Six years in, people are now holding up Culture Amp as a successful startup. It’s certainly good to see the company at this stage, with funding from venture capitalists in London, Australia and America, and more than 1,000 happy customers. But truth be told, I’m less concerned with the financial side and more interested in what we’ve built along the way. We set out to understand whether we could build a successful culture-first company. That’s the legacy I want to leave.
Our customers use Culture Amp to collect, understand and act on feedback impacting employee engagement, employee effectiveness and employee experience. We’re constantly adding to Culture Amp as the shape of work changes. As an example, we just recently launched a diagnostic to empower teams to optimise their effectiveness as we saw how many organisations, including ours, were being restructured into flatter teams.
In Europe we work with innovative organisations, including Deliveroo, Bupa, Auto Trader, adidas and Airbnb, to drive company culture. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting with human resources leaders all over Europe and I’m always excited to hear how they’re using people analytics.
We set out to understand whether we could build a successful culture-first company. That’s the legacy I want to leave
My co-founders and I want to attract people to work at Culture Amp who really believe in the culture-first idea. Our first hire was our chief scientist Dr Jason McPherson who lectured in psychology, research methods and statistics for many years, as well as working in several successful consulting firms. He has both the context and expertise to help imagine a new way of understanding how employees engage with workplaces.
We now have people with PhDs in data science and organisational psychology on our teams in London, San Francisco, New York and Melbourne. They ensure that Culture Amp is shaped by the latest research in organisational psychology and data science, and guide our customers in collecting, understanding and acting on employee feedback.
Finding organisational psychologists who want to join a culture-first company isn’t much of a challenge. Where it becomes interesting is attracting other employees. For example, our sales people aren’t paid commissions. If you’re not paying commission, you need to have mission-based selling. You have to have a company that people believe in. Our salespeople are some of the most motivated and committed you’ll see anywhere.
Because we have so much data, we’re able to do all sorts of analyses. We appreciate that not all organisations feel like they can prioritise culture and for them we share data about how increased employee engagement impacts metrics which hit the bottom line in a very real way.
Another joy of working at Culture Amp is our community. We call them People Geeks. They’re people who work in human resources and get excited about how data and insights can drive a better world to work in. Our People Geek community now brings together more than 60,000 human resources professionals and academics from all over the world. We hold regular workshops, geek-ups and webinars, and are constantly blown away by what people are achieving in their workplaces. We have a regular newsletter, The People Geekly, and release e-books and other resources on the subjects our customers tell us are top-of-mind for them.
We are hard at work on achieving our goal: a successful culture-first organisation. But one thing we’ve learnt is there’s no one perfect approach to human resources. That’s why we’ve created the Modern HR Playbook, which draws on not only our experience, but the experience of our customers. I’d love to share it with you.
For your free copy of the Modern HR Playbook please visit www.cultureamp.com/londontimes
