Does Company Culture Impact The Bottom Line?

 Beyond being an employee benefit, is company culture important to productivity, efficiency and better work?

This is the question I struggled with many years ago as our company grew and morphed into something that I was no longer happy to be a part of.

It's hard to believe but the company that I founded in 1995 had actually become something that I dreaded coming to. How did this happen? It felt almost as if I woke up one day and stepped into a new reality that was no longer the place I had dreamt about having. 

The problem began actually when we became successful. We got more work than I could manage so we started to hire people out of my immediate circle of friends and friends of friends. We hired people based on their resume or portfolios thinking that each individual would help to elevate the company's profile. That happened, but something else happened as well.

We had a company filled with differing beliefs, opinions, work ethics and value systems. On the surface, that's great right? Isn't diversity and opposing points of view healthy for a company? That was a sign that we sought independent voices. The only problem is, those differing voices led to many "management" meetings and soon enough we started dealing with our internal differences as opposed to working as a collective whole. Small changes and innovative ideas were hard to come by because of these conflicting value systems.

As a designer first and business person second, I found the conflict and passive aggressive behavior to be overwhelming and now my company was filled with people that seemed more interested in playing "the devil's advocate" on big and small issues.

We lost our competitive edge and I became exhausted. It got so bad that sometimes I would pull into the parking lot and have to will myself to get out and go to work. The culture that formed was taking a toll on my mental and physical health.

The answer was in what my business coach advised me to do. Define your core values and align your staff towards that. Great idea! Except, I didn't know what I stood for or wanted. So days turned into weeks and I didn't make much progress. That was until I ran into a neighbor of mine who told me to read this book, "Delivering Happiness" by Tony Hsieh. He kept going on about how the book had "changed his life." A little hyperbolic for my taste.

Nevertheless, I ordered the book and read it cover to cover (a rarity for me due to my attention span). I read about how he had lost his way in running a successful software company and hated going to work. He sold it, but made note of where it went wrong. His next company would not repeat the same mistakes and he established the 10 ‪#‎CoreValues‬ of ‪#‎Zappos‬. They were great! Why? Because the values he documented were generated by his employees. They contained things that were clear, actionable and best of all didn't require Google sized budgets to implement.

The answer to our company culture appeared in a book. So what did I do? I did what anyone in my position would do. I copied them– almost verbatim. I made adjustments here and there and began the work to transform our company. It took almost two years to do so, but I'm glad I did.

The results? I have a smaller team, but we move faster, adopt ideas quicker and they push me to build on the values we defined. That is company culture at work. Though we are not the biggest or the baddest design company, we are able to attract and employ some of the best creative minds out there because we have a great company culture.

photo: Archi Prudencio

"If you hire people just because they can do a job, they’ll work for your money. But if you hire people who believe what you believe, they’ll work for you with blood and sweat and tears." – Simon Sinek author of " Start With Why"

So can company culture have an impact on the bottom line? Yes! But more importantly it will have a big impact on your happiness and those that choose to help you build your dreams.