Often entrepreneurs start alone or with a small number of employees and scale up with growth. Maintaining a positive organizational culture in a small company may not be difficult.
However, as your company grows and you bring in new hires, there is a high likelihood that your company culture will begin to die or get diluted.
A dying culture spells trouble for your organization because customers and employees expect your organization to retain or improve the culture that attracted them to you.
The following are some reasons why startup culture doesn’t scale with growth.
Failure to Attract and Maintain Top Talent
Top talent is picky because they are in high demand. Attracting them requires positioning yourself as a good employer. Once you have them working for you, you have to ensure that they stay by ensuring that they are facilitated and empowered.
As an employer or business owner, you must ensure that you do not exhibit a toxic attitude in your interaction with your employees. One of the most common but subtle errors employers make without knowing is showing an unconscious bias that could cost you great talent.
But you don’t have to worry about that, as this post on “What is unconscious bias at work” can help you identify the subtle but destructive attitude you need to shun.
Doing It All
If you have a small team, it is possible to help them learn and adapt to your organization’s culture. However, as your team grows, you may realize that it is a challenge to meet the demands of running your business and the need to get your employees to adapt to your organization’s culture.
Unfortunately, many employers try to juggle the two, which ultimately leads to the failure of a company’s culture when scaling up. But there is a way around the problem; utilizing employees that have worked long in your organization and putting them in charge of promoting company culture in new hires.
Employees Start Considering Their Career Growths
When starting up, your very first employees’ goals and aspirations are to see the success of your business.
Once you start growing and more employees join your organization, your first employees tend to feel like they have already achieved their goals and start thinking about their career path and your organization’s opportunities for growth.
Unfortunately, many employers fail to take note of this which ultimately leads to losing talent that has been in the company longest and that has the company culture ingrained in them. The best way of ensuring you keep this talent is by providing growth opportunities.
For example, if you need to hire someone for a higher position, a good idea would be to train your older workforce to fill those positions. Doing this helps them realize career growth while still at your company.
Culture Starts To Solidify
While you may want to maintain the culture that propelled you to growth, it may need some tweaking and subtle changes from time to time to ensure that it aligns with your scaled-up needs.
Unfortunately, startup culture can start to solidify with time, to the extent that it becomes so rigid to fit in the scaled-up version of your organization.
To ensure that your culture does not solidify, try improving your existing culture because there is always room for improvement. For example, you may want to hear from your employees or clients about what they think about specific aspects of your business and develop ways of improving them. This way, your employees will get used to changes with time, allowing your organizational culture to evolve with business growth.
Take Away
Growing a company from scratch to a point where its culture begins to bulge means that you have done some pretty good work. If your organization’s culture is at the brink of collapse, there is hope for you if you apply the countermeasures listed in this post.
Bulging or failed company cultures also act as a lesson to you in the future. In other words, it can help you understand that what works for seven will not work for a hundred. But a hundred is not the limit for growth; it may go further than that, so you must be ready for change and allow your organizational culture to grow and evolve to meet the needs.
