As HR professionals, we’ve all seen the pattern. A startup with a brilliant idea and ample funding takes off, only to stumble a year later. The post-mortem often reveals the problem wasn’t the product or the market, but the culture. Top talent flees a toxic environment, communication breaks down, bad habits become the norm, and innovation withers.

On the other hand, resilient startups navigate challenges and thrive with employees who wouldn’t dream of leaving. Their success is almost always anchored by a strong, intentionally built culture. In response to Glassdoor’s 2019 Mission and Culture survey of more than 5,000 people across the U.S., UK, France, and Germany, 73% of respondents said they “would not apply to a company unless its values align with my own personal values,” while 71% said they would look for a new job if their company’s culture deteriorated. More than 50% of respondents said that culture is more important than salary when it comes to job satisfaction.

When a company is new, HR professionals have the rare opportunity to play an outsized role in helping shape its culture from the ground up. Even if you’re not the first HR hire, your mission is to lay the foundation of a company culture that your employees are proud to be a part of. This isn’t a soft initiative; it’s a core business strategy that your company leaders—and you—own. Your role is to partner with leadership to help define your organization’s core values, design the systems that support them, and scale them as your company grows.

Initially, it’s common for a company’s culture to reflect its founders’ personalities. In your role, you are in a position to help leadership codify their values, make them explicit, and flag anything that may hinder the company’s growth.

In a startup, it can be easy for leadership to confuse culture with the perks they choose to provide, such as ping-pong tables or free snacks. You are in a position to educate leadership about the difference. While perks are temporary and transactional, culture is rooted in your leadership’s core values. Those values should be the guiding principles for leadership’s behavior and decision-making.

If your company is further along and has the budget to hire facilitators, it can be helpful to leverage them to help your leadership identify the core values it wants to embrace. For smaller, more agile companies, it’s not uncommon for HR leaders to take this task on. Guiding the founding team through a values workshop is one of the most influential actions HR leaders can take. These tips can help get you started:

• Listen for stories. Start by facilitating a session in which you invite leadership to share personal moments of professional pride. Your job is to listen for common themes. A story about solving a customer problem in a novel way could point to a value such as “prioritize customer satisfaction.” Tales of radical honesty might suggest a value such as “default to transparency.”
• Challenge the fluff. It’s tempting to choose trendy keywords when articulating company values. Instead, push for authenticity by asking probing questions, such as:

• • Will this still feel true in five years?
  • When did this become important to you?
  • Can you commit to this with 200 employees, not just 20?

This exercise will help ensure you land on values that will last.

• Vet for psychological safety. As you define values, ask the company’s founders whether they foster healthy communication or may pit employees against each other. Weaving psychological safety into the conversation early ensures it will become part of the company’s DNA.
• Distill and refine. Help the group consolidate the themes they identify into 3-5 clear, memorable, and actionable value statements. Steer them away from generic terms such as “integrity” and toward active language.
• Define the behaviors. This is the most critical step. Don’t end the workshop until each value is tied to 2-3 concrete, observable behaviors. For example, what does “bias for action” actually communicate? It might be interpreted as meaning, “We reward calculated risks, even if they fail,” or “You are empowered to make decisions in your role without seeking multiple layers of approval.” These behaviors will become the bedrock of your HR processes.

With your values defined, the next step is to weave them into the daily employee experience through your HR processes.

Hiring

Your hiring process is the initial gateway for building a company culture.

• Champion “culture add,” not “culture fit.” Explain to new hiring managers that evaluating potential new hires by determining whether they are a “cultural fit” with the organization can lead to bias and groupthink. If cultural fit becomes key to hiring decisions, you may end up repeatedly hiring for the same type of person. Instead, build a framework for assessing whether a potential employees could be a good “culture add.” This means designing interview processes that identify candidates who both align with the company’s core values and add to its culture by adding diverse perspectives that the company may not currently have.
• Develop a structured behavioral interview process. Create question banks for interviewers that are tied directly to each core value. For example, if one of your values is “pride of ownership,” say, “Tell me about a time a project that you were working on was at risk of failing. What was your role in getting it back on track?” If a value is “default to transparency,” say, “Describe a time you had to deliver difficult feedback to a colleague. What was the situation, and what was the outcome?”
• Invest in employer branding. Your values should shine through in everything you do. Write robust job descriptions that paint a picture of the culture, encourage new hires to leave employer reviews, and share employee stories on social media.

Communicating

Partner with leadership to establish clear norms that reinforce your values. This includes creating a communications guide (explaining which tool is used for what purpose and audience) and structuring key communications moments, such as all-hands meetings or project demos to be inclusive and consistently highlight cultural tenets.

Evaluating

Performance management is where culture becomes accountable. Integrate values directly into your performance management system. This system must be designed to both address the “brilliant jerk” (the high performer who is culturally toxic) by ensuring how work gets done is valued as much as what gets done. Build recognition and career paths that explicitly reward employees who embody company values. When announcing promotions, coach leaders to explain how the individual being rewarded demonstrated those values.

Onboarding

As a company surpasses 50 or 100 employees, your role will shift from being a hands-on facilitator to building scalable systems. A key way to do this is to own the onboarding process as a strategic tool for cultural immersion.

To do this, design a Day 1/Week 1/Month 1 experience that includes sessions on the company’s origin story, deep dives into its values, and a “culture buddy” program that pairs new hires with tenured employees. Structure early goals around connecting with coworkers and learning communication protocols, not just immediate task work. Ensure multiple touchpoints in the first month to allow new hires to see the company’s values in action.

An Enduring Structure

To prevent culture drift, you must own your company’s feedback strategy. Implement anonymous employee engagement surveys, facilitate town halls, and systematize “stay interviews.” Analyze this data to give leadership a clear, honest assessment of the organization’s cultural health, highlighting any gaps between stated values and the actual employee experience.

In a competitive market, your company’s greatest asset is a high-performing culture. Competitors can copy products and pricing, but they cannot easily replicate a culture built on a foundation of deeply embedded values.

Building this foundation is the strategic mandate of modern HR leaders. It begins with defining authentic values, is solidified by designing systems that make those values real, and is protected by owning the feedback loops that ensure the culture remains strong as you scale up.

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