Structure to the Culture at TeliportMe.com
My last post talked about how I was beginning to take hold of some of the issues we were facing as a company w.r.t culture .
Last week I sent out a feedback form to our employees that had questions very similar to one of the culture exercises I had taken in the conference. You can check it out below *(this is a public page so please copy and create another sheet for ur own company use). *The employees had to rate how our company performed in those areas from 1 (bad) to 5 (excellent); this was done anonymously.
what I thought ?
what the company thought?
The good part was that I was not out of touch of what we were good at and what we were horrible at; the bad part was that we had too many key areas in the bad regions of between 3–4 and needed more work on together as a team.
The key areas that really needed work was reinforcing the vision and purpose of the company, this is something I know that I have done a horrible job at. In the next 2–3 weeks we will be discussing who and what TeliportMe is and I will also be publicly talking about our values and vision to set the tone and more details about the history of how this came into being. This background is very important because I strongly believe that values and vision are a function of action rather than hollow words on a document.
With respect to the other areas, we sat down last Friday with a Google document, open for anyone to contribute more information about as to what they felt was lacking in each of those areas, all this was done live and anonymously. This was followed by a long 3 hour session of discussing issues, finding consensus, understanding perspectives and horrible puns courtesy me.
I believe that this exercise really did two things
1)help bring structure and understanding of what was wrong in the company culture and work ethic.
2)provide a open platform for conversation on how we should make this work together.
I think we made great progress in atleast recognizing the problems and brainstorming solutions together as a team. I am looking forward to more cohesiveness and happiness with our work :). This is till a WIP and we have a long way to go .