Creating a culture for your employees to thrive: How to build a powerhouse team with Natalie Pearce
So much of building a strong team is heavily reliant on the culture you establish in the early stages. That’s just one of the many great lessons we took away from our conversation with Natalie Pearce.
Natalie is the founder of The Future Kind collective, a culture consultancy which focuses on using service design to create the best possible working experiences for employees.
With a wealth of knowledge to help growing companies design their cultures, Natalie gave us some food for thought on the topic of building a culture to cultivate a powerhouse team.
You can catch up on our full discussion here. In the meantime read on for our top takeaways.
⚡Creating a sense of belonging…
This is a critical pillar to consider for Natalie, as this was perhaps her biggest motivation to build The Future Kind Collective. At her last company (SPARCK), she felt she could show up to work and express herself freely in a safe space. This then encouraged her to focus on helping replicate that same experience for others.
She advocates that a really important step in building the right culture for a powerhouse team is for founders to focus on building psychological safety. This encourages an environment where team members feel that they are able to share opinions, challenge one another and make mistakes without the feeling of judgement, fear or ridicule.
Creating a sense of belonging unlocks creativity and brings about an environment where people can share their best ideas freely and confidently. So much of creativity requires vulnerability, and so to unlock creativity, your team needs to feel supported enough to do their best work. Without this, you risk losing the honesty and criticisms you need to overcome challenges and grow.
⚡Differentiating between culture and camaraderie…
With many adopting the remote-working style, many worry about building a culture away from the physical workplace. However Natalie encourages all companies to design for remote-first cultures, regardless of working styles, and to understand why we need to consider the difference between culture and camaraderie.
While culture focuses on agreed behaviours, camaraderie focuses on more personal relationships. While building your company culture isn’t a linear journey, Natalie, suggests considering these three steps:
- Firstly, define the company’s purpose, vision, mission and values to build a strong foundation for your team.
- Then make your values tangible by turning them into measurable behaviours. For example, defining what behaviours constitute a good day or a bad day can help set a standard for what you expect from your teams.
- Embed your values into your business processes and rituals. For example, at The Future Kind, they make sure they communicate that one of their biggest values is Compassion, which is underpinned by kindness and generosity. This way if there are candidates who are more individualistic or generally don’t align with their values, they can sidestep the risk of hiring the wrong fit as candidates can get a glimpse of their culture.
-
⚡Approaching culture as a shared responsibility…
An important lesson she learnt at her previous role as Head of Culture is that building a strong team culture doesn't boil down to one individual. While heads of people, founders or CEOs serve as important role models and nurturers of the culture, they aren’t solely responsible. This is because a culture is something that is owned and maintained by everyone in the organisation.
For Natalie, it's much more powerful when more people are involved - not just the head of people or the chief people officer. This is something she has taken into account in the process of building her business. Now, with their client projects , they’ve introduced culture champions and culture activist communities outside of core people teams to spread the responsibility and support implementation of culture initiatives.
A key takeaway from Natalie is for founders to implement a culture as soon as possible. Although culture may shift and evolve as you grow, the longer you wait to define your culture, the more cultural debt you accumulate.
Cultural debt refers to the behaviours that you tolerate but aren’t aligned with your core culture. The longer these behaviours accumulate, the harder it will be to establish a culture that truly aligns with your values.
As culture is not visible, it’s harder to notice progressing cultural debt. For example unconscious bias - if not dealt with proactively, it can be difficult to unlearn within a team. So the sooner you put in the effort, the better!
How have you created a culture to help build your team? I’d love to know!
PS: You can learn more about Natalie and The Future Kind Collective here:
Newsletter#founderstories#startuplessons#startuptipsCase Studyrecruitment
