Laying the foundation for your startups culture: How 'You' are it

Statutory Disclosure:“To start off let us be very clear that unlike what the title might seem to suggest, this one is not intended to be a guide about how to setup a culture at your organization or anything remotely connected to processes as such, because eventually culture, be it organizational or societal isn’t something that starts by following a few guidelines. It’s you and what you do that goes on to be the culture or at least a part of it.”Now think of the word culture and promptly an image of customs and traditions, of Kanchipuram silks, of 330 million or more gods and goddesses does come up. Else if you are one of those (same as me) who can only think of their work and office, work place, organizational culture would be a few scenarios that will play their motion images on your mind screen.

Starting Up And Thinking You Got It:

So we start up and our first thoughts are surely something along the lines of, “At long last we are on to our dream journey of a lifetime”. We start off and try to do all the cool things we ever dreamt of which maybe we could never experience within our prior work environments. We try and have the best of processes, the best of product development ethos and the coolest of work place and organizational cultures. Does seem to be enough, ain’t it? Does seem that we have got it! But have we? Well even after all of these, have you ever experienced the following:

Employees: We are tired, why can’t we do it tomorrow, why can’t some one understand, god! Office yet again (mostly on Mondays)

Employers:Why aren’t things moving, what does everyone do, oh my losses, yes! My profits this quarter etc.

Myself (for every individual, including a mix of the above two groups): Is this really me?

If you have, that would be because while we might feel that we have captured the word culture through our stress upon a beautiful work environment, work place culture and an organizational culture, we really haven’t captured anything, because all the things that we think we have caught up with are actually just inanimate instruments of culture which have nothing to do with how human beings catch up with the word culture.These are the garnishing definitely, but never the main course.

In essence the starting up of a culture starts and ends with the initiatives that each of the human beings from the above categories take or do not take. And it goes something like:

Employees: Startup employees are a segment apart from the rest. Most of them come into the folds with a view to work on things which they did not have the opportunity to work with earlier or else maybe because of the sheer monotonous schedule of earlier engagements. As such most startup employees work with startups to follow a dream they had. Since they are following their dreams with the startup, it helps when they see their dreams as part of the startup dreams.

Furthermore since not being able to express is one of the most avid reasons of work place frustration, starting talking at every chance you get, to everyone around is one of the best ways to start your contribution to the culture. At startups people love to talk.It’s just because of the hard pressed times, no one does. But if you start the talk, I am sure you will be talked to. And thus backed by the instruments of culture will arise the employee and work culture.

Employers:Entrepreneurs are amongst the most foresighted and planned human beings around. In fact they plan for literally everything. And they are packed with personalized ideas about how to go ahead. This is why as someone who has started a great organization and is moving to the next big thing, often you will find yourself moving alone on your plans. This is because being the most foresighted, planned etc etc guy in your team, you sometimes tend to move ahead of others without actually thinking about where they are.

Most of the time you think about the plans with such depth that you tend to forget the humane aspects of the processes that you just thought about. How often has it happened when you think, “He/she can easily do this within so and so timeline.” But how often has it happened that you have thought whether the person to be executing the job has something else on his/her mind, his/her capabilities notwithstanding.

If you are thinking of this and the like for every plan you layout, that’s great. If you are not? It’s time to start doing this and more importantly start communicating the same.This is how the culture of interaction with your team starts. In the absence of which the team starts getting freaked out and so do you and work process delays, unproductive hours etc become bywords.

In short the above is actually the start to your organizational culture which starts with you.

Myself:For every individual comprising of the above two classes, a few thoughts along these culture lines and committing ourselves to them will result in the sunshine culture we all hope for.

And with these the answers to every question asked by every group mentioned above start turning up. For:

Employees: It will be something like, “yes, I am tired but at least I am understood well, so let me do the job well and I can rest later.” (Implies employee motivation and job satisfaction are on the positive)

Employers:I am sure the plans will soon surface well. (Implies the team has developed well and the organization is sound and the entrepreneur has matured as a leader)

Myself: Thank god, I am here. (Implying I feel like I belong)

Conclusively starting up a culture is guided by how you think and decide to actand not how you go by technicalities of work culture or organizational culture. And how your startup progresses and succeeds or fails is a result of it.

Concluding Disclosure: “For the record this long piece is a result of seeing things from a number of experiential perspectives and having sat long drawn idle hours thinking about the same. As such any resemblance to any text of any book of any a-b-c-school is clearly not a possibility. Hence lack of conventional organizational culture based theories is unavoidable.”

About The Author:Rupam joined the startup bandwagon almost immediately after his Masters (apart from a small stint at a major) and since then has been working with FindYogi, a consumer web product from Bangalore based startupWowway Labs. He can be found here and followed on twitter at @rupamRg