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So, I have good news! My talk runs kind of short, so you'll be getting to lunch maybe even a little bit ahead of schedule. Let's get started. My name is Pamela Vickers, and we're going to talk about company culture today.
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Company culture is a term that's really thrown around all over the place now. It's become a ubiquitous phrase and can mean anything from being able to work from home to having nerf guns in your office. What was once a description of a company's values and personality is now being treated kind of like a commodity. You know, you get your workstation, your pins at your desk, and you get your company culture, and there you go!
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So, what does it mean when we rave about our company culture? Does it mean that beer Fridays have good attendance? Or does it mean we work hard but play hard, that we have supportive co-workers, and well-defined systems for mitigating squabbles? I searched for the keyword "culture" on job listings on Stack Overflow and GitHub jobs, and it was kind of like searching for the word "job." Almost every listing mentioned their company culture, but very few defined what they meant by it, leaving it as an exercise for the reader to figure out.
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Let’s read some examples. "To succeed, you must be passionate about Acme Co., keep up with our daily release cycles, and maintain our useful, funny, cool culture during times of immense growth. It also doesn’t hurt to impress us with your technical chops." This was the last time they mentioned culture in the listing. Another company’s listing said, "Our unique culture deploys a highly integrated model where traders, quantitative analysts, equity analysts, and technologists work closely together to capitalize on pricing opportunities in options, commodities, and futures markets." I have no idea what that means.
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Please check out our culture and process dev blogs to get a feeling for the Acme Co. experience, but don’t just trust us when we say we have the best culture in town. Drop by on a Friday after work for a craft brew and try to beat our CTO at ping pong. I checked out their blog post where they said, "Wow, the day has flown by! You finished two stories; your pull requests were peer-reviewed and merged. Now it’s time to kick back, pull up a stool next to our keg, and pour yourself a craft brew or grab a seat in front of one of our huge TVs for some intense Call of Duty. Tomorrow, we’ll wrap up the current sprint and hold a science fair to showcase the new hotness we've built. We hope you enjoyed Day Index Zero— it only gets better from here!"
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The phrase "the best culture in town" sounds a lot like, "We’ve brought together a talented team that’s down-to-earth, friendly, and driven to build products that people use and love." They claim to have flexible hours, sponsored company events, and a sweet ping pong table. This reminds me that company culture isn't something you can just get overnight. It usually takes about a week to shift that ping pong table.
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Some of the job listings I saw were just strange. One listed, "We're looking for an experienced and awesome iOS developer, someone who puts ‘WTF’ in apps." Again, I have no idea what that means. Some actually just used the term "awesome" in their company culture section to attract hits, hiding really telling bullet points deeper in the listing without any redeeming qualities. For example, an ability to work extended hours, including some evenings and weekends, and to be on call for emergencies was required.
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Fortunately, some companies seem to grasp the concept of company culture a little better. They state, "What we value: we don’t care about ninjas or rock stars; we look for people who are really smart, really nice, and who want to solve big problems and have the freedom to do so without slogging through layers of bureaucracy. We believe in code quality, testing, peer reviews, and collaboration. We like polyglot programming; we believe in using the best tool for the job. We love open source, open communication, and have created an environment where we treat people like adults. We value building the right team and love that people rarely leave us." That's a good one.
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Here’s another good one: "At Acme Co., we respect and value our employees and promote a fun and supportive culture. We invest in your future with unrivaled professional development and provide challenging, dynamic projects that are collaborative and engaging. All of this happens within a 40-hour work week to keep your work and play balanced. We know that happy developers write the best code, and our employees are the best in the business." That’s another good one!
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Assuming that a great, awesome, or even 'best in town' company culture is one that produces happy developers and employees, let’s investigate what a company’s culture should strive to be. We'll examine along the way what can distract from these long-term goals, all in the name of creating great culture.
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We’ll hear from Ernie Miller tomorrow, but he has given a great talk in the past called 'The Most Important Optimization: Happiness.' In it, he introduces Martin Seligman's model for happiness, PERMA, which breaks down happiness into five elements: Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Achievement.
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Perhaps there are other elements in your life that are preventing you from truly achieving happiness, but is it reasonable to expect your company to at least attempt to check off each of these PERMA elements? I say yes! To call your company culture great, they must!
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So how can company culture satisfy this model? Let’s take a look at each letter. Perhaps the most visible element is often 'P' for Positive Emotion. Emotion is what fuels tweets and blog posts about how much someone loves or hates a company. If a company can generate some of that brand love and loyalty, they can get results right away for what they’ve accomplished.
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But what elicits positive emotion lately? It seems to be free t-shirts, beer Fridays (or even beer always), office scooters, good coffee, dog-friendly offices, nerf guns, and, of course, more than anything else—well, that’s a discussion we can have.
