7 ms·

Executives don’t decide if the company culture is good, employees do

58 points by DrKnow 5y ago

DrKnow 5y ago
"Often, there are two company cultures. There’s the glossy, official, Comms Department-approved culture — and then there’s the real, lived experience of showing up every day and working at a place. If the difference between those two versions is large enough, the result is generally serious, sustained, employee-management resentment."
- signalandnoise 5y ago
  comms is often far detached from the reality, but surely most people learn this in their career.
bradleyjg 5y ago
Companies are a means to an end. That end isn’t making employees lives endlessly blissful. Of course, miserable employees lead to lots of problems but nonetheless it is mistaking the proxy for the outcome to say that employees are the only relevant judges of company culture.
- alex_g 5y ago
  Who else should be judging a company’s culture?
  - jlund-molfese 5y ago
    Customers should definitely be part of it. A company might be a great, egalitarian place to work, but have a predatory business model.
    - birdyrooster 5y ago
      How do customers learn about the corporate culture? Do they have a complete enough picture to focus on their voice? Employees are often customers of their company and have a more wholistic view of the culture.
      - bradleyjg 5y ago
        There’s no vote to determine whether or not a company’s culture is good. We have to look at outcomes and then work backwards. Customers play a key role in those outcomes, and therefore determining whether a culture is good or not, despite not knowing anything about it.
        j4yav 5y ago
        Couldn’t you have a quite terrible culture that delivers results through illegal means or coercion that would pass this test?
        bradleyjg 5y ago
        I personally don’t think such a system would be competitive over the long term. I look at the most totalitarian countries, that use widespread coercion to encourage productivity, and notice that they aren’t wildly successful from an economic output point of view.
      - theevilsharpie 5y ago
        As a customer, I can tell a lot about a company's culture by: - Their sales process. (Is it high pressure? Do they know what they're selling? How do they handle aspects of their product/service that is weak relative to competitors?) - Who is actually targeted by the sales process. (Do they actively try to court technical individual contributors, or do they try to bypass them and pitch directly to leadership?) - Their support process. (Do the support reps know the product? Are escalations handled quickly? Are conversations organic, or is it so scripted that you may as well be talking to a robot?) - General product development. (Are product iterations delivered to market in a timely and consistent manner? Is it a quality product [i.e., does it work as advertised]? Does it seem like there's a consistent vision and design language for the product?) - General employee sentiment? (Do you have a long-term company contact, or does it seem like your contact changes on a monthly basis? What's the general mood of the people you interact with [i.e., one person may just be having a bad day, but a consistent coldness suggests something more systemic]? Are high-level people generally leaving or joining the company?)
  - prepend 5y ago
    Customers, shareholders, competitors. The goal of good culture, I think, is to create great products. If the employees are all ecstatic and the products suck for customers then I won’t buy them. Similarly if capital returns or poor then as a shareholder I won’t invest.
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
      It seems to me like the goal of any particular culture -- by which I mean the effort of trying to create any particular culture -- will necessarily be in the eye of the beholder. Owners will be looking to maximize profit. Employees will be looking to enjoy their jobs. Customers will be looking for good service.
      - bradleyjg 5y ago
        If the customers don’t buy anything eventually the company goes under and there’s no pie for owners, managers, and workers to divide up. Well, at least unless a government endlessly bails it out, but then the government is de facto the customer.
        asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
        Sure, but there are many different configurations that are sustainable and yet maximize different goals subject to the goal of sustainability.
- Grustaf 5y ago
