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Corporate Culture: Tips to keep it in shape

Alexa Romero / 5 Oct 2021 / 4 min

In recent times you may have heard a lot about corporate culture and its importance to business success and talent retention. talent retention. While most companies and startups are clear on the concept, many find it difficult to put it into practice. If this is your case, stay tuned to read this.

In this post, we gather tips from three expert voices in business culture and value transmission: Patricia Forment, People Manager at Holded, the startup that offers technology for the comprehensive management of businesses; Paula Ferrer, Head of People at Cobee, a platform that allows automating the benefits and flexible compensation of teams; and Nitya Fajardo, Regional Sales Manager for Southern Europe and Latam at Factorial, the software for the digitization of human resources departments. 

Next, we present the learnings from three success stories and how they have managed to grow while maintaining a healthy company culture, from their founding as a startup to their current expansion phase as scaleups.

  • Define the values with a collective exercise

Our company's values define its soul and must be mission-oriented, according to People Manager Patricia Forment. The corporate culture must follow a roadmap set by the founding team that takes into account both where we come from and where we are going.

But, for this second process, for the path we want to take, it is very important to have the team's input, and that is why experts recommend that values be defined through a brainstorming exercise to which all departments are invited.

  • Include corporate culture in your Scorecard

According to Paula Ferrer, “the main asset of a company is not technology or processes, since they are replicable, but what makes companies successful is the culture, the type of people they have, how they work and how they interact with each other.” Therefore, it is very important that in the hiring processes we ensure that the candidates are aligned with us and that they vibrate in the same direction. To do this, the degree of harmony with our corporate culture should be one of the indicators of our Scorecard.

  • Learn to communicate values

To ensure that the corporate culture permeates the team and is not lost, it is key to know how to transfer the DNA of the founding team to the rest of the departments. To do this, according to Nytia Fajardo, it is essential to provide managers with tools so that they can transmit it. It is also essential to evaluate whether it fits and whether it has been understood with surveys, forms and even informal talks.

  • Defend them!

Once we have achieved all this, we have to know that on the road to success there will be moments of change that could shake our corporate culture. The purchase of our startup by another group or the entry of a new investment are some of the situations in which we have to be transparent and explain what our values are. The objective is to carry out a values check and make sure that they can fit together.

If you've been left wanting to learn more insights, here you can watch the conversation we had with them in the Startup Talk: Company's culture - from startup to scaleup at Aticco Bogatell. This conference has taken place thanks to the collaboration of Upbizor.

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