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Workplace culture is at a crossroads. Companies are grappling with the dual challenge of maintaining growth while supporting their employees amid rising concerns about burnout and mental health – what some call “Great exhaustion.”
January 2024 SHRM Report He highlights that firms are increasingly investing in mental health advantages to address these challenges, and yet many employees still struggle to find balance. At the same time, debates proceed over hybrid and distant work, with firms like Amazon facing backlash over their work mandates related to returning to office. These trends highlight a universal truth: scaling company culture is each complex and critical. As businesses grow, maintaining a thriving, values-based environment becomes one of the most difficult challenges leaders face.
In Tinuiti, this challenge was a constant companion on our journey. What began two many years ago as a five-person team driven by a vision of putting people first has evolved into one of the largest independent full-service performance marketing agencies in the US. Through all of it, we have learned that culture is not static – it must evolve with your organization to meet the needs of each your people and your goals.
Here are five key lessons we have learned in navigating the complexities of a scaling culture while remaining grounded in our core values.
1. Accept that culture must evolve
One of the biggest challenges in scaling your culture is resisting the temptation to stick with the way things have been in the past. If we tried to recreate the energy and strengths of our original small team, we might ignore the needs of the thousand-plus employees we employ today. As firms grow, culture must evolve to serve the greater good, not only individual preferences.
According to Harvard Business Review research73% of employees say that working in the office seems dearer than before the pandemic, and almost half consider that orders to return to the office put management preferences ahead of worker needs. Forward-thinking firms are responding to these concerns by reimagining the advantages – offering solutions corresponding to distant working stipends, caregiver support and even housing subsidies to ease the burden of paperwork.
By recognizing that advantages and policies must adapt to employees’ changing priorities, organizations can avoid alienating their employees and ensure their culture effectively scales with their business.
2. Know when to evolve and when to change
Understanding the difference between evolution and change is extremely essential. Evolution requires incremental improvements, while change requires transformational change. At Tinuiti, this distinction has been essential to keep our culture flexible and strong, especially when it comes to our compensation system.
Initially, we used a easy, individual-focused substantive model, which worked well for our small, single-channel agency. However, as we became a multi-channel, integrated company, it became clear that this model didn’t fully support our collaborative, interdisciplinary work. To meet these challenges, we have repeatedly modified our approach, each developing and implementing daring changes to higher align with our culture and goals.
We recently launched Project Simplifi, an agency-wide reorganization designed to balance individual achievement with team success. This evolution helps employees proceed to earn competitively while gaining latest opportunities to develop their roles and careers inside Tinuiti’s growing structure. By strengthening our culture of ownership, this model fosters a sense of shared success by aligning worker development with the growth of the company.
3. Get out of the echo chamber
The older you get, the harder it is to get an honest picture of reality. Leadership is often at the center of two opposing forces. On the one hand, people may hold back, offering only selective feedback to avoid upsetting leadership or shielding the CEO from bad news. On the other hand, the squeaky wheel effect can skew perceptions because the loudest voices dominate conversations, often without the full context needed to solve the underlying issues.
To overcome these challenges, leaders must actively seek diverse perspectives and ensure communication flows each ways. For example, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai usually holds town hall meetings and worker surveys to gather insights and address concerns. During these meetings, Pichai often faces difficult questions from employees, corresponding to addressing cutting company costs resources or clarifying organizational priorities, as highlighted during recent town hall meetings.
Despite the challenges, these honest conversations help create an environment where employees feel their voices count and foster trust through transparency.
4. Embrace change, but hold fast to your core values
As leaders, our role is to create an environment where change is understood, not feared. Not all change shall be good; some will push people out of their comfort zone. However, if core values remain strong and consistently visible, teams are higher equipped to cope with these changes with resilience.
While culture evolves to reflect the challenges and opportunities facing an organization, values provide the foundation on which decision-making and behavior are based. They define the principles that guide actions, ensuring that whilst processes and strategies change, the organization stays true to what is most vital.
Sprout Social offers a great example of how to do this Values can anchor organizations during disturbances. Just three months before the global health crisis, Sprout went public with latest capital and momentum. But when the pandemic hit, the newly public company had to adapt quickly.
Building on its core principles of communication, accountability and care, Sprout provided employees with the tools to transition to distant work and supported customers through uncertainty. These actions not only helped Sprout overcome the crisis, but also strengthened its culture.
Lesson for other firms? In times of rapid change, anchoring on core values can guide decision-making, strengthen culture, and ensure resilience even in the face of major disruption.
5. Be the chief reminder officer
As a leader, your job is to consistently remind your team of your organization’s core values. This could appear repetitive, but it is essential to keep these values alive and actionable. Without strengthening values, they could develop into empty corporate slogans. At Tinuiti, transparency is one of our guiding principles and we make it a each day practice through open communication channels corresponding to chats, LinkedIn posts and office hours.
But transparency is not just about sharing information – it’s about creating accountability. For example, during our last hour of work, we discussed what “adequate transparency” means: sharing enough insights to make employees feel like owners, without overwhelming them with unnecessary details. I often ask the team, “How does this information help improve customer outcomes?” These questions reinforce transparency as greater than just a corporate value – it is a strategic empowerment tool.
By embedding these discussions into on a regular basis practices, we make sure that transparency stays an intentional and meaningful part of our Culture of Ownership, helping employees align their work with the broader company mission.
Ultimately, scaling a business is difficult. Scaling culture is complex. Do each at the same time? This is the ultimate challenge – and it only gets tougher as your organization grows and the connection to your culture becomes increasingly dependent on others to carry it forward.
Don’t assume that culture scales itself. A thriving ownership culture requires intention, motion, and a constant stream of reminders. If I could give leaders one piece of advice, it could be this: You cannot please everyone by scaling – appreciate constructive, direct critics, and don’t take on the vocal minority who hides behind anonymity or the traditionalists who resist change. And remember, the advantages of building a culture that grows with your organization far outweigh the challenges.
Judge for yourself whether you have remained true to your values. In my case, performance over politics, experience over opinion, “we” over “me”, transparency over fragility and, most significantly, actually helping people, not performing performative gestures.
Success is reflected in shared outcomes – employees progressing in life and profession, loyal customers whose businesses thrive, and stakeholders achieving their goals. When all three are harmonized, your culture will flourish. A culture of scaling is a continuous process of listening, adapting, and amplifying what matters most.