Company culture is often overlooked, misunderstood, and rarely managed proactively. This article clears up the confusion and offers actionable tips to improve your team’s culture—whether you’re in management, leadership, or an individual contributor.

What is company culture?

Every company has a collective mindset and shared ways of interacting that form its culture. This exists at every level—within teams, throughout departments, and across the entire organization. Culture is constantly evolving as teams shift, attitudes evolve, and habits change. Sometimes this change occurs in an instant (e.g. when Elon Musk acquires a company) or in other cases it can change more gradually over a period of months or years (e.g. Apple's transition from tech underdog to tech giant).

What determines a company's culture?

One of the biggest factors impacting a company's culture is its size. The culture of a small startup tends to be an extension its founding team members. As a team of three engineers who have worked together for over eight years, the culture of our company is a natural blend of our personalities.

The following are a few of the defining characteristics of our team's culture:

• We are dedicated to our craft and focus on executing with quality, no matter what we are working on (e.g. code, design, documentation, etc).
• We prioritize relationships first, both within our own team and throughout our interactions with clients.
• We don't to take ourselves too seriously, maintaining a fun and relaxed environment within the team.

We didn't have to sit down for a brainstorming session to decide on these principles. They automatically took shape as we started working together. As the size of a team grows, it becomes more important to consider and identify the ideal attitudes and methods of interaction for the team.

Is it good or bad?

The truth is that there is no objective standard for good or bad culture. Rather, it's about fit. As an individual, do you look forward to your daily interactions with coworkers or do you dread them? For an organization, do the attitudes of your teams contribute to the overall success of the business, or detract from it? It will never be "perfect" which means there are always opportunities for improvement. Rather than trying to measure and analyze it, spend time refining it to be a better fit for the individuals on the team and the organization as a whole.

What can you do to change/improve it?

There's no need to wait for the leadership team to decide on a mission statement and set of core values. While having buy in from the top can be helpful when making changes to an organization's culture, it is not necessary and does not have to be the starting point. The culture of a team is determined by the attitudes of and interactions between all individuals, not the words written on the walls or the mission statement on the company website. No matter where you sit within an organization, you have the ability to influence the culture within your specific team.

To start with a radical suggestion, talk to your teammates. Find or create space to have open and honest discussions about what is working well and what the team can do better. While this can take the form of a recurring retro meeting, we've found great value in more informal discussions centered around topics that interest any one team member.

We use Marginal, a tool we developed to help small teams to run structured discussions spanning any topic of interest to the team. Each week, a different team member shares a link to a podcast, video, or article they are interested in. After listening, watching, or reading, we prepare questions and meet as a team to discuss it. These meetings have not only built stronger personal relationships within our team but have ended up stimulating a number of great conversations around how we can work together more effectively and the direction we want to take our business in.

Like moving a large boulder, it takes significant effort at first, and you may see little movement. But over time, momentum builds, and progress becomes faster. Rather than exhausting yourself trying to "fix" your teams culture over night, identify a few concrete changes you want to make in the way people think about their work and/or interact with one another and invest in making these changes in ways that are maintainable over the long-haul. As you start to see these investments pay off, you'll be motivated to make further improvements and you'll have the organizational capital to do so.

But why?

If this sounds like a lot of effort spent on something that will take a long time to complete and is not guaranteed to succeed, it is. So it's a reasonable question to ask if it's even worth doing. Having worked at a wide range of organizations, some whose culture was a good fit for my personality and some whose culture was more at odds with my personality, I can confidently say that the benefits are widespread and significant.

In particular, the following are just a few of the areas that an individual or a team can benefit from improved culture:

• Collaboration: Teams that get into a shared rhythm find it easier to collaborate and as a result do so more frequently. The creativity and enjoyment that comes out of this collaboration makes each individual and the team as a whole more productive.
• Effectiveness: The sense of accountability that comes out of deeper bonds with your coworkers encourages each team members to push harder toward the objective set before the team.
• Satisfaction: We spend too much time in the workplace to allow it to be a constant source of stress and frustration. When you work alongside people you appreciate and in ways that well suited to your personality, your work will energize you and bring great satisfaction to your life.

This is far from a complete list, but hopefully even these few factors demonstrate how valuable a culture that is tailored to meet the needs of the team can be.

In Summary

In conclusion, cultivating a positive and effective company culture takes time, effort, and collaboration, but the rewards are significant—from improved teamwork to greater job satisfaction. Whether you’re a leader or an individual contributor, you have the ability to influence your team's culture in meaningful ways. We'd love to hear your thoughts on this topic—what resonates with you, what you’ve found helpful in your own experience, or any challenges you're facing with your team's culture.