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There are many angles to the positive emotion element. An interesting article, which may be a little controversial, is titled 'Model View Culture' by Melissa Santos and Ralph Colburn. It discusses how perks can divide us. You might be surprised, but let’s just look at those perks very quickly.
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T-shirts, for instance. I’m sure most of the seven women in this room can agree—unisex t-shirts are a total lie. When sizing becomes an issue, people can feel embarrassed and ashamed, and they might never say anything. So the people ordering the t-shirts will have no idea.
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Beer: by promoting company beer events, you might be ignoring someone who’s struggling with alcoholism. And when most of the team-building events are booze-infused, this person might have to choose between being in a bad personal situation and a good professional situation.
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Dog-friendly offices: I love being in an office that allows dogs, but it can be inconsiderate to people with allergies, dog phobias, or those who just don’t like dogs. And then there’s the ping pong—this is just the coolest office. It’s probably a hot new startup.
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While none of these benefits are intentionally malicious or inherently bad, we have to balance our assumption that everyone will appreciate and benefit from these perks in the same way.
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When a company focuses too much on the perks it provides its employees, it might be missing more important, less tangible benefits it should be delivering. I’m not advocating removing these fun perks, but suggesting a shift in focus. I’ve worked at many companies that have these great sort of fringe benefits, and I know how nice it is to have them.
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However, it’s important to ask yourself: if all of the nice coffee, snacks, and food were to disappear, would you still be happy where you are? Removing these perks won’t remove the problems they can mask, but shifting the focus back to the heart of the company— the people— will highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the company’s culture.
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Our book, Minster Fuller, an architect, systems theorist, author, designer, and inventor, said: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." So, what new non-perk space company culture model should we build?
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I believe that positive emotion can directly result from having the other PERMA elements fulfilled, and free well-fitted t-shirts and catered lunches can just be the sweet, sweet icing on the PERMA cake.
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As a developer, the number one element that dictates the quality of my working life is the quality of the project that I'm on. Anyone here who has suffered through a bad project or a bad client probably knows what I mean. If you haven’t, consider yourself very, very lucky!
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If we want to avoid bad projects, we must first identify what makes a good project. Fortunately, three pieces of the PERMA model come together pretty well to describe a great project: engagement, meaning, and achievement.
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Hopefully, your company already knows that engaging work is vital to employee happiness, and hopefully they’re seeking out projects or internal things to work on that are engaging and provide the tools you need. When engaged, time zooms by, and work moves smoothly. However, if your day is spent trying to find a free tool that could be replaced with a better-paid tool, you’re less engaged in the project and more engaged in getting set up.
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Or, if your day is spent in meetings talking about a project or chasing down feedback from a product owner or client, by the time you sit down to do actual work, you can feel mentally done. Obstacles, no matter their form, break concentration and prevent engagement. Removing friction and these procedural obstacles is a big step in ensuring that good work can be done in a good way.
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It’s also easier to stay engaged in your work when it has meaning. Does the application solve an interesting problem, provide a helpful service, improve the quality of life, or track difficult data points? If you’ve ever worked on an application that seemed pointless or like no one is going to use it, conjuring up the required focus can be extremely difficult, if not impossible.
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But if you know your application will provide something good to the world, you can often find motivation from within to power through the tough parts. Once a project is in action, knowing how to create and measure successes along the way is crucial to staying motivated.
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Having a tight feedback loop between the client and developer, or project manager and developer, ensures that issues surface early and can be addressed in a timely way. Setting it up from the start for success helps a developer hit the milestones along the way.
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Working under impossible deadlines can be extremely demotivating, and when you as a developer realize that you just can’t do it within the set window of time, it’s hard to even try. Feeling that success is possible keeps you engaged and working; despair does the opposite and breaks concentration.
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Good communication, available information, adequate tools, and time to complete a task all contribute to engagement. But what happens when one of these pieces breaks down? Bad communication kills engagement, and you’ll just be distracted waiting for answers to questions or feedback.
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Bad or unavailable tools also kill engagement, resulting in you battling your tools all day instead of working on the actual application. Impossible deadlines ruin motivation and engagement and completely prevent achievement.
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A boring domain provides no meaning, prohibiting real engagement. An ambiguous ethical domain creates an uncomfortable meaning you might not even want to start. Possibly the worst feeling is the thought that no one is going to use this—this blocks all three aspects, leading to no meaning or purpose, thus no engagement and ultimately no achievement.
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But, of course, there's no perfect project where everything is sunshine and daisies and cotton candy. When you’re a programmer, you’re solving problems daily, which is inherently hard. Big Nerd Ranch’s founder, Aaron Hillegas, sums it up effectively in his Objective-C programming guide: "The life of a programmer is mostly a never-ending struggle solving problems," and the always changing technical landscape means that programmers are always learning new things.
