# Workplace Surgery: Scaling company culture during rapid growth

- **Episode:** [130](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/130.md) (2024-09-24)
- **Type:** workplace-surgery
- **Tags:** company-culture, scaling, growth, startup
- **Time:** 30:59–36:37 (start 1859s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/130?t=1859](https://truthliesandwork.com/130?t=1859)

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[30:59] Leanne Elliott: Congratulations on your rapid, rapid growth, Techstarter
[31:02] Al Elliott: We've gone from 15 to 50 employees, 5-0, in just 18 months. And while I'm— whilst I'm thrilled with our success, I'm struggling to maintain the close-knit, innovative culture we had when we were smaller. If I had a penny for every time someone said that. We've tried to keep our weekly all-hands meeting and monthly social events, but attendance is dropping and I sense a disconnect growing between the original team and newer hires. Very, very common. Our once collaborative atmosphere is giving way to more siloed work, and I'm worried we're losing the spark that made us special. How can I scale our culture along with our headcount? I'm excited about our growth, but I just don't want to become another faceless tech company. Leanne, that's quite an interesting question. I mean, there are some aspects that we've covered before, and in fact, the same question comes up quite often. But I like the end of this. I don't want to become another, just another faceless tech company
[31:54] Leanne Elliott: Well, like you say, Al, we have asked, we've been asked and answered this question a few times. How do we maintain culture as we grow? I'm going to throw it over to you, my little entrepreneurial business founder. What do you say to somebody who worries about that?
[32:07] Al Elliott: I like that you don't want to become a faceless tech company. I like that you've got a vision. Don't feel like you need to deliver on that vision just yourself. You can get help
[32:17] Leanne Elliott: Yeah, absolutely. Um, a few things to know. Very normal feeling. One of the most disruptive things to workplace culture is change, and change and growth is one of the most disruptive types of change. Um, so yeah, it is, it is, it is. You're feeling and observing the right thing. Your culture will be changing as you grow. The assumption is that that's a bad thing. Culture does need to evolve. You're not gonna— startup culture is a very different beast, and they need to be. To accelerate that growth, to, to get them from startup to scale up successfully. They need to be scrappy, they need to be ambitious, they need to be hardworking, hustle. As time goes on, an organization evolves much like your operational processes evolve, where they need to be a bit more sophisticated, they need to be a bit more stable, they need to be a bit more standardized. And it's the same with culture, really. That's not to say that you need to be a faceless tech company. It just means that you probably are point where— of your growth where you need to reevaluate your culture and what you want your culture to be as a scale-up rather than a startup, there's always, there's always 2 things I'll say. Is one, never make the assumption that you've got a bad culture, because culture is, culture is always changing. Culture is like a living thing. And pretty much from the point you hired your, your, your second employee, when there's now 3 of you, you are no longer in in control of workplace culture because there's relationship behavioral dynamics that are happening independent of you, and that shapes culture. So my, so my thought would be don't assume that it's bad. It might be that you have a lovely culture, it's just not a culture that you set out to build intentionally, or maybe the culture that you need to build your business to its next stage. So take some time to understand the culture that you've got. It might actually be that, that as a founder who is very risk-taking and likes excitement, that actually you're disconnected from the culture rather than your employees being disconnected from the culture. So, take some time to investigate what the current culture is, where you currently are. Then you can kind of go, okay, like a, you know, as-is-to-be type analysis where you'll figure out your values, your behaviours, your organisational structure, your relationships, your manager dynamics, all those things that are then going to feed into actually creating the behaviours that define the culture that you want. And and the culture that the business needs. It might be as well you're getting to 50. The salad working might not be a cultural problem. It could be an operational problem. It could be a manager problem. It could be a collaboration problem. There's so many different, different variables that come into play as you grow. It's not necessarily culture. So the easiest way to figure out if it is, is to start by assessing the culture you currently have. You can use a variety of tools, um, the RX7 method, R Method being one of them. Um, or there's actually a really good culture audit, um, a paper that I've used a couple of times before actually with clients. I'll leave a link in, in the show notes, um, if you want to have a little read of that, if you want to do some DIY stuff. But if you're at 50 people, now is probably the time to think about bringing in a consultant, whether it be an occupational psychologist, a business psychologist, an HR practitioner, um, or indeed a culture expert. So yeah, that's my thoughts, Al
[35:25] Al Elliott: I would just add one last thing as, um, kind of a Nerd, I would love to be a founder of a tech startup. I think I might be too old now. But but as a fellow nerd to another nerd, with when you look at the tech that you've built, I'm sure that you look at the code and you're like, oh, there's so many things we could do better about this. But your customers don't care because it just does what it's supposed to do. So you could spend all your time just cutting down your tech debt. You could rebuild certain features by making them making the code even. even better and possibly like a tiny bit faster and cleaner, but your customers won't notice. It's kind of the same with your culture, I think, because you can see behind the scenes of your culture. Then it might be you can see all the problems as like a nerd, as like a geek. You can see all the problems, but actually your staff, your employees, your team don't care because like Leanne said, this is the culture. And it might be that you are disconnected, not they are disconnected. So be a good marketing person. And go and talk to your customers, in this case your employees, and say, are you happy with the culture? And if they all go, yeah, I like it, don't mess about. Just put it to one side. You don't need to fix everything. Okay, question number 3, Leanne. This question is about navigating office romances