  Who decided what the end is? It would seem that when society accepted the legal construct of the corporation, it was not because the man in the street felt that there had to be a way for capitalists to get even richer. And still to this day, if you ask the man in the street why we have corporations, I don’t think the answer will be that. But you are right, many executives tend to agree with your point of view. That’s probably the single largest problem in society today.
  - kardianos 5y ago
    Literally the owner(s) of the company decide.
  - ramphastidae 5y ago
    The purpose of a business is to make money. Corporations are a type of business with basically the same goal. I think this is pretty well understood by the general public.
    - neolog 5y ago
      > The purpose of a business is to make money. A business does a lot of things. No need to restrict the "purpose" to just one thing.
  - bradleyjg 5y ago
    > That’s probably the single largest problem in society today. What an amazing world where the single largest problem isn’t war, famine, or pestilence. We dun good.
    - neolog 5y ago
      > pestilence. We dun good.
      - bradleyjg 5y ago
        Grustaf thinks the idea that companies exist for the benefit of shareholders is a bigger problem.
swframe2 5y ago
Often, Founders set the direction of the company culture. They define which behaviors are accepted and valued.
- iainctduncan 5y ago
  exactly.
kingsuper20 5y ago
My takeaway is that: a) Charlie Warzel has never run an organization or group of any size. 2) He comes to this tempest-in-a-teapot with a strong POV. Is he right? wrong? neither? You might as well listen to the guy on the next barstool over. That's the nature of the modern op-ed.
- wrs 5y ago
  I have, and he’s certainly right about one thing: you won’t successfully influence company culture by just instructing the employees what culture to have.
  - d0100 5y ago
    But you can influence company culture by removing people that are disrupting your vision for culture
    - zepto 5y ago
      Yes - but not necessarily in the way you want. That can just as easily create a sense of unease and a culture of fear.
- raspasov 5y ago
  Opinion articles are the junk food of the brain.
- otde 5y ago
  Is running an organization the only way to have expertise on subjects like “how decisions made by organizations affect their members?” I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that a person can collect a fair bit of policy-specific knowledge from being directly affected by said policy. This is not a defense of punditry — I feel pretty icky anytime I see a climate denialist like Bret Stephens opining on climate change in The Paper of Record, for example — but I also don’t think we should necessarily conclude that a person’s relationship to power connotes an inherent level of expertise.
raspasov 5y ago
Employees, nor executives decide whether culture is good. Customers do. Business basics such as "The customer is always right" are so banal and correct at the same time. If a company doesn't deliver value to somebody somewhere, all this extra talk does not matter.
- nobodyandproud 5y ago
  Eh. Old Blizzard vs EA. Both are gaming companies. Both serve similar segments. Only the latter was a toxic work culture.
  - raspasov 5y ago
    When a company is so large with so many mostly disconnected products/titles I’m not sure we can even start to talk about “a” homogeneous culture. I’m sure there’s a lot of cultures mixed in there, from at least decent to the most tyrannical and non-productive.
    - nobodyandproud 5y ago
      I’ve never heard good things about EA, at least as a work culture.
- birdyrooster 5y ago
  Customers don’t have insight into the company culture which is why there are whistleblowers. Customers cannot give accurate assessments about corporate culture.
- gls2ro 5y ago
  While I agree that in general a company should focus on customer, I strongly disagree with the phrase "the customer is always right". The customer should be listen emphatically, while trying to identify their needs and see if your product fits or not, should have maybe a voice in saying what kind a direction a product should go, should have access to information regarding their own data and how we handle it, but I would not put such responsibility of figuring the "right" to the customer. The customer is sometimes wrong. The customer is sometimes influenced by bad press, publicity or lack of knowledge, or even lack of interest to put the effort to understand or articulate their own needs. Sometimes the customer asks for a feature that they will not use. So we should see the customer emotions, expressions, complaints, praises as an effect which needs to be acknowledged and listen to and try to understand the cause. Here is a simple example: televisions which are promoting useless debates, false claims or subjects which are blown out of proportion, you know what they say: It is what the public wants.