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This case of learning new things is a euphemism for battling against our own ignorance. If you write code, you will struggle. Most professional developers learn to struggle hour after hour, day after day, without getting too frustrated.
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And that really is the key! You’re going to have difficult days on the best projects, but if companies can strive from the start to provide their developers with good projects and good tools, we can mitigate some of this frustration.
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So what do developers want? What keeps us engaged in striving for achievement? How can we find projects that approach being all sunshine, daisies, and cotton candy? I asked my Twitter friends for three adjectives to describe their favorite types of projects.
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I gathered a few of their responses to show you: inspiring, innovative, practical, finite, community building, beneficial, interesting, challenging, short, epic, important, and successful—also challenging and innovative with a finite nature and a clear relationship between work and reward. A good project has a degree of complexity and autonomy.
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Without any coaching, a trend was apparent. I received other replies that didn’t follow my three-adjective requests, but the same ideas were present. We want to work on challenging, innovative projects that are well scoped and designed to succeed.
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To be engaged and absorbed in your work, the task at hand needs meaning, and it needs to feel achievable. Based on this data, I propose a formula for creating more positive emotion within your company: Engagement + Meaning = Achievement, which generates Positive Emotion.
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In other words, without engagement and meaning, there’s ultimately no achievement, and without achievement, there is much less positive emotion. The positive emotion gained by achievement is something that can't be created by even the best cup of coffee.
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But what happens if a project even after vetting becomes unbearable? Shifting it around to other developers can turn into a game of project hot potato. Sometimes, when doing client work or consulting, a business relationship—like any other relationship—has to end or require an uncomfortable DTR (define the relationship) conversation.
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Sometimes, the best service you can provide to a client or product owner is telling them what they can’t have based on the resources and time available. These are difficult conversations to have, and it might even feel in the short term easier to try to just work long and late hours to achieve the impossible. However, managing expectations and guiding a product owner to something achievable can be the best thing you can do for them.
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And sometimes business relationships just don’t work. This isn’t to say that a business contract can be scrapped or that you should just rage quit your job in the middle of crunch time, but when it comes time to resign a client’s contract or begin a new sprint on an internal project, consider these questions.
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Does the product owner respond to questions or requests in a reasonable timeframe? Does the product owner respect the developing team members? Does the product owner appreciate and value the work done by the developing team? Does the product owner follow the process outlined by the developing team within reason?
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Is the product owner pleasant to work with in general? And do we, as developers, have the resources needed to move the project forward? If and when the developing team is no longer able to move a project forward in a valuable way, perhaps it’s time to re-evaluate and advise a break in development.
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Whether working for a consulting company with clients or a product company with a long-running application, detecting bad project "smells" and knowing when and why to speak up about them is key to continued productivity and happiness.
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Carefully scrutinizing whether to continue or discontinue an existing project is just as important as scrutinizing new project decisions. Being vocal about what makes a good project work can help bring more good work your way, and both developers and product owners benefit from the symbiosis.
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In a product company realm, if you find that no one is receptive to procedural changes or suggestions, perhaps it’s time to find yourself a new client.
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Once you have all of the excellent project pieces in place, the final piece to the PERMA puzzle could be the trickiest one of all: relationships. In our case, I’m going to stick to just platonic relationships among coworkers, but I think there are some universal truths here.
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Fortunately, most of the places I’ve worked have realized that routine check-ins or one-on-ones go a long way in surfacing small issues before they become big issues. By asking, 'How are things going?' or 'Have you had any problems lately?', a team lead or mentor can open a dialogue that might get pushed aside otherwise.
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When we were a much smaller company, we had one-on-one check-ins with our head of operations, and they were called “things that suck.” It was very small at the time. Our head of operations, a guy named Chris, would ask us for anything that had interfered with our happiness or productivity that week. He tried to help figure out the cause and effect and would then email a list to everyone with ideas for improvement.
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A lot of processes were tweaked, and many improvements were made through that short-lived experiment. One week, Chris asked me what was up, and I couldn’t think of anything—it had been a really good week. But I had to tell him something, so I thought and said, "Well, someone adjusted my chair, and it took me a while to get it back the way I like it." He wrote that down, and shortly after, he emailed everyone saying, "If someone has their name on a chair, you can sit in it but don’t adjust it!"
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This removed friction for many people coming into the office. We were remote-friendly, so it was nice to know that you could move seamlessly from one workspace to another without wasting time getting set up. I think the chair edict is still a rule that most people follow.
