Will it be through stock options, catering services, parties, cool office digs, free educational training courses or competitive compensation packages? It’s a predicament that many a CEO has grappled with, because as much as you’d like to offer all these perks (and more), it’s simply not possible or fiscally responsible. So it boils down to a choice that has the potential of defining (or redefining) your company’s culture.

Netflix’s innovative and unconventional comp-based model is a prime example of how investment choices can lead to high employee retention and satisfaction. The on-demand video streaming giant promises its employees top-of-the-market compensation packages, giving them a choice between stock-focused or cash-focused salaries. And, as if that isn’t enticing enough, the company’s vacation policy is that it has no policy or formal tracking system.

The concept, which Netflix laid out in a slideshow presentation that has been viewed more than 14 million times online, was an instant hit with employees, and the market was quick to take notice. “[A] great workplace is stunning colleagues. [A] great workplace is not espresso, lush benefits, sushi lunches, grand parties or nice offices,” Netflix wrote in its presentation. “We do some of these things, but only if they are efficient at attracting and retaining stunning colleagues.”

Luckily, lucrative comp packages aren’t the only way to achieve this goal. I personally have found that money isn’t everything. Of course, salaries must be fair; your employees shouldn’t be underpaid. In essence, salary is the enabler of retention, but it doesn’t stimulate retention. The IT market is competitive. There is always going to be a company, like Netflix, that is going to offer (a lot) more money than you. You need to give your employees reason to work for you. They need to feel like they not only have a purpose, but that they belong. Here’s how you can achieve this:

Focusing on Employee Retention

At my company, we offer a couple of standards, like free food, educational events, gym memberships and easy access to top management. But what we decided to pour our hearts, souls and a big chunk of our profits into is a really cool office space.

People spend the majority of their lives in the office. It would be a shame to spend those hours in a hole. The quality of office space has always been one of our topic investment priorities, and as it turns out is key to our employee retention strategy.

Keep in mind, it’s simply not possible to make everyone happy, especially if you’re running a large, growing company. We have around 150 employees, a significant increase from 2015, when we were a small staff of 50. A decade ago, there were essentially just two of us manning the ship.

As our team began to expand exponentially, my co-founders and I found ourselves moving from a dinky 860 square-foot loft-like office space into a 3,770 square-foot unit in a well-established commercial complex. We expanded it to 9,150 square feet less than a year after moving in.

But last spring, it became clear that we were rapidly outgrowing even that spot. We decided that our next move would be for a long-term commitment, and we wanted space that would not only be big enough to someday accommodate a development team of 500, but one that would also have pizzazz. After nearly a year-long search, we settled on a 59,200 square-foot space in a new office development along a leafy riverbank, and immediately set out designing a headquarters our employees would feel like was their second home.

Creating the perfect work environment is not something to shortchange nor is it something that can be done in a week or even a month. Hand this task off to dedicated professionals. Finding a team of experienced interior designers and architects should be at the top of your to-do list once you settle on a new office location.

We tried to steer clear of trendsetters, and did not want to emulate office digs like that of Google or Facebook. Instead, we opted for something unique — a design and feel that closely relates to our own brand. Our new offices cover three floors, and includes two terraces and a large multipurpose event space, where we hold developer meetups and hackathons. In addition to themed meeting rooms, several kitchens and a bar, gym, pool table and an outdoor jacuzzi, our offices feature sleeping boxes, swings and a birch tree forest.

Having an office that feels like home will not only help increase employee retention, but will also increase overall morale, which should be any company’s key goal. Whether or not a comfortable office space is one of your business’s top priorities, focus on the perks that help employees feel like they matter.

The best leaders of today recognize the importance of excellent customer experience. They do their due diligence when designing great experiences and taking the steps needed for those experiences to happen. At my company, we add meaning to our customer experience by maintaining our Net Promoter Score (NPS), which is an active, fluid way of measuring customer loyalty.