zozbot234 5y ago
Why should we give any credit to a "company culture" where employees freely shared lists of customers' PII in order to ridicule them, while proclaiming their supposed commitment to privacy? If that's the outcome of "employees deciding if the company culture is good", I'd much rather trust the CEO. Note that I'm not invoking a slippery-slope argument here - we know that privacy was being violated here, we're not merely predicting that this could happen in the future.
- joshuamorton 5y ago
  I'm very confused by this thought process. It wasn't the CEO who initially said this was wrong. It was employees who did, and the CEO initially pushed back and said it was fine. The employees were the ones to change that negative aspect of the culture after the CEO had failed to do so for years. What about that gives you confidence that the CEO values privacy?
  - true_religion 5y ago
    The employees were also the ones to create that negative aspect of culture, and maintain it through out the last decades. It is unclear currently if the employees leaving are the same ones who supported the old culture or those who lobbied for the new, or if both groups are the same. I've seen one report that a person called Basecamp culture akin to 'genocide' when that person had been an active supporter in the 'genocidal' culture themselves. It may have been a genuine change of heart, but their hyperbolic language couldn't have lead to good discussion making nor made it clear what kind of punishment that person should get for their past admitted misdeeds.
    - joshuamorton 5y ago
      > The employees were also the ones to create that negative Yes and? This doesn't explain why you should then trust the CEO, who took longer to come around, more than the employees. Yes they both did a bad thing. One group began addressing it first. Why trust the other group more? > I've seen one report that a person called Basecamp culture akin to 'genocide' when that person had been an active supporter in the 'genocidal' culture themselves. Right so this isn't what was said. They posted a diagram that contained the word genocide as a potential (very) long term outcome of not taking more minor forms of racism seriously. The CEO took this as this person accusing him of genocide, when that isn't what happened.
egberts1 5y ago
LOL! Employers pay for the workplace (I tried to type in “wokeplace”, but autocorrect nailed me.)
iainctduncan 5y ago
So has anyone asked DHH and Jason whether the result was the catastrophic disaster portrayed here? My job consists of talking to people who own, buy, and sell companies, and in my experience on 50+ transactions, there are many, many cases where "non-regrettable attrition" (as they call it) is exactly what they want. In a well run company (technically I mean), people should not be all that hard to swap out. Personally, and guessing, I doubt they wanted it to quite this high, just based on the size of the payout. But I'd bet dollars to donuts they were hoping for 20-25% to take the money and leave, or they would not have made it so attractive.
- vntok 5y ago
  Correct. This was amazingly handled, in my opinion. No one loses face in this story, yet the company has successfully managed to eject -in a very short time and a controlled way- the people it considers the worst. And the company has advertised for free, thanks to mass media, that it will readily pay top dollar for people who seek to spend their workhours... you know, actually working.
  - iainctduncan 5y ago
    Reflecting on this, I realized when I was CTO at a company that needed a culture reset when I arrived (not of happiness, but of accountability for software that actually worked), I had 20% non-regrettable attrition on the eng. team, so not too far off 1/3 really. 3 months later quality was better and the rest of the team were happier too, because putting out bug fires in production every day is very stressful. Sure people are your company, but that means people are your company problems too....
iainctduncan 5y ago
