinforce culture? Culture only gets valued by one thing: how consistently you reinforce it. There has to be substance to it. You reward people, but it’s also how you reward them when things go wrong. Do you reward people for failure? I think it’s a great thing to do, because you’ll never get breakthroughs if people aren’t trying things that have never been done before, and if you’re trying those things you’re going to make mistakes. Do you want to fire somebody for that, or reward them for trying? I know which I’d pick.

And do rewards always come from the top, or do you want peer rewards, encouraging peer communication and acknowledgement? At Underdog we made the cheapest reward system imaginable: it costs nothing. It’s virtual: everybody on Slack can give each other tacos. You get five to give a day. We give tacos all the time, for looking after an entrepreneur, for supporting a teammate in a difficult situation, for a mental-health solution someone came up with for a founder stuck with a kid at home. As a result, at the end of the month we don’t have to figure out who the “kickass team member” is; we just look at who got the most tacos. Simple, costs nothing. But it has to be authentic; you can’t just borrow mine. We picked tacos because one of our team absolutely loves them; National Taco Day is more important to her than any day of the year. So it’s authentic to us.

Salsify reinforces by celebrating as many things as possible. As Rob put it, building a startup is a slog; the one scheduled sales demo they had that day was terrible, with nothing good to say about it, and lots of product experiments just don’t work. Rome wasn’t built in a day, so the more little successes you can draw attention to, the more motivating and fun the environment. Every Friday is “Feature Friday,” where an engineer picks a small thing in the product, starts and finishes it, and delivers it by end of day; sometimes they work the night before so features ship first thing in the morning, then call the whole company over for the demo. They also celebrate their employees’ individual interests and quirks, even if it’s embarrassing, to let people know they’re loved for who they are. A big strength of good cultures is being at least equally focused on what’s not working as on what is: Salsify openly discusses the demo that went wrong, the customer that isn’t working, the first customer they decided not to pursue.

Aquia and Symantec both show that peer recognition works and doesn’t cost money. Let the whole company decide what needs celebrating; they figure it out for you (easiest thing, because you don’t have to do the work), and the people at the coalface, at the customer-service desk or in admin, know who’s actually making an impact in a way the CEO of 300 people never will. At the company we started in Europe (European Software Publishing, which brought Symantec over there) we created something called PRIDE: Peer Recognition for Individual Dedication and Effort. Anybody could go to anybody and say, “I want to recognize you for something you just did for me,” and we tracked it, so at month-end or quarter-end those tallies of peers recognizing each other bubbled up and everybody could celebrate who was making an impact. It made everybody feel great and established a real culture of caring.

And think about what you celebrate. Every company celebrates sales, of course. Fewer celebrate marketing’s great headlines, engineering’s wins, and services, but services are the face to your customer; if they’re not celebrated for taking care of customers, you get straight to unhappy people and then unhappy customers. And what about admin? If Nicole isn’t running the office when 160 people joined in nine months, do you think things work? Celebrate admin too. This stuff needs thought; it doesn’t happen in the absence of people defining what they want to value.

Form and substance are a big deal. Startups often don’t have money to give around, but you don’t always need money: a Klondike or Kegerator break, recognizing a birthday, or management taking a day to do community work (which costs some time and energy but no money) establishes what you really believe in. It’s about what you actually do rather than what you say. And a free, underutilized tool is simple acknowledgement: be a culture that says thank you and appreciates when somebody’s gone above and beyond. You don’t need the resources to award a bunch of money; people don’t necessarily need that. But if culture is going to be successful, it needs some kind of audit, some balance and check, and the recognition and reward scheme is what provides it.

The bottom line on reinforcement: you have to live it, walk the talk, lead by example. Culture is valued not by what you put on the slide but by what you do, and the more consistently you do it, the more people believe in it. HP’s Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard were known for management by wandering around: managers were expected to be out of their offices, understanding what was going on. That consistency made HP feel like one culture wherever you went in the world, and it took me a while to learn that lesson. When I ran international early in my career, I flew around dealing with customers everywhere and never figured out how each wanted to be treated consistently; we ended up with customers who felt pricing was unfair because we didn’t normalize it regionally and service felt different. Then Hewlett-Packard themselves told us, “We can’t do business with you, because you do business with us differently in Geneva than in Colorado and Boise, and we want to do business with you in Africa too; you don’t look like one company.” That was a real wake-up call. The fix was to go visit all of HP’s divisions (San Diego plotters, Fort Collins computers, Boise storage, Corvallis calculators) and realize that everywhere in the world, HP was one culture. They ended up becoming our largest single customer in the world; we became their largest partner for what were CAD/CAM systems, and they OEM’d our product as HP Draft. It was all to do with culture, and it took me a while to figure that lesson out.