The Dollar Shave Club is a prime example of a company with an above-average NPS score that contributed greatly to its value. With a consistent commitment to enhancing their core customer experience, it recently sold to Unilever for $1 billion. Here are three ways you can add value to your own customer experience and start building an above-average NPS of your own:

Empower Employees Not to Take a Customer’s Emotions Personally

Most businesses will provide tools and education to help employees boost their knowledge and emotional intelligence, but they often leave out a key skillset that sets the stage for the best customer experience: personal control (AKA the control quotient). This is the ability to stay calm when things become challenging — not just once — but when handling every challenge as they come.

The key to increasing your employee’s CQ is creating the right environment. The Effortless Experience, a method for building stronger customer loyalty, defines the three necessities an employee needs to up their CQ. They include: the need to feel trusted to make the right choices, the need to feel connected to the company’s bigger mission, and a strong peer network for support. Businesses that create support and education around these three factors create a positive and supportive environment where customer experience can thrive.

Don’t Aim for Customer Satisfaction. Aim for Customer Loyalty.

If you want an NPS that tells you your customers feel great about the experience they’re having with your business, you have to go beyond simply meeting their needs. After all, customer satisfaction is only one part of the customer experience. Without focusing on how the customer feels throughout their entire experience with your business, customer loyalty is much harder to achieve.

Reduce the amount of effort required on your customer’s end to get the experience they expect. Customer experience requires constant proactive thinking to identify and prevent the next issue before it happens. This can be attained through client feedback, but a business must also continuously discover what its customers’ pain points and goals are, and apply this knowledge. Another way businesses can ensure a proactive experience is by putting together tutorials, guides and other information that answer questions your customer is likely to ask. This way, solutions are easy to find. Again, it’s about constantly getting to know and understand your customer, and nuture that relationship continuously.

Take Care of Your Employees

Happy employees take care of customers. As Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart, once said: “If you want the people in the stores to take care of customers, you have to make sure you’re taking care of the people in the stores.”

If you truly want to serve your customers and offer them the best solutions, you must adopt an employee-centric management strategy. When employees aren’t treated well, they’re too frustrated to focus their time and energy on providing a good customer experience. Richard Branson said it best: “If the person who works at your company is not appreciated, they are not going to do things with a smile.”

Employees also give customers clues into what your company really stands for. If your customers see employees who are mistreated and undervalued, it speaks volumes far beyond what any marketing campaign or product solution could repair.

In order to achieve the highest NPS score, businesses need to prioritize employees first, customers second and shareholders third. When you follow this model, all three stakeholders get exactly what they were looking for out of your brand.

There are different levels of intrapreneurship: Unofficial intrapreneurs are individuals in an organization who take responsibility for driving end-to-end product development — potentially up to and including bringing the product to market. These are essentially the “star product managers” in an organization. In some instances though, these intrapreneurs may spin up independent businesses within the parent organization. These quasi-independent intrapreneurship situations are the ones that have the most potential, but also pose the greatest danger.

Keeping this in mind, here are the five most common issues plaguing intrapreneurship today:

Strategy Conflicts

Intrapreneurs usually start out by identifying a new or previously missed opportunity for the parent organization, and then pull together the resources to capture the opportunity. In these instances, the strategic alignment between the intrapreneur and the organization is obvious. The problem is traditional entrepreneurs at the idea/seed stage rarely (if ever) make it to market with the original product they envisioned.

As an intrapreneur, my team and I developed an interesting piece of advertising technology that modestly surpassed our industry’s benchmarks. We soon realized the modest improvements we could deliver weren’t compelling to our customers, but our ability to gather data across tens of thousands of websites was. Unfortunately, our parent organization was averse to data-centric business models and we weren’t given the freedom to pivot. Intrapreneurs are plagued with an inability to respond to the needs and demands of the market, which takes an already difficult task (finding product-market fit) and makes it almost impossible.

Leadership Conflicts 

One of the few red flags that will always kill an investment deal with a venture capitalist is when a company’s founders claim to be “co-CEOs.” This doesn’t work. In the context of intrapreneurship, there are always multiple CEOs. At a minimum, there are two: the intrapreneur and the parent organization’s CEO. In some instances, there might be someone like a VP of Product, complicating matters even further.

