Forget pricey eateries: Hit the roof instead

Building team culture needn’t be expensive

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When I started my first tech company in Vancouver, one of the only things it had going for it was culture. It was in my loft apartment. There wasn’t a fancy coffee machine or a foosball table or even a real desk to work at.

But there was a rooftop patio — a little space where my tiny team and I could retreat to after work, to have a drink and admire the view.

Building culture doesn’t always have to entail a huge cost or commitment. In fact, some of the most powerful culture-building tools are essentially DIY hacks. Hootsuite now has about 1,000 employees and we help more than 800 of the Fortune 1000 companies manage their social media.

Pretty much everything has changed since those early days, but one constant has been finding creative ways to cultivate a sense of community, without breaking the bank.

With 2017 around the corner, let’s look at some effective tools for building culture, while keeping the budget in check. how important this principle is, when our London office finally graduated to a new space with an expansive rooftop patio.

Suddenly, the staff is hanging out after work and gelling as a team.

Food is a natural bridge builder. But company dinners, especially when you grow to a certain size, can get prohibitively expensive. And when you’re stuck at a table it can be a challenge to mix and mingle, which kind of defeats the purpose. We overcame this with a potluck style strategy: the “guac-off.”

Our first guac-off in the company’s early years featured 11 competitors and three simple rules: No premade guacamole mixes, contestants have to prepare their creations live, and everyone has to have fun. Since then, it’s become an annual tradition.

There’s nothing revolutionary going on here, but it shows that breaking bread together (or tortillas, to be precise) doesn’t have to entail huge expense.

Lots of companies pump out T-shirts, hats and stickers with their name and logo on them. Nine times out of 10, this swag is ugly, poorly made and discarded as soon as it’s handed out. We found that taking an entirely different approach can be an effective differentiator and culture builder.

For starters, we handed the creative process to our own graphic designers.

We emphasized that the goal was to create T-shirts, hoodies, even socks, that people wouldn’t be embarrassed to be seen in.

The result: company clothes people actually want to wear.

This isn’t a costly measure by any means, but putting a little style in your swag reinforces the feeling that there’s something special going on and something worth being part of. up between departments. Before you know it, the sales team and the engineering team, for instance, feel like two different companies.

This lack of co-ordination inevitably hurts the final product and the customer’s experience.

This is a huge problem and there’s really no easy fix. But one hack we’ve discovered — to at least break the ice — is a random coffee program.

Employees sign up and are paired with a peer — blind date-style — from another department.

They set up a time that suits them to meet over a coffee break. It turns out this can be just the nudge needed to open a connection with other teams.

Company parties aren’t just a nice perk, they’re also a way to strengthen bonds between team members. But gatherings for dozens — if not hundreds — of people can easily get cost-prohibitive.

As a result, many companies limit themselves to just one or two bashes a year, despite the clear culture-building benefits.

We found a workaround, really out of sheer necessity: a DIY party concept we called Parliament.

Each month, two departments would join forces to host a fête for the entire company, in the office. We’d give them a few hundred dollars and virtually complete autonomy to design their dream bash.

The result was a number of increasingly creatively themed parties, from a Mexican beach night to a discothemed country fair.

None of these culturebuilding hacks will mean much unless a company already has a foundation in place in the form of a mission, a commitment to employees and a healthy work environment.

But in many respects a company culture is the sum total of little things. It’s whatever inspires employees to come to work, and to give it their all.

It doesn’t have to cost a fortune.