Codifying our Team Culture
Why We Created the Whiteboard Passport
Growth doesn’t make anything less complex. It often magnifies false assumptions, personality quirks, and leads to more crowded refrigerators. I know from experience that no one is happy about the smell of a six-month old taco. We understand every culture has ebb and flow but regardless, we set out on a mission to articulate what makes us, us.
Every culture has borders. It’s the margins of culture that define what makes great countries, great companies, and great people. Documents like the Declaration of Independence, President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, the Emancipation Proclamation, are some examples of how borders can encourage what we do and don’t do. The way we act and don’t act.
The important part is defining a way in which a company lives and breathes. A culture you don’t assume, but create.
Over the past six years we’ve grown from two founders and a kitchen table to over twenty teammates and a bustling office. We realized the kitchen table carried ideas and values that deserved protection and definition.
The Whiteboard Passport has become our gospel: a collection of those kitchen table ideals we want instilled in Whiteboard for the next 100 years. Ideals like kindness, commitment, empathy, generosity, and belief.
It defines what we require of anyone who joins our team and it serves as a mirror into what my team expects of me.
Books that define company culture are not new. Companies like Facebook, Netflix, and Zappos have created excellent resources for their employees. (NOBL, an organizational design company, has done a great job collecting a library of culture books you can reference.)
Every company is limited by its founders and/or leadership team. A successful 21st century company has to bring everyone to the table. It has to give their employees a voice. It has to define margins. What happens in the middle is what separates good companies from great companies.
“A value is an enduring belief that a specific mode of conduct or end-state of existence is personally or socially preferable to an opposite or converse mode of conduct or end-state of existence.” — Leslie de Chernatony
The pursuit of our values is what motivated our team to create the Whiteboard Passport. Here’s a few reasons why values are critical in the success of a company:
Values Don’t Decay
In an industry that is constantly evolving, our values are the only part of our company that don’t give way to obsolescence. No matter what software we use, language in which we write code, or strategies we test, our values should withstand the test of time. Whether Whiteboard is a company for a season or for a lifetime (hopefully longer), our desire was to craft values that our team could not only believe in, but act upon.
“Marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world; it’s a very noisy world, and we’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. And so we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us.” — Steve Jobs
Values Create Culture
Imagine a world where businesses of all shapes and sizes promote worthwhile values to their employees. Conversations and attitudes at work would overflow into homes built on strong marriages and good health.
In 2015, the U.S. Department of Labor reported that the average work day for employed people spent 8.9 hours working (ages 25 to 54 with children). 7.7 hours was the average amount of sleep.
The point: people spend more time at work (by far) than anywhere else.
“What if companies valued making better people, and not only better employees?”
I believe employers have a responsibility to the people who work for them. Paychecks come and go. So does time. Great results at work, but not at home is hypocritical. The businesses that make up our cities have a responsibility to promote values that make strong communities.
Values As Foundation
Never build anything on a weak foundation. A fragile foundation may withstand a few storms, but it won’t last a lifetime. If you try to overlay semantics on top of a hidden agenda you’ll be found out. Greed, gluttony, and other capitalistic sins don’t make the world a better place.
I believe company cultures are built on a foundation of two key ingredients. First, the commitment to show up for the job every day plays a big role in any company, but the second is where the magic happens. At Whiteboard, the informal moments are the ones that make our company culture. It’s the moment a co-worker becomes a friend and confidante. It’s the weekend get-togethers that happen outside of the 9am to 5pm work week. It’s when company growth doesn’t just happen on a ladder, but when the character of an individual expands. A good combination of formality and informality cultivates the best in people, and people create the best companies to work for.
Whiteboard’s foundation was built on friendship. A dream to lead a different kind of agency with a different kind of purpose that cultivates the best in the people on our team and the people we serve on a daily basis.
It is the posture of friendship that makes our team better people. It’s what makes us take our work seriously.
But not too seriously.
The Whiteboard Passport continues to serve as a cornerstone of identity and purpose for our team. Alongside our values is our team structure, work expectations, explanation of benefits, and more. We are also creating a glossary of terms (some inside jokes) that we continue to revise. If you’re interested in exploring our culture book we’ve made it available to download.
If you’re thinking about creating a culture book for your company and need some help, please don’t hesitate to ask.
