Culture matters if you want to succeed.

A bit late to the party, I know, but I finished watching Mr Bates v The Post Office last night. I already knew the story well, but it’s easy to see how the dramatization captured the imagination of the nation and outraged viewers.

I feel for the people working in the Post Office’s communications team right now. And Fujitsu’s for that matter. When your brand becomes pretty toxic overnight, it’s difficult to come back from.

The only real option is a massive mea culpa, an open discussion about lessons learnt and doing everything you can to right the wrongs for which you were responsible, in this case by compensating the victims.

It got me thinking about how important values and culture are to any successful business. The rise in B-Corp certification (it’s an ambition of ours too!) demonstrates that more and more leaders see that how you treat people – whether customers, employees or partners - matters.

But not everyone is catching on. And it will be to their detriment.

I once worked with someone who described values as ‘trite.’ They couldn’t be more wrong. Values are a way of signalling how you do things, what you expect from your people and a way of holding yourself accountable for doing what you say you will. Certainly, that particular business would have been a far nicer place to work if everyone had really lived by the values they claimed to stand for.

I worked with someone else who didn’t believe in checking in on colleagues going through a hard time. They were so task focused that they forgot about the people delivering the tasks, and in a service-based business, that is a recipe for disaster. The result? Many colleagues found them impossible to work with and didn’t want them involved in their projects, despite their experience and undoubted intellect.

In any business, your people are your most important asset. They get the work done, but they are also your ambassadors, your external voice, whether you like it or not. You can’t have two cultures, an external one where customers think of you well and your own people hate or fear you. Just ask the Post Office. 

So if you want to be around for the long-term, if you want to inspire loyalty and pride, you need to do more than just pay the wages.

When I set up Awe & Sonder, I made a conscious decision that I wanted to create something better than I had experienced before. Something that would get the best out of me and the people I work with.

I set myself some goals for the sort of culture I wanted to create: employ more parents (who can struggle to find work compatible with school and childcare), be flexible by default and don’t take money from people you wouldn’t spend your own with.

We’re not quite a year old yet, but we’re growing. There are now four of us working for clients (admittedly not all full time, but that’s part of being a parent friendly business!), and we’ve worked with five clients over the last 11 months. It’s hard work, but it’s a business I’m proud of.