I would further argue that executives are exactly who determine company culture. Anyone with experience in management knows this: culture starts at the top. The thing is, they determine it by what they do not what they say they do. If you have backstabbing mercenary executives - that's your culture. If you have a bootstrapped company where the founders own >50%, they get to determine the culture. Might not be what they want it to be or say it will be, but they certainly determine it with every decision they make. They have decided to reset their culture - it might work out, it might not. But by doing it with a massive voluntary payout with no obligations, they have said huge amounts about their own personal integrity, which will trickle down. I have no doubt they are inundated with high quality applicants right now. No such thing as bad publicity and all that...
- ergocoder 5y ago
  I definitely agree with this. Execs' words carry a lot of weights. What they choose to celebrate vs. what they don't will define the culture. Any sort of leaders know this.
- seriousquestion 5y ago
  Yes, it was Jason and DHH who selected for the loud, intolerant, "politics is everything" Twitter personalities in the first place. Now they intentionally weeded them out. It could hardly be more clear that executives decide Basecamp's culture.
  - iainctduncan 5y ago
    Agreed, which is why I think the court is still out whether it will work. Personally, I'd be more likely to work for them now. But I can certainly see why some people are shocked by the about face.
karaterobot 5y ago
In my experience, executives are usually so separate from the rest of the company (insulated by multiple layers of management) that to hear them talk about the company culture feels a lot like hearing Queen Elizabeth talk about the culture of Britain: how would she know? Executives are so zoomed out, and culture is so ground-level, that I don't think people in those high level roles really even know what the culture of their companies are most of the time. I agree with this blog article insofar as you cannot define what a culture will be, the way you define OKRs or go to market strategies. A couple anecdotes: At a former company, roughly the size of Basecamp, a VP of business development said this to me, essentially word for word: "The culture of ${companyName} is getting to $30 million ARR within the next 6 months." This was in the context of me telling him that developers were not happy with the direction of the company culture. His framing told me that he was talking about something definitionally different than I was when I talked about culture. Incidentally, that company imploded, though it does continue to limp on. At another company, the CEO repeated at every all-hands meeting that our company had a "culture of performance". I always wondered how the hell he would know that, since the only time he interacted with anyone at the company outside the VP level was when lecturing at the all-hands meetings. He was no doubt qualified to discuss the culture of vice presidents and the c-suite, but how could he possibly describe what the other 99% of the company was like? My point is that executives think they can define what a culture is, but they can't. Nobody can. You can only describe what a culture turns out to be. You can try to change it, but it's not ever going to be entirely in your control, ex officio, like it's a dress code or something.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ewag 5y ago
I worked at a company that started this yearly employee survey to measure things like engagement. We knew how to game the survey right away, making sure the first survey had low scores so there would be an MBO to improve the scores, and budget for things like go-karts, etc. Sure enough, the MBO came and the next year we improved the scores. We knocked that MBO out of the park 4 out of 5 years. The outlier was the year where we had two extra rounds of layoffs, so we got a pass for that one.
Graffur 5y ago
A company's job is to extract value from employees to give to shareholders. An employees job is to extract value from a company to give to their own life/family.
akomtu 5y ago
Execs decide what viewpoints to punish and what viewpoints to promote and this decides the culture.
jmull 5y ago
That 1/3 of employees opted to leave the company is eye-popping, but any analysis that ignores just how generous the buyout was (like this article does) are probably going to come to some wrong conclusions. You don’t have to be disgruntled at all to take a 6 mo or 3 mo salary buyout. (I read 6 mo for people at the company over three years, 3 mo otherwise.) Anything short of highly motivated to stay would have to think seriously about taking that.
egberts1 5y ago
Employees have a fiduciary duty to their employers. As such, employers define their own culture. https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=724a91e1-94f1-4514-9e30-3749303c7c26 https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=724a91e1-94f1...

