<aside> 💙 Culture is the sum of the way we treat each other and make decisions - and not what is preached in this document. That’s why the easy part is defining culture and the hard part is implementing culture. Since you are onboard this mission, we expect you to take part in this, as much as you take part in building the product, selling to clients, cleaning the office… or whatever responsibility you are given at Resights.
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In the beginning, the early founding team makes decisions together and plays a part in hiring every single person. We implicitly set the culture through our actions without much deliberate effort spent on culture. At this stage, our culture is self-regulating since any bad behaviour can be noticed and addressed immediately.
As our company gets bigger, and we no longer are working together all of the time, the risk that we develop a bad culture increases. A single bad hire can become toxic and can develop into an environment where we are no longer treated the way we want to be treated, or decisions are made based on self-interest, not the company’s best interest. Put differently, our culture exists whether we chose to talk about it or not. By talking about culture and codifying our values, we can intentionally shape its direction.
Shaping our culture will increase our chances of success, because of two primary reasons:
We all want to join a team that stands for something and is passionate about who we are. Having a strong and unique company culture helps us stand out from other companies and gives us a shared understanding and language to talk about what makes our team unique.
Also, having a strong culture means that we all know what the expected behavior is, and therefore we need fewer rules. With fewer rules, we have more autonomy and ownership. The best people seek out autonomy and ownership, and so the best people thrive in cultures that are strong.
In a strong culture, everyone takes action to protect the company when we notice bad decisions happening. Armed with a shared understanding of what behavior at our company is acceptable, we will self-regulate. This also helps limit the number of rules and processes we need to implement as we scale, which limits the formation of bureaucracy.
If we have clear and well-understood culture, we will make decisions similarly to the way the founding team would have made it if they were involved. If we have an unhealthy or a weak culture, these things will happen, and no one will do anything about them. Eventually, these problems will get worse and may cause people to be unhappy or to leave. Once big problems happen within our culture, they are very hard to find and fix.
Resights was built by a bunch of inexperienced people with well-thought ideas. To continue down a path of innovation and delivering value to customers, we must be extremely aware of the ideas that win on a daily basis. We have job titles, but we’re not highly hierarchical - we make decisions based on the quality of an idea, not the seniority nor the confidence of the person proposing it.
We've been able to achieve so much with so little because everyone at Resights takes ownership of their work. We seek to improve all aspects of our company even in ways that are not explicitly part of our job description. This also means that we are collectively owning the wins and losses we make along the way. There will always be an infinite number of things to do, fix, tweak, or experiment with. Let’s be a company full of people that get shit done without being asked or told.