With multiple CEOs, strategy and priorities are bound to shift over time, and team members could get confused and ultimately frustrated with dealing with inconsistent leadership. The parent organization’s CEO of one intrapreneur I have worked with dictated a list of product development priorities to the intrapreneur’s team, while the intrapreneur gave the team another set of priorities. In an environment like this, progress cannot be made.

Hiring Issues 

Top talent can choose between two kinds of companies: They can pick blue chip organizations, which while maybe less interesting can offer larger salaries and clear paths to advancement and stability. On the other hand, they can pick a startup where they will earn less in salary and where advancement options are less obvious, but they’ll have substantial control over company’s direction. Intrapreneurial companies usually end up with the worst of both worlds.

As an intrapreneur trying to hire talent, I was always asked what kind of equity package we could put together for prospective hires. Unfortunately, the answer wasn’t a particularly attractive one. This meant we couldn’t attract the kind of diehard talent startups typically seek. Rather, we attracted people interested in a corporate culture. Without the tools or structure to hire and retain top talent, intrapreneurial endeavors are operating at a disadvantage from the start.

Resource Conflicts

Intrapreneurial companies have complicated capitalization issues. Often, they are funded from corporate cash flows. This can be great when times are good, but it introduces uncertainties entirely outside the intrapreneur’s control. If the parent has a bad quarter, funding may dry up for the intrapreneurial endeavor. Similarly, a slight shift in the parent organization’s priorities may result in engineers or other resources being taken from the intrepreneur and put into other projects. I’ll admit that when I was overseeing intrapreneurial teams, I would occasionally “steal” resources for other projects I was working on. Even with the best of intentions, these kinds of resource shifts happen all the time.

Culture Problems 

If you’re an intrapreneur and you manage to avoid all the above problems, you’re then likely to fall victim to culture issues. Running an intrapreneurial endeavor inside a larger organization successfully requires setting your own culture and following your own strategy. It might mean different face-time expectations, and it almost certainly means a more nimble operation. People in the parent organization who are not part of the intrapreneurial endeavor could potentially develop feelings of resentment.

Being an entrepreneur is extremely difficult, so it’s not surprising many are attracted to the idea of intrapreneurship. It promises the same creative outlet as entrepreneurship with the stability of a traditional career. However, given the additional hurdles faced by intrapreneurs, most entrepreneurs would be better off taking the plunge and launching their business as an independent company.

By 2013, remote work was all the rage. We had several outside contractors and provided a service that could work in a remote environment. At that point, we decided to go cold turkey and start working remotely entirely. I was more productive because I wasn’t interrupted and could focus on things that needed to get done. I figured this could be an advantage for everyone else as well.

But a year later, we lost a few employees and I wasn’t enjoying what I was doing. I don’t necessarily attribute this to working remotely, but I decided to resign as CEO to serve as an advisor so I could focus on my new startup. I was able to start and validate it from home, and began adding remote team members to the fold. We have team members all across North America and one offshore. Throughout this journey, I’ve noticed some drawbacks to operating a business using a remote environment:

A Lack of a “Team” Mentality

The nice thing about working remotely is the focus it provides. However, the sense of teamwork feels diminished, especially in earlier-stage startups where you don’t have five-plus people in every department.

After losing a couple of our key contributors, I decided to shift the organization into a local company that would work from a centralized office. This meant my business partner would need to uproot his family from Florida and move to Phoenix. He agreed with the direction, and this wasn’t much of a hurdle. Another employee moved back to Phoenix to help make it happen as well.

To try and mirror an in-office setup, you can set up regular video hangouts to facilitate collaboration. Just keep in mind it’s impossible to fully replace an office atmosphere.

The Potential for Isolation

When you’re in an office, employees won’t have to work by themselves. When things get stressful, they can talk through the issue easily with co-workers or management. There’s a deeper sense of belonging when you’re in a shared space, all working together towards a common goal.

