By Dan Ducoté
The secret to building a successful business is having a culture that’s crystal clear and embraced by all your employees. It’s how we started Enginuity Global in 2018 — and were able to grow from a team of four to more than 100 employees within five years. It’s how we plan to grow Big Rock Leaders.
A strong culture begins by defining core values. Years before Enginuity began, one of my cousins told me that only 10% of people like what they do for a living. I found this statistic really disturbing because I’ve always loved my work. From that moment, I decided if I ever started my own company, it would be a place where people could earn their livelihood doing the exact thing they loved.
So when Rich Major, Eric Belgard and I launched Enginuity, one of our paramount values was to “cultivate heartfelt enthusiasm.” We wanted to make sure that:
- We knew what our people were passionate about.
- Employees were placed in positions that enabled them to act on that passion.
When you love what you’re doing, it’s contagious. Your colleagues feel it and feed off of it. It affects your friends and family.
Core values go beyond putting words on paper. Those values must be embedded in your processes. For example, we developed a grading scale to reflect how people aligned with corporate values, and we used this tool for hiring, training and performance. Granted, there were a few times we missed and hired the wrong people, but we have consistently maintained a great retention rate and held on to top talent throughout the years.
Some other components of a solid culture include:
Communicating consistently — It’s important to talk frequently about what your values are and how you’re putting them in practice. If you don’t, it will either set the company back or slow growth. This kind of communications can be more challenging with remote workers who aren’t in the office on a daily basis, so you have to reach out to them more often share differently than with your in-office team.
Enforcing accountability — Everyone needs to act on core values, regardless of what rung they occupy on the organizational ladder. Otherwise, you’ll need to have difficult discussions and make some hard decisions. I’ve worked for companies that overlooked some bad behavior because an employee was a good performer. Yet if you don’t consistently hold everyone accountable, other employees will notice and quickly become disengaged. It will spread like a cancer and destroy your culture.
Being flexible — Just as skyscrapers are designed to sway so they can withstand seismic pressure, your culture also needs to accommodate a little give and take. At Enginuity, we have different work schedules because some employees like to arrive earlier, while others prefer to come in later. Some folks like to work four long days and take off on Fridays. Our staff understands that as long as they get the job done and are accountable, they can work when they like. To me, such flexibility doesn’t erode culture, but rather, keeps it alive. It’s about enabling employees to be themselves and understanding that everyone has a life that’s a bit different.
To recap, your team must be a good fit with your core values. Otherwise, you’ll lose employees (or need to) and be back to square one. Yet by creating a culture that enables people to be passionate about their work in a defined and accountable way, you are laying the foundation for a successful company that can scale quickly.