58 points by DrKnow 5y ago

"Often, there are two company cultures. There’s the glossy, official, Comms Department-approved culture — and then there’s the real, lived experience of showing up every day and working at a place. If the difference between those two versions is large enough, the result is generally serious, sustained, employee-management resentment."

signalandnoise 5y ago
comms is often far detached from the reality, but surely most people learn this in their career.

bradleyjg 5y ago

Companies are a means to an end. That end isn’t making employees lives endlessly blissful. Of course, miserable employees lead to lots of problems but nonetheless it is mistaking the proxy for the outcome to say that employees are the only relevant judges of company culture.

alex_g 5y ago
Who else should be judging a company’s culture?
- jlund-molfese 5y ago
  Customers should definitely be part of it. A company might be a great, egalitarian place to work, but have a predatory business model.
  - birdyrooster 5y ago
    How do customers learn about the corporate culture? Do they have a complete enough picture to focus on their voice? Employees are often customers of their company and have a more wholistic view of the culture.
    - bradleyjg 5y ago
      There’s no vote to determine whether or not a company’s culture is good. We have to look at outcomes and then work backwards. Customers play a key role in those outcomes, and therefore determining whether a culture is good or not, despite not knowing anything about it.
      - j4yav 5y ago
        Couldn’t you have a quite terrible culture that delivers results through illegal means or coercion that would pass this test?
        bradleyjg 5y ago
        I personally don’t think such a system would be competitive over the long term. I look at the most totalitarian countries, that use widespread coercion to encourage productivity, and notice that they aren’t wildly successful from an economic output point of view.
    - theevilsharpie 5y ago
      As a customer, I can tell a lot about a company's culture by: - Their sales process. (Is it high pressure? Do they know what they're selling? How do they handle aspects of their product/service that is weak relative to competitors?) - Who is actually targeted by the sales process. (Do they actively try to court technical individual contributors, or do they try to bypass them and pitch directly to leadership?) - Their support process. (Do the support reps know the product? Are escalations handled quickly? Are conversations organic, or is it so scripted that you may as well be talking to a robot?) - General product development. (Are product iterations delivered to market in a timely and consistent manner? Is it a quality product [i.e., does it work as advertised]? Does it seem like there's a consistent vision and design language for the product?) - General employee sentiment? (Do you have a long-term company contact, or does it seem like your contact changes on a monthly basis? What's the general mood of the people you interact with [i.e., one person may just be having a bad day, but a consistent coldness suggests something more systemic]? Are high-level people generally leaving or joining the company?)
- prepend 5y ago
  Customers, shareholders, competitors. The goal of good culture, I think, is to create great products. If the employees are all ecstatic and the products suck for customers then I won’t buy them. Similarly if capital returns or poor then as a shareholder I won’t invest.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
    It seems to me like the goal of any particular culture -- by which I mean the effort of trying to create any particular culture -- will necessarily be in the eye of the beholder. Owners will be looking to maximize profit. Employees will be looking to enjoy their jobs. Customers will be looking for good service.
    - bradleyjg 5y ago
      If the customers don’t buy anything eventually the company goes under and there’s no pie for owners, managers, and workers to divide up. Well, at least unless a government endlessly bails it out, but then the government is de facto the customer.
      - asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
        Sure, but there are many different configurations that are sustainable and yet maximize different goals subject to the goal of sustainability.
Grustaf 5y ago
Who decided what the end is? It would seem that when society accepted the legal construct of the corporation, it was not because the man in the street felt that there had to be a way for capitalists to get even richer. And still to this day, if you ask the man in the street why we have corporations, I don’t think the answer will be that. But you are right, many executives tend to agree with your point of view. That’s probably the single largest problem in society today.
- kardianos 5y ago
  Literally the owner(s) of the company decide.
- ramphastidae 5y ago
  The purpose of a business is to make money. Corporations are a type of business with basically the same goal. I think this is pretty well understood by the general public.
  - neolog 5y ago
    > The purpose of a business is to make money. A business does a lot of things. No need to restrict the "purpose" to just one thing.
- bradleyjg 5y ago
  > That’s probably the single largest problem in society today. What an amazing world where the single largest problem isn’t war, famine, or pestilence. We dun good.
  - neolog 5y ago
    > pestilence. We dun good.
    - bradleyjg 5y ago
      Grustaf thinks the idea that companies exist for the benefit of shareholders is a bigger problem.

swframe2 5y ago

Often, Founders set the direction of the company culture. They define which behaviors are accepted and valued.

iainctduncan 5y ago
exactly.

kingsuper20 5y ago

My takeaway is that: a) Charlie Warzel has never run an organization or group of any size. 2) He comes to this tempest-in-a-teapot with a strong POV. Is he right? wrong? neither? You might as well listen to the guy on the next barstool over. That's the nature of the modern op-ed.

wrs 5y ago
I have, and he’s certainly right about one thing: you won’t successfully influence company culture by just instructing the employees what culture to have.
- d0100 5y ago
  But you can influence company culture by removing people that are disrupting your vision for culture
  - zepto 5y ago
    Yes - but not necessarily in the way you want. That can just as easily create a sense of unease and a culture of fear.
raspasov 5y ago
Opinion articles are the junk food of the brain.
otde 5y ago
Is running an organization the only way to have expertise on subjects like “how decisions made by organizations affect their members?” I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that a person can collect a fair bit of policy-specific knowledge from being directly affected by said policy. This is not a defense of punditry — I feel pretty icky anytime I see a climate denialist like Bret Stephens opining on climate change in The Paper of Record, for example — but I also don’t think we should necessarily conclude that a person’s relationship to power connotes an inherent level of expertise.

raspasov 5y ago

Employees, nor executives decide whether culture is good. Customers do. Business basics such as "The customer is always right" are so banal and correct at the same time. If a company doesn't deliver value to somebody somewhere, all this extra talk does not matter.

