As my company evolved from a scrappy start-up, into a sustainable small business, I found that I needed to hire talented people in order to take care of our growing customer base. This is a wonderful problem to have, but the only reality I knew was as a partner in a company with three co-founders; we didn’t launch with non-equity employees.

Hiring our first employee.

Our first employee, a commission-only sales rep, really was a guinea pig. We had zero idea of the necessary steps for onboarding a new employee; understanding the process of enrolling them in a workplace pension program, filing the proper tax paperwork, setting up withholdings and managing payroll were very foreign concepts. We did it by the seat of our pants (which was also the way we launched our business).

But, moving beyond paperwork and legal requirements, how would we instill our ethos, our company culture, into this newcomer? We certainly didn’t want to appear dictatorial, but we had a set of values that helped us to grow and become the type of company that can support employees.

Learning to encourage company culture, rather than dictate It.

Fast-forward to today, we have 24 employees. We’re not the largest firm in the world, but we’ve learned at least 24 important lessons about helping a company keep its soul while expanding. And, it turns out, by sharing our culture and inviting employees to embrace it, we’ve been able to improve employee engagement.

A company’s culture is something that evolves overtime. Every new member of the team brings with them a set of unique experiences. These experience mesh with the existing culture and hopefully add a little flavor to the mix.

But what is company culture? According to The Harvard Business Review:

“Culture guides discretionary behavior and it picks up where the employee handbook leaves off. Culture tells us how to respond to an unprecedented service request. It tells us whether to risk telling our bosses about our new ideas, and whether to surface or hide problems. Employees make hundreds of decisions on their own every day, and culture is our guide. Culture tells us what to do when the CEO isn’t in the room, which is of course most of the time.”

Empowering employees with a genuinely respected voice.

When we just had three co-founders handling the onslaught of product development, customer acquisition and customer service, we could handle things on the fly. As issues arose, we had a clear understanding of our mission and the end-result we wanted to deliver to the customer.

With employees comes bureaucracy. It turns out, not all bureaucracy is a bad thing. We set system in place that are consistently reevaluated for efficiency. Our managers understand that our core values revolve around taking care of the customer and humbly resolving issues that arise.

But, most importantly, we set a system in place for employees to voice concerns anonymously. Our digital “suggestion box” allows employees to anonymously submit a “request for consideration”. And we handle our decision making process with as much transparency as possible; encouraging feedback during every phase of the process.

For example, we recently decided to change the division of labor between our customer service reps. We transitioned form operating as departments (customer service, accounts and tech support), to a more uniform team of “customer satisfaction experts”. These individuals are well-versed in every aspect of our business. We pay them more, because of the extra training involved, but customer concerns are resolved in less than half the time required for departments to transfer and resolve issues. Individual agent call handle times are up, but total resolution time per customer is dramatically down.

We couldn’t have made these decisions without input from our customer service team and their supervisors. They noticed bottlenecks in our customer handling process, and we implemented changes based directly on their valuable feedback.

Working with a growing company is challenging, but embrace the challenge and invite employees to contribute to the culture of the company. Leadership should set broad-stroke expectations that are clearly defined and enforced; but give your team permission to paint in between the lines. Your employees will feel more engaged, and customers will have a better brand experience.