Our Paris-based AdTech startup has seen rapid growth in a comparatively short period of time – including expansion plans in London – as we respond to customer demands.
When you’re scaling at this level, the culture your business was founded on becomes even more essential.
It’s an asset, a point of difference, and a foundation for your people, your customers, your purpose. It’s also how you retain the organisational identity that will drive your longer-term success.
A company’s culture is like a constitution. It’s a safeguard. Fundamental issues are always resolved by referring back to our company culture. Our company culture is what we ARE, not what we aspire to be.
Why culture matters
Company culture is so much more than the work environment you create, the hours you set, your work-from-home policy – it’s your mission, values and ultimately, your business’s goals.
In the startup ecosystem, too, it’s often your point of leverage, particularly when you’re starting out.
Ensuring your people are aligned to your culture drives engagement, belonging and productivity is essential for hiring, retaining and developing your talent. Especially as more Gen Z – with their values of purpose, impact and inclusion – come into the workplace.
We made the conscious decision to embed culture into the core of our strategy. It’s our setpoint; we use our culture to define our leadership as well as to understand the behaviours and processes we want to encourage.
It’s about defining who we are so that our people can quickly identify themselves within the culture as we grow. Importantly, it’s also defining what we’re not.
Communicating your culture
We are on a mission to help publishers regain control over their AdTech solutions and strategies. We have unapologetically ambitious goals having, as a founder team, exited our previous business Groupe Cerise successfully in 2017.
This makes for a specific culture defined by a core set of values: we are hungry, obsessed with data, collectively driven, we’re problem solvers and we say what we do. Being on our ‘A’ game is a given. The truth is, this means we are mostly ourselves.
And while our experience shows that the best talent in the market is attracted to the Sparteo culture – and that talent in turn, attracts talent – we have invested heavily in communicating this culture – at every point in the employee lifecycle, at company days and in our internal communications.
Culture is the glue that binds us together, so with every office we open, we ensure our teams understand, connect and engage authentically. Because we’re scaling so fast, we work with employees to ensure they not only understand our culture but how this translates into the behaviours that achieve it.
For example, with our value of aiming for collective goals, our people have an explicit understanding that this means we help our colleagues: instead of working and thinking by ourselves, we lead by example and are open to other ideas instead of letting our ego take over. Nothing is implied and this has created a culture of openness and clarity.
Making your culture more than words
However fast you’re growing, your culture must be more than a tick box exercise. It must go further than some pretty words printed on the glass wall of your boardroom. How do you integrate your culture into everything you do?
As leaders, we wanted to create a culture that’s deeply actionable – individually and collectively, as an organisation. We wanted our culture to be tangible in day-to-day actions, and easily understood by our customers and partners.
Company culture needs to be documented. This is something we’ve learnt from experience – in our previous company, it wasn’t written down.
Yet, the larger a company grows, the less time the founders have to share it with incoming teams. If there’s an issue with an employee, you can refer back to the culture deck, so it doesn’t feel like criticism.
As such, we use our core culture deck to guide decisions at every level, inform interviews when hiring new colleagues and support performance reviews and individual team development. It also saves time during onboarding and provides a framework for recruiting.
Our employees know that there’s an expectation to uphold our values in their own actions too, so that they’re contributing to that collaborative, open and high-performance environment.
We know a strong company culture is what makes scaling your business possible, through an engaged, committed team, minimised turnover and healthy productivity. Investing in this at the start of your business, and growing your team around it, means you can scale faster, further, and more sustainably.