I spoke recently to Aaron Cohn, who founded Worknice, "the world's first artificial intelligence powered Chief Culture Officer," designed to make teams and companies happier. How, you may ask, can an artificially intelligent being create culture change? Aaron’s theory is that every organization needs daily nudges and reminders to support good workplace culture... and what if those reminders came from a bot? The Worknice bot emails employees with prompts reminding and inspiring them to create intentional rituals and norms around culture. 

Soon Aaron will turn move his services from email to Slack (a message platform that combines the features of email and chat). Worknice will create a slackbot that sends prompts and reminders about culture via slack. As it turns out, there are several new slackbots aiming to help with workplace culture.

Here’s an increasingly common request I’ve gotten from startup founders recently:

“We have used the resources on your website extensively in our culture setting process, and we just made our internal culture guide public. Now we’re planning a system for goal setting and performance feedback. How should we go about this? We’re looking for best practices or examples of this, especially in a relatively flat hierarchy?” - Health tech startup founder

“We are a 15 person organization, having doubled in size over the past year. No HR person. We have no structured way to give and receive peer-to-peer feedback, outside weekly one-on-ones between managers and their direct reports. We're looking to do two main things: design a process (potentially using internal design and engineering resources) that would facilitate feedback and self-evaluations. We'd also like to conduct trainings internally to get people on board with the process and how to give "good" feedback.” -Financial tech startup

Startup companies are getting smart to the fact that building a culture of feedback is important. And just as defining your culture is easier done earlier on in your company’s growth (I’ve written about that here), defining your feedback process is also easier done earlier on.