How to build and scale company culture from day one

Executive overview

Growing a company from 30 to 800 people in a few years exposes every weakness in your culture infrastructure. Without deliberate, memorable core values embedded from the start, employees define the culture for you — and not in the way you want.

The fix is designing values like product: user-friendly, max 10 words total, four to five values, with visual symbols and descriptors. Then make them daily language through peer recognition, onboarding immersion, and quarterly measurement — not posters in the break room.

Core values only work if they become the language of the organisation, not a management artefact.

Designing core values that stick

• Max 10 words across all values combined; max four to five values (Miller's Law: humans remember ~7 items)
• Generic words like "integrity" or "teamwork" are baseline requirements, not differentiators — avoid them
• Each value needs a descriptor: three to five specific sentences clarifying meaning, stable enough to be relevant in 100 years
• Pair each value with a distinct visual symbol to aid recall
• Test: can any decision in the organisation be resolved by referencing the values?

Rolling out values so they come to life

• Onboarding is the highest-leverage moment: dedicate a full day before employees start their actual job
• Run three separate workshops on day one: strengths (Gallup), core values, and core purpose/BHAG
• Fly remote employees in; treat the investment as foundational, not optional
• Ask interview candidates for examples of living these values outside the company

Making values the daily vernacular

• Use peer recognition software (e.g. You Earned It) to let employees give each other points tied to a named core value
• Publish peer recognition company-wide twice a month; at scale, 10,000+ instances of gratitude per month become normal
• Reference values when things go well and when things go wrong — consistency makes them language, not policy
• When values become language, they hold people accountable without managers having to

Measuring culture health

• Run anonymous quarterly surveys: eNPS, Gallup Q12 engagement, and per-value ratings from employees
• Benchmark quarter over quarter by department, not just company-wide — pinpoint declining areas early
• Use internal leadership forums monthly to score how "alive" each value is on a 1–5 scale
• Track engagement scores concretely: current baseline 7.8/10 engaged, 4/10 highly engaged; target 9/10 and 5/10

When to bring in a coach

• Chaos starts around 60–75 employees as founders become layers removed from the work
• Self-implementation is possible with prior experience, but rate of growth matters: adding 120 employees in a month requires external support
• A coach's value at scale is less about implementation and more about third-party strategic perspective
• Check-in at three and six months if self-implementing: score against the habits checklist and compare to baseline

Common mistakes to avoid

• Writing values that sound cliche or generic — employees ignore them and define culture themselves
• Hanging values on walls without rituals that make them memorable
• Skipping value-based questions in interviews (easy to overlook even when you know better)
• Building too many values or using too many words — more than 10 words and recall collapses