The challenge in an office setting can be the distractions. We’re taking a page out of Stackoverflow’s office environment to provide developers and marketing folks the privacy they need, with glass walls to help to maintain a sense of openness. Productivity can be a challenge as well: I usually have an open-door policy if people need to talk, but if that door is closed, it means no interruptions. Designating certain hours for those “got a minute?”-type meetings can also be helpful.

The biggest downside to being in an office, in my opinion, is the talent pool, as pulling in local talent in small cities can be tough. Scour LinkedIn for key personnel — don’t just wait for candidates to come to you through job postings.

That said, all your employees don’t necessarily have to be under one roof: Engineering talent, in particular, can be tough to find in the competitive market. We do what we can to get our team, local or abroad, here through relocation options or even H-1B Visas.

Which Is Right for You?

If you are unsure of whether or not to go the office route, try to secure a smaller space with a smaller lease initially, so you aren’t locked into a long-term agreement. Negotiate a full-service lease, where the landlord takes care of HVAC, plumbing, utilities, maintenance, etc. Otherwise, these expenses can add up. If you are willing to sign a three-year lease, you’ll be able to get some customizations to make the office feel like your own space. Take advantage of this tenant improvement allowance.

Having been both fully in-office and fully remote for several years each, I see the pros and cons of both. Ultimately, I feel the in-office solution outweighs remote: The happy hours, backyard barbecues and team events are tough for remote teams to compete with.

That said, we still may experiment with some optional remote days as well, as I do see the advantage of having that freedom (plus, it’s a strong selling point when hiring). You’ll just never be able to convince me that you can build a stronger culture and more enjoyable work environment than one developed under one roof.

Up until that point, my small team was getting by with sticky notes on a whiteboard, a handful of phones and a small website. Our press feature, although exciting, was bringing in traffic that we simply couldn’t handle. We missed out on a lot of business that day because our website crashed, we couldn’t respond to emails fast enough, and we weren’t able to answer every call.

So what did we do next? Planned for scalability. I made it an objective for the next year to focus on building processes, tools and headcount (if necessary) for complete 10x scalability. I worked closely with my chief operating and technology officers to make sure all of our bases were covered — and the lessons that came from that year have been some of the most important since starting Fattmerchant. 

You Can’t Manage What You Can’t Measure

When you’re operating on a small scale, it’s easy to pull numbers when you need them or simply remember important information. You’ll notice where your leads are coming from because there aren’t that many — so you take a personal look at each one.

This should go without saying, but that just isn’t going to work at scale. As your company continues to grow, it is vital that you have tools in place to track everything. The more data you have, the better equipped you are to make changes when necessary, either to fix what’s broken or improve what’s working.

Metrics dashboards have become my best friend, all thanks to my CTO. We’ve built dashboards for all of our departments so we can stay on top of metrics day to day. This has been a game-changer as far as scale is concerned, because now we can look at the numbers and gain a better understanding of where our roadblocks are.

Determine Build Versus Buy

So you find yourself in need of a certain product or tool — a website upgrade, customer management system, new landing pages — but you don’t know where to start. You might immediately look at your in-house developer for your website upgrades, but she already has a full plate with your core product. In these cases, it might be the smarter decision to buy services from an outside source. Other companies have found their niche and have the time, experience and expertise that your team members might not have for certain tasks.

Look at each new process or tool you want to implement and make sure that your internal team’s time is being used in the best way. For example, my company recently reached out for third-party help on some website optimization items, but looked in-house for customer onboarding improvements.

Never Say ‘This is Fine for Now’

Saying that running a business is hectic is a massive understatement. Trust me, I know how difficult it is to look at broken processes, see what it’ll take to fix them, and feel overwhelmed by all of the other things on your plate. But saying “this is fine for now” is the worst thing you can do.

Putting the time, effort and dollars into building scalable processes now will pay off in the long run. In the early days of Fattmerchant, we didn’t know how to keep track of deals. Someone picked up a Post-it, wrote down the contact information, stuck it on a whiteboard, and we all thought “this is fine for now.” We quickly learned it wasn’t and realized the importance of a good CRM system the hard way.

