Work culture is one of the key factors in both worker well-being and business success. But how do you get a strong and supportive organizational culture at your workplace? Do you really need goodies, such as sticker packs, hiking trips, and company water bottles?
In this article, Egbert Teeselink, co-founder of chat API and SDK provider TalkJS, lays out a different approach. Instead of adding more ‘stuff’, cutting perks and processes actually makes space for meaningful work. Drawing on over a decade of experience, Egbert explains how a focus on autonomy and impact can help you build a positive work culture.
What is work culture?
Work culture is the set of patterns of behaviors, norms, beliefs, rituals, and values in a workplace. Workplace culture includes anything from meme sharing on Slack to how you interact with customers. In short, it’s the way we do things around here. But why is culture important?
Why is a strong workplace culture important?
Having a strong work culture matters because work contributes to business success. Workplace culture also affects people’s well-being and motivations on a day-to-day basis. A thriving company culture means that everyone can do their best work, and as a result, makes the company better. So that prompts the question: What do you need to do to get a positive culture at your workplace?
What makes for a positive work culture?
It might be tempting to associate a great work culture with foosball tables, unlimited book budgets, and company parties. Especially at startups.
But here’s the catch: foosball tables are a terrible predictor for a fulfilling job. If the job is the most fun when you’re not working, you’ve got a pretty big problem. Wouldn’t it be better to ensure that the actual job is fun, instead of providing distractions?
“If the job is most fun when you’re not working, you’ve got a pretty big problem”
What makes for a fun job? At TalkJS, we’ve found it to be a combination of two factors: autonomy and impact.
Autonomy at work
How much autonomy you have in your work is a key contributor to how enjoyable a job is, and to workplace culture.
What does autonomy at work involve?
- Working at your preferred location
- Planning your own tasks
- Colleagues trust you to do your best work
- You aren’t told what to do, nor when to do it
- Working when you want to, and taking your kid to the doctor when you need to
- Discussing designs with your coworkers, with mutual respect and without pressure or politics
Why is autonomy important?
Lack of autonomy can leave you feeling constrained, belittled, and even frustrated. Research published by the Academy of Management shows that if workers have more control and autonomy in the work they do, that has a range of benefits, including:
- Performance: More on-the-job autonomy often leads to better performance and greater productivity. If you have more control, you’re often deeply immersed in the issues, and so can make more informed decisions and solve problems more efficiently.
- Motivation: Being able to work autonomously strengthens motivation. When you decide on your own tasks, you’re more likely to take pride in the quality of the output and can feel more intrinsic motivation to perform well.
- Well-being: Having more autonomy in the workplace can lower stress levels. You’ll have more control over your schedule, work methods, and the tasks you do. If you can start when you want to, rest and recover when you need to, and decide what to do when, that’s known to reduce mental strain and improve well-being.
As such, autonomy at work matters a lot for building a positive workplace culture.
Work with impact
Impact is another key factor in a fun job, and a strong workplace culture. Impact means that the work you do makes a meaningful contribution to the world. Work with impact is the direct opposite of what anthropologist David Graeber calls ‘bullshit jobs’. Bullshit jobs involve pointless busywork that make no difference to society whatsoever.
Why is impact important?
If you can work on things for which you can see the direct impact of your contributions, that can have a range of benefits too:
- Sense of meaning: Doing high-impact work with tangible results can create a sense of achievement and meaning. Studies show that meaningfulness is often more important to workers than other aspects, such as wages or shiny perks.
- Engagement: Knowing that your work has a meaningful impact plays an important role in worker engagement. Engagement ties in with intrinsic motivators, such as personal values and a desire to make a difference.
- Business value: Work with impact is directly tied to outcomes with value for the company, such as customer satisfaction and retention. When you do work that matters, you’re more likely to choose tasks that provide most value, and put in focused effort to achieve results.
Company-branded mugs, t-shirts, mouse mats, or wall art aren’t going to contribute much to the impact of your work. If you’re not motivated to do your best work unless you’re wearing a t-shirt with the company logo, then your job is simply not exciting enough.
At TalkJS, we know that if your work improves the lives of our customers and partners, you’re more likely to feel engaged and get recognized for what you do. Founders can make all the difference by focusing their energies on addressing that, not on sending you t-shirts.
