Company culture

This week we had the pleasure of having Gunnar Holmsteinn as our quest lecturer. Gunnar has much experience with starting companies and currently he is working as a CEO on the startup QuizUp. The topic for the lecture was company culture but we also had a Q&A session with Gunnar about general aspects of being a startup CEO.

Company culture can be all these things and more. Source

When Gunnar started working at QuizUp as the CEO he wanted to know the opinions the employees had about the company. He wanted to get to know the company and the possible strengths and weaknesses it had. He came to realize that the company was seen by the employees as a fun and exciting place to work with many talented employees. However, it was also clear that there were some issues with the culture. Some things which were causing frustration were lack of clear orders and poor information flow. Employees responsibilities weren't clear either. A lot of important things were not discussed. For example retention of customers, long term planning, and the core values and beliefs of the company were not articulated. This all deals with the culture of the company which is something that has a major effect on the performance of a company. At this time the culture of QuizUp was not clear. There was no clear vision and so something needed to be done.

As a response the company took two days off the establish clear image, values and vision for the company. The stated their values as follows:

• Help others learn: help others grow so the talent in the company increases
• Fun with every action: not too serious when experimenting with new things
• Drive the vision: every action should in alignment with the vision (connecting people through shared interests)        
• Wait for nothing: get things done!

QuizUp culture is nowadays also based on the model “the 5 dysfunctions of a team". A representation of this model can be seen in the figure below.  Starting from the bottom of the figure, to deal with lack of trust Gunnar established FridayFeelings where they discuss what's going on in both their work and personl life. Fear of conflict on the other hand is now handled at QuizUp by meetings were they discuss what went well and what did not go so well and what are the things that need to be fixed. Building commitment is handled when you have the right amount of conflict and trust. QuizUp uses small teams so that no one can hide and everybody has their voice heard. To deal with accountability they keep all meeting notes public. To the results they pay attention by having town hall meetings once a month and also by having one on one conversations about the results of each individual.

The 5 dysfunctions of a team. Source

That's all for now. There was also a great quote said in the class about startups in general. I'll end this blog post with it (and with style). See you in the next post!

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