With great power comes great responsibility.
In every version of the Spider-Man story, the core arc remains the same. Peter Parker is a teen devoted to his family and passionate about science, who gets superpowers through a radioactive spider-bite. As he grows in strength, he loses sight of what’s important, and it gets his uncle Ben killed — then, remembering the iconic line, he renews focus on his values and becomes a hero.
As a person or organization grows bigger and more powerful, they have to keep in mind what’s important to them or they’ll lose it. This lesson is especially significant for startups as they scale — they have to remember to hold on to their culture. After all, the company’s culture — the passion, creativity and innovation — is probably what caused most of the ground-floor employees to sign up in the first place.
When a business starts out, the people who sign on want to back the dream that helped it take off. As it grows, its culture should grow with it by listening to employees and focusing on values. Keep working on culture, and a company can secure loyal, passionate team members who are invested in helping the company grow even further. Like Spider-Man, startups are successful when they remember what’s important to their people and work hard to preserve it.
These four tech companies understand the importance of sticking to their company culture as they scale. Leaders from Inspire, Albert, Ritual and HopSkipDrive opened up to Built In about the power of their company culture and the steps they have taken to honor their responsibility to keep it thriving.
Tell us about the growth Inspire has been experiencing recently.
Inspire is going through an exciting period of rapid internal growth. While we’re hiring across all teams. As a clean energy technology company, we are particularly focused on building our acquisition, analytics and technology teams. The work these teams are taking on in 2022 is instrumental to our business — it will play a key role in helping Inspire expand our customer base and accelerate our mission of a net-zero carbon future. We also have big plans to nurture our digital channels with the aim of making clean energy more accessible to homes across the country.
How would you describe your company culture? What’s changed since the early days and what’s stayed the same?
Our mission has always been a driving force in our company culture — it attracts passionate individuals who are committed to contributing their unique talents towards fighting climate change. Despite the critical nature of a mission like ours, Inspire employees have always found ways to bring levity into the workplace and to make each day both purposeful and enjoyable. Employees at Inspire don’t take themselves too seriously either and aren’t afraid to have fun. We have several unique and long-standing traditions like our company-wide Halloween costume competition, ultra-competitive team bake-offs and our annual “Windy’s” awards night. These traditions have continued to deepen our community and carry us through the challenges of working in a remote world.
In addition, we invested in building a community team early in our company’s history which has made our unique culture deeply connected to Inspire’s DNA. This team focuses on creating intentional programming that leads to strong relationships in the workplace and will continue to build the community-focused moments that make Inspire so special.
Inspire employees have always found ways to make each day both purposeful and enjoyable.”
What are you doing to keep company culture strong through this period of rapid growth?
At Inspire, we rely on the feedback of our people to create a workplace where employees feel safe, included and empowered to thrive in their roles. Our people team sends out quarterly pulse surveys to gain insights from our employee base. They’re an avenue for our community to share honest feedback about what we’re doing right, what we can improve upon and how we can evolve in this period of growth.
Letting our community lead us in how we shape our future is nothing new for Inspire. Based on feedback from our people, we have invested in creating three employee resource groups (ERGs), which have supported an 11 percent increase in our engagement survey’s inclusion scores. Earlier this year, the people team also established one or two wellness days off per month, where our office closes and teams are encouraged to take the day to focus on their wellbeing. In addition, we created a recurring “Mission Moment” segment in our biweekly all-hands meetings to give employees a new way of connecting to our mission. Lastly, we launched educational segments called “Coach It Corners” to bring more awareness and understanding of our industry company-wide.
Tell us about the growth Albert has been experiencing recently.
Commensurate with our product-market fit, the team at Albert has grown significantly in 2021. We’ve added 180 new team members in just 12 months. We’ve also reopened our offices in west LA and expanded our footprint by adding offices in NYC, Ecuador and the Philippines while also adding a bevy of remote teammates across the U.S.
How would you describe your company culture?
We’re focused on diminishing an artificial wealth gap that's created by an inequitable access to sound financial guidance and underserved by traditional institutions. The people that work at Albert are deeply motivated by that mission and passionate about changing the paradigm. The work is fast-paced — we are consistently solving new and difficult challenges, which creates a rewarding environment.
