Steve Daniels, President and Co-Founder of Able Health, recently led his startup through a culture setting process to create a culture guide. Steve and his co-founder, Rachel Katz, understood that it was important to be intentional about their culture from the very beginning. Even though they only have eight employees, they just made their internal culture guide public on github. I asked Steve to walk me through how this process worked. Here's what he said....
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How To Build a Culture of Feedback
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.
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