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Approaching our head of operations and saying, "Hey, someone adjusted my chair, and it took me forever to get it back to the way I like it, and that totally sucked," might not feel very professional because it’s not. However, when someone asks you—who is in a position to help—what can be improved or if there’s anything wrong, it feels okay to talk about these small things. It opens dialogue early so that small issues stay small.
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But, of course, there is a caveat. In order for the head of operations or manager of a team to get real honest feedback, there has to be trust. Otherwise, open dialogue is just frozen shut. You need trust to give feedback, and you need feedback to solve conflicts or issues. Maintaining a short internal feedback cycle is just as valuable as maintaining a short feedback cycle between developers and clients or product owners.
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Trust among coworkers is not a byproduct of managerial training. Choosing the most technically strong developer to lead a team might not be choosing the best team leader. Managers or team leaders need empathy and emotional intelligence for effective open communication. This empathy and emotional intelligence must exist all the way up the chain of command.
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The way a company grows and handles layers of responsibility will shape what type of communication and feedback cycle can exist. The chain of communication is only as strong as its weakest link, and a good idea or important criticism will fall off the radar if that link fails.
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Selecting good, empathetic, thoughtful managers, leaders, and mentors—and giving them the tools and resources they need to succeed—will fortify this chain of communication. While managerial training can and should teach people in leadership how to handle difficult situations and provide awareness to non-obvious concerns, trust itself takes time to build.
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Building this trust requires processes to encourage and speed up the development of trust. At ThoughtWorks, they recognize that some conversations are difficult to have with colleagues. For those instances, they encourage having mentors or coaches present to help guide these conversations.
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This creates a safe environment for all parties so that ideas can be shared openly, and in time, trust is built among everyone involved in these conversations.
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The company Pluralsight maintains culture coaches to help dive into company issues and spotlight any problems. Keith Spark Joy, the CTO, writes on their culture blog—which I highly recommend, that no matter how much we try to take the focus off people, no matter how many of us learn to stop being judgmental, people are still going to hesitate to talk about the tough stuff.
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They, like ThoughtWorks, attempt to open this dialogue by having a culture coach available to help address the tough stuff and by employing the 5Y system. This approach sheds light on hidden issues, and culture coaches can commence making recommendations for solutions.
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If you’re unfamiliar with the 5Y system, it’s an approach to surface cause and effect by keeping asking 'why' until you reach the root cause of a problem. Here’s a quick example: The car won’t start. Why? The battery is dead. Why? The alternator isn’t working. Why? The alternator belt wasn’t replaced. Why? The car isn’t being maintained well.
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Pluralsight’s culture coaches don’t have the authority to take direct action after identifying problems, but they have a direct line to top leadership at Pluralsight. They have a process in place to keep the chain links connected.
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To prevent and mitigate HR headaches and co-worker relationship problems, processes must be clearly defined, established, and followed. To assume that people will behave like adults leaves a company vulnerable, and unnoticed small issues can snowball into big problems.
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These processes are only as good as the people implementing them. To have a culture of open dialogue and feedback, a company requires more than just trust-building exercises or processes over time; it requires hiring trustworthy people.
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Referring back to my earlier question about what three things make a project really work, Patrick Van Stee of AssemblyMade provided me with a second answer: good people, good people, good people!
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If we revisit Acme Co.'s job listing, part of their description addresses this: "What we value: we don’t care about ninjas or rock stars; we look for people who are really smart, really nice, and who want to solve big problems." Hopefully, you recall that the rest of their job listing really nails what a company culture should aim to be. But even if they just specified looking for smart, nice people, they’d be ahead of the game.
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Since I first gave this talk, people have started sending me job listings, whether good or bad. The range I’ve seen is staggering. But the important thing isn’t the words in the job listing or the stated values in an employee handbook; the important thing is recognizing what qualities are actually valued and promoted in our daily work life.
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If we only value business-building qualities, we are ignoring and devaluing the team-building qualities. Kindness, empathy, and compassion should be valued just as much as being a ninja, rock star, or ten-time developer.
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Whether you’re giving fake internet points in your company chat room, sending an email of praise to the whole team, or recognizing an employee of the month, you’re bringing attention to and praising the values you appreciate.
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You’re deliberately shaping the culture of your company! Simply combining good people with fun perks in the same place and assuming that it will yield awesome culture leaves vulnerabilities exposed.
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Good company culture doesn’t just happen; it takes work and refinement just like any business process. In pursuing a well-crafted, deliberate company culture, you might find a better model than the PERMA model to emulate.
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However, having multiple people within your company thinking about and working towards a culture that is conducive to a fulfilling professional life will help you make strides toward that awesome company culture we all hear about.
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So yes, awesome company culture can happen! It takes time, and it might require some unexpected changes, but everyone can benefit from the refinement process, especially when everyone is involved in making it happen.
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So make it happen! Thank you for listening.