Many characteristics have stayed with us from our beginnings in 2015. We’re now tackling a ton of challenges that are common to hyper-growth tech startups — whether that’s taking an objective view on how we store an increasing amount of data or engaging a growing distributed and hybrid global team. Our challenges are exciting, fresh and focused on scaling an ever evolving business while growing a team and a winning, world-class culture that can tackle them.
The people that work at Albert are deeply motivated by our mission and passionate about changing the paradigm.”
What are you doing to keep company culture strong through this period of rapid growth?
To ensure engagement, we’ve added perks that take into account a geographically diverse and distributed team. For our remote team members, we send six chef-prepared meals per week through a partnership with Factor — for those who work at one of our offices, we provide catered lunches three days a week to foster cross-functional interactions.
We also host fireside chats with unique guest speakers who speak on a range of thought-provoking topics from leadership to pursuing your passions to diversity and inclusion. Other weekly events include game nights, in-person and virtual meditations, happy hours, contests and much much more. We publish a company newsletter twice a month that celebrates wins and gives unique perspectives from different departments and team members.
Tell us about the growth Ritual has been experiencing recently.
We’ve doubled our team over the past year and expect to grow at 100 percent next year as well. Every department across the organization is growing, but we’ve heavily invested in hiring for engineering, supply chain, brand, R&D and in the business functions that support those teams.
How would you describe your company culture?
Our mission is to become the most trusted brand for everyday health — and that starts by building an internal culture grounded in health, happiness, transparency and trust. These pillars have been core to our company both internally and externally since day one, but have become ever more important as we’ve grown and shifted throughout the past few years.
For example, we previously relied on our HQ in Culver City, CA to get work done and to stay connected as a team. But over the past year, we really listened and heard what our team wanted from the future of their workplace. Based on their feedback about how they wanted to connect and collaborate, we’ve created three role personas that our team members can choose from based on their personal work preferences. Our North Star is listening to our teams and continuing to iterate based on their feedback.
We bring together employees to hear from leadership, discuss priority projects and occasionally bond over the nonconventional agenda items.”
What are you doing to keep company culture strong through this period of rapid growth?
With every new stage as a company, we remain focused on connecting our team and creating a culture that celebrates learning from and with each other. One of the ways this has played out in practice is through our weekly all hands meeting. We bring together all of our employees to hear from leadership, discuss priority projects and business objectives and occasionally bond over the nonconventional agenda items like a surprise magic show. We also offer catered lunch in the office once a week, monthly newbie coffee chats, a Ritual book club and lunch and learns hosted by different departments. We also set aside stipends for every team member to invest in their personal development.
While rapid growth is exciting as a company, we recognize this can cause burnout, which is why we give employees PTO the first Friday of each month, sponsor Talkspace memberships and encourage open and honest communication around the importance of taking time to reset.
This is just the start. We’ll keep listening to our teams and driving forward their suggestions and ideas to create a place they are proud to work at.
Tell us about the growth HopSkipDrive has been experiencing recently.
HopSkipDrive has been growing rapidly. We doubled our staff in 2021 as demand for our school transportation solution skyrocketed and continues to skyrocket.
How would you describe your company culture?
Keeping our culture strong as we scale is incredibly important. Having won many best workplace awards, we know that staying true to our values of empathy, ownership and community empowerment is key to ensuring team members are passionate about our mission and company. Working remotely makes scaling culture a challenge — one that we’re more than up to.
Staying true to our values of empathy, ownership and community empowerment is key to ensuring team members are passionate about our mission and company.”
What are you doing to keep company culture strong through this period of rapid growth?
We host a weekly virtual town hall, where we invite teammates to share their “five minutes of fame” and give presentations about the work they’re doing. Our co-founder and CEO shares our business metrics to promote continuous transparency. We end the meeting with shoutouts and gratitude so that team members can recognize their coworkers publicly.
Every time a new employee joins our team, we ask them to share information about themselves. Managers also send out welcome emails to the entire team with a short bio.
We also make use of apps. Donuts are incredibly important — the Donut app matches random teammates and schedules a 30-minute meeting. This allows employees who may never actually work together to sit and chat for a half hour. These conversations have sparked friendships and new collaborations across the company. Bonusly enables teammates to give each other “skips” to acknowledge each other in another public forum.
We also host virtual happy hours, baby showers, wedding showers, holiday parties, team bonding activities and more. In our recent holiday party, we hosted virtual ice cream tasting, candle making, flower arranging and margarita making activities.