nobodyandproud 5y ago
Eh. Old Blizzard vs EA. Both are gaming companies. Both serve similar segments. Only the latter was a toxic work culture.
- raspasov 5y ago
  When a company is so large with so many mostly disconnected products/titles I’m not sure we can even start to talk about “a” homogeneous culture. I’m sure there’s a lot of cultures mixed in there, from at least decent to the most tyrannical and non-productive.
  - nobodyandproud 5y ago
    I’ve never heard good things about EA, at least as a work culture.
birdyrooster 5y ago
Customers don’t have insight into the company culture which is why there are whistleblowers. Customers cannot give accurate assessments about corporate culture.
gls2ro 5y ago
While I agree that in general a company should focus on customer, I strongly disagree with the phrase "the customer is always right". The customer should be listen emphatically, while trying to identify their needs and see if your product fits or not, should have maybe a voice in saying what kind a direction a product should go, should have access to information regarding their own data and how we handle it, but I would not put such responsibility of figuring the "right" to the customer. The customer is sometimes wrong. The customer is sometimes influenced by bad press, publicity or lack of knowledge, or even lack of interest to put the effort to understand or articulate their own needs. Sometimes the customer asks for a feature that they will not use. So we should see the customer emotions, expressions, complaints, praises as an effect which needs to be acknowledged and listen to and try to understand the cause. Here is a simple example: televisions which are promoting useless debates, false claims or subjects which are blown out of proportion, you know what they say: It is what the public wants.

zozbot234 5y ago

Why should we give any credit to a "company culture" where employees freely shared lists of customers' PII in order to ridicule them, while proclaiming their supposed commitment to privacy? If that's the outcome of "employees deciding if the company culture is good", I'd much rather trust the CEO. Note that I'm not invoking a slippery-slope argument here - we know that privacy was being violated here, we're not merely predicting that this could happen in the future.

joshuamorton 5y ago
I'm very confused by this thought process. It wasn't the CEO who initially said this was wrong. It was employees who did, and the CEO initially pushed back and said it was fine. The employees were the ones to change that negative aspect of the culture after the CEO had failed to do so for years. What about that gives you confidence that the CEO values privacy?
- true_religion 5y ago
  The employees were also the ones to create that negative aspect of culture, and maintain it through out the last decades. It is unclear currently if the employees leaving are the same ones who supported the old culture or those who lobbied for the new, or if both groups are the same. I've seen one report that a person called Basecamp culture akin to 'genocide' when that person had been an active supporter in the 'genocidal' culture themselves. It may have been a genuine change of heart, but their hyperbolic language couldn't have lead to good discussion making nor made it clear what kind of punishment that person should get for their past admitted misdeeds.
  - joshuamorton 5y ago
    > The employees were also the ones to create that negative Yes and? This doesn't explain why you should then trust the CEO, who took longer to come around, more than the employees. Yes they both did a bad thing. One group began addressing it first. Why trust the other group more? > I've seen one report that a person called Basecamp culture akin to 'genocide' when that person had been an active supporter in the 'genocidal' culture themselves. Right so this isn't what was said. They posted a diagram that contained the word genocide as a potential (very) long term outcome of not taking more minor forms of racism seriously. The CEO took this as this person accusing him of genocide, when that isn't what happened.

egberts1 5y ago

LOL! Employers pay for the workplace (I tried to type in “wokeplace”, but autocorrect nailed me.)

iainctduncan 5y ago

So has anyone asked DHH and Jason whether the result was the catastrophic disaster portrayed here? My job consists of talking to people who own, buy, and sell companies, and in my experience on 50+ transactions, there are many, many cases where "non-regrettable attrition" (as they call it) is exactly what they want. In a well run company (technically I mean), people should not be all that hard to swap out. Personally, and guessing, I doubt they wanted it to quite this high, just based on the size of the payout. But I'd bet dollars to donuts they were hoping for 20-25% to take the money and leave, or they would not have made it so attractive.

vntok 5y ago
Correct. This was amazingly handled, in my opinion. No one loses face in this story, yet the company has successfully managed to eject -in a very short time and a controlled way- the people it considers the worst. And the company has advertised for free, thanks to mass media, that it will readily pay top dollar for people who seek to spend their workhours... you know, actually working.
- iainctduncan 5y ago
  Reflecting on this, I realized when I was CTO at a company that needed a culture reset when I arrived (not of happiness, but of accountability for software that actually worked), I had 20% non-regrettable attrition on the eng. team, so not too far off 1/3 really. 3 months later quality was better and the rest of the team were happier too, because putting out bug fires in production every day is very stressful. Sure people are your company, but that means people are your company problems too....