That’s not to say that we’ll never send anyone a TalkJS t-shirt, but it’s pretty low on the priority list.
Worker autonomy and the ability to do work with impact have a range of positive benefits, and as such are key contributors to a positive work culture. But if your workplace currently doesn’t have much room for either autonomy or impact, what can you do to change that?
How to build a positive work culture
Here are three steps that you can take to build a positive organizational culture, which have worked well for us at TalkJS.
Cut out redundant ‘stuff’
One of the most important things you can do to make space for autonomy is to cut out redundant processes, check-ins, and ‘stuff’.
Most companies, as they grow, begin to accumulate more ‘stuff’. More sponsored gym memberships, more organic juices, more management, and more formal processes. Initially, this may seem nice, but an abundance of principles and procedures can be stifling. It doesn’t have to be that way.
TalkJS, like most companies, started out with pretty little stuff. But so far, it’s only gotten less, not more. For example, the dev team started out doing Scrum. But a sprint cadence pushes you to take a single hard ‘release or not?’ decision every two weeks. Why not just ship a feature when it’s done? It makes no sense.
Kanban might seem more appealing, because it does away with hard cut-offs, and just has a neat overview of tasks in to-do, doing, and done states. But if your Kanban board goes outdated, does it stop you from shipping? No? Then you can cut out Kanban too. More likely than not, daily standups are likely to interrupt half your team’s flow. So why not ditch them? Do you have any compulsory company-wide Zoom calls? Be realistic, do you really need them? You can cut those too.
“daily standups are likely to interrupt half your team’s flow. So why not ditch them?”
At TalkJS, we kept cutting things out. By now, TalkJS is a company with no deadlines, no obligatory meetings, no fixed working hours, and no bosses giving you tasks.
Build a self-organizing team
Cutting out processes and stuff on its own won’t automatically bring success though. You also need to get people with the right mindset on board.
TalkJS consists of people who move the fastest when they’re not held back by process. People who don’t need to be told what’s the most important thing to do right now (and who know to ask if they’re not sure). People who prefer to dive deep and emerge victorious. People who know how little sense it makes to try to split a performance problem into estimated ‘story point’ tasks on sticky notes. People who know how to scope work down into small chunks, so we ship fast increments whenever we can.
Sure, at sixteen people TalkJS is still a small company. So it’s not too challenging to streamline business processes. But nothing prevents larger companies from forming radically collaborative, self-managing teams.
Fewer perks, more worker control
There’s another, more surprising, side to respecting workers’ autonomy and self-determination. And it’s led TalkJS to cut out all the standard perks, too. Here’s why.
You might initially be thrilled if your company has a free book budget, an education budget, and a computer budget. Unlimited books! A free computer! What’s not to like? But think about it: Would you be willing to trade salary for all of those fancy perks? Unlikely. All those fancy perks could’ve been money that you could’ve freely spent on anything, instead of on a predetermined list of things.
It’s none of your workplace’s business to tell a worker how to spend their life. If you want to spend all your money on booze and World of Warcraft swords, who is your boss to tell you to go and do deadlifts? Does a healthy workforce make for a productive workforce? Who knows. But it’s patronizing to impose that on workers.
“All those fancy perks could’ve been money that you could’ve freely spent on anything”
Like the processes, TalkJS has taken this one pretty far. For example, at TalkJS you won’t get a company computer. After all, you have a computer already, don’t you? And you have it set up exactly the way you like. Why not use that one for work? The company paying for your desk feels nice, but if you’re paid well, then that gives you all the freedom to make your own choices about all this.
Key takeaway: Make space for real work
Minimalism towards perks and processes opens up a lot of mental space for doing real work.
TalkJS has been pretty minimalist right from the start. As a fully remote company, it’s really just a bunch of people behind screens in Europe and Africa, building the best white-label chat API for websites and apps. (Check out a demo!)
Staying minimalist allows you to make sure that everything you do helps your customers, as fast as possible. The best code is a feature that customers are actually waiting for, built in a way that makes sense. The best marketing is content that helps people figure out what’s best for them.
If your work’s fun, if the outcomes matter to you, and if you’re well-rewarded, then you won’t need or even want all that ‘stuff stuff’. Cutting perks and processes helps you create mental space for doing better, more fulfilling work instead.
Do you want to come and work at TalkJS? Check out the job vacancies.
