Needs Assessment

• On average, most companies felt that managing culture as you scale is the hardest challenge for the talent function
• However, attracting talent is not getting easier and companies need to identify creative ways to communicate their culture
• Every organisation has a different structure for their talent team
  • no talent function
  • sits under operations
  • broken up by tech and non-tech
  • specific employee experience managers
  • separation between acquisition and engagement

Best Practice

• Get potential hires to experience culture as experience leads to buy-in
  • Attend Friday town-halls/meetings, join company events/outings, send personalised messages (e.g. GIFs) during interview process
• Customised job specs
  • Change the language, the structure and other information you provide. For example, for engineers, it may be worth it to structure the spec through problems that they are trying to solve.
• Communicate culture through your job spec
  • A/B test job specifications to discover the best strategy to communicate culture to filter the right candidate; it works - get less applicants, but better applicants!!
• Go out of your way to help people to learn
  • Bring in a constant flow of inspiration - speakers (designers, writers, activists)
• Creating an inclusive culture is important
  • Communicate that the environment is non-contrived and encourage celebration
• Important to make the connection between values and behaviours
  • Need to have clarity on what are the things that are good, be careful of confirmation bias

Challenges

How do you communicate culture externally and raise awareness about your culture?

Videos help, convey culture in every external document, picture job ad/video job ad

How do you manage 2 different cultures within the company?

Find a common ground b/w both and use that as a hook during events, deal with the reality of having 2 cultures

How transparent should you be?

Logical limits on transparency - need to know vs. want to know

How to communicate negative news (e.g. employee has been fired)?

Give the individual the option to communicate it to relevant teams and frame the discussion, don't make a broad announcement, do an exit interview and share learnings with relevant stakeholders

Are there any good metrics for culture?

Define culture and capture them in questions, and get employees to answer the questions (indirectly) -- if 85% right or more are correct, you have someone who is a good fit

Other Questions / Thoughts

• How do you make culture something people think about, not just leaders?
• How do you prevent culture dilution (e.g. if people question vision, founders leave etc.)?
• How do you bring your company values to life?
• How do we find a common language?
• What’s the most difficult question asked, and how was it dealt with?
• We need less people trying to prove their worth in their jobs and more focus on results
• It is important people have the same moral fiber
• Culture is what you love and breathe every day
• There is a danger in getting stuck on version 1 of your values -- need to keep evolving your communication and clarifying your values
• How do you put culture into action? "Hugs not handshakes" at LostMyName