iainctduncan 5y ago

I would further argue that executives are exactly who determine company culture. Anyone with experience in management knows this: culture starts at the top. The thing is, they determine it by what they do not what they say they do. If you have backstabbing mercenary executives - that's your culture. If you have a bootstrapped company where the founders own >50%, they get to determine the culture. Might not be what they want it to be or say it will be, but they certainly determine it with every decision they make. They have decided to reset their culture - it might work out, it might not. But by doing it with a massive voluntary payout with no obligations, they have said huge amounts about their own personal integrity, which will trickle down. I have no doubt they are inundated with high quality applicants right now. No such thing as bad publicity and all that...

ergocoder 5y ago
I definitely agree with this. Execs' words carry a lot of weights. What they choose to celebrate vs. what they don't will define the culture. Any sort of leaders know this.
seriousquestion 5y ago
Yes, it was Jason and DHH who selected for the loud, intolerant, "politics is everything" Twitter personalities in the first place. Now they intentionally weeded them out. It could hardly be more clear that executives decide Basecamp's culture.
- iainctduncan 5y ago
  Agreed, which is why I think the court is still out whether it will work. Personally, I'd be more likely to work for them now. But I can certainly see why some people are shocked by the about face.

karaterobot 5y ago

In my experience, executives are usually so separate from the rest of the company (insulated by multiple layers of management) that to hear them talk about the company culture feels a lot like hearing Queen Elizabeth talk about the culture of Britain: how would she know? Executives are so zoomed out, and culture is so ground-level, that I don't think people in those high level roles really even know what the culture of their companies are most of the time. I agree with this blog article insofar as you cannot define what a culture will be, the way you define OKRs or go to market strategies. A couple anecdotes: At a former company, roughly the size of Basecamp, a VP of business development said this to me, essentially word for word: "The culture of ${companyName} is getting to $30 million ARR within the next 6 months." This was in the context of me telling him that developers were not happy with the direction of the company culture. His framing told me that he was talking about something definitionally different than I was when I talked about culture. Incidentally, that company imploded, though it does continue to limp on. At another company, the CEO repeated at every all-hands meeting that our company had a "culture of performance". I always wondered how the hell he would know that, since the only time he interacted with anyone at the company outside the VP level was when lecturing at the all-hands meetings. He was no doubt qualified to discuss the culture of vice presidents and the c-suite, but how could he possibly describe what the other 99% of the company was like? My point is that executives think they can define what a culture is, but they can't. Nobody can. You can only describe what a culture turns out to be. You can try to change it, but it's not ever going to be entirely in your control, ex officio, like it's a dress code or something.

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ewag 5y ago

I worked at a company that started this yearly employee survey to measure things like engagement. We knew how to game the survey right away, making sure the first survey had low scores so there would be an MBO to improve the scores, and budget for things like go-karts, etc. Sure enough, the MBO came and the next year we improved the scores. We knocked that MBO out of the park 4 out of 5 years. The outlier was the year where we had two extra rounds of layoffs, so we got a pass for that one.

Graffur 5y ago

A company's job is to extract value from employees to give to shareholders. An employees job is to extract value from a company to give to their own life/family.

akomtu 5y ago

Execs decide what viewpoints to punish and what viewpoints to promote and this decides the culture.

jmull 5y ago

That 1/3 of employees opted to leave the company is eye-popping, but any analysis that ignores just how generous the buyout was (like this article does) are probably going to come to some wrong conclusions. You don’t have to be disgruntled at all to take a 6 mo or 3 mo salary buyout. (I read 6 mo for people at the company over three years, 3 mo otherwise.) Anything short of highly motivated to stay would have to think seriously about taking that.

egberts1 5y ago

Employees have a fiduciary duty to their employers. As such, employers define their own culture. https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=724a91e1-94f1-4514-9e30-3749303c7c26 https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=724a91e1-94f1...