Understand When to Break Your Ceilings

One of my favorite analogies for scale is the ceiling analogy. Basically, every new stage of growth can be viewed as a floor of a building. The most difficult part of scaling is breaking through to the next floor — but once you do, there’s a period of relative calm as you float toward the next ceiling.

Our COO is wonderful at understanding when to break that next ceiling. It’s natural to want to break it as soon as you see it. Growth is exciting! But that isn’t always the best idea. Understanding the right time to make the move can ensure you’re actually ready in every sense — headcount, funding, process and so on.

Give Your Decisions Time

With everything going on as you scale your business, it’s easy to feel impatient. As you continue to build process, make decisions, implement tools, and hire new team members, you will naturally expect instant results. But don’t fret if you don’t. These things take time!

One thing we have all learned is to not overcorrect. Once you make a decision or implement a new process, give it time to do its thing. Just because it’s not immediately showing results, doesn’t mean you need to pivot to a new solution right away. A good way to combat this is to go into each new decision with a set of success and failure definitions. What exactly does success look like for this process? What’s the ramp schedule? Answer these questions and set expectations for each major decision. You’ll be set up for success.

But above all, I encourage you to take risks. You already took the leap and started your own business, so the “playing it safe” mindset has no place in your company. Success comes from your ability to go outside of your comfort zone and do what you need to do to grow and scale the best way you can. Create great processes and hire great people, and you’ll be on the road to success in no time.

Does this sound gut-wrenchingly familiar? There’s a good chance you committed one or more of the five fatal mistakes of negotiating a raise. I’ve been on both sides of the table, as an employee navigating annual reviews and asking for raises, and as an employer and CEO conducting more than 100 annual reviews since 2009.

In order to broach the topic of a raise, you need to first understand what’s at stake. Your employer will give you a raise when you’ve met all of the following conditions:

• You are producing more tangible value in your role than you’ve been compensated for since your last performance review (i.e. You are producing more, high-quality output).
• You are taking on responsibilities and initiatives outside of your core role and are excelling at them without dropping the ball. 
• You have built up enough value in your company that your particular skills and talents are difficult to replace.

Once you’ve understood that any negotiation is based on two parties agreeing upon the perceived value being discussed, you’ll have a much more successful outcome. Steer clear from making any of these disastrous mistakes during a salary negotiation:

You Don’t Know What The Market Pays For Your Position

If you don’t understand the changing value of your role in the market, you won’t be able to anchor your request with facts. Market value is determined by:

• What you could earn for the same role elsewhere
• What your company would pay to replace you 
• What your company would pay to keep you

Compare apples to apples when researching your role. Account for market size, geography, and cost of living standards. For instance, salaries in Toronto, Canada will be very different from those in San Francisco.

You’re Asking For a Raise Prior to Proving Your Capabilities

Employers are wary about paying for success in advance of it being achieved. If in the last year, you have over-performed in your role, but your responsibilities have stayed the same this year, asking for a performance bonus is much more appropriate and likely to get awarded.

To increase overall compensation, you must increase your responsibilities and do more work that creates tangible value for your company. A reasonable boss would be happy to compensate you for it. 

You Think Working Harder Is The Same as Producing More

As coach John Wooden used to say, “Never mistake activity with achievement.” Applying effort, being a team player, and being a social butterfly at work won’t necessarily increase your value. If you find yourself talking about how you deserve a raise because you’re a hard worker, you’re automatically setting yourself up for disappointment.

To increase your salary, simply become an achiever in your role. Think of yourself as a sports player: The more goals you score, the better your contract gets.

You Aren’t Prepared to Show Your Boss How You’ve Provided More Value

Prepare a well-structured document to show your boss how you’ve increased value for the company. Doing this prior to discussing your raise not only increases your confidence when speaking with your boss, but your boss will be pleasantly surprised to see that you’re so well prepared.

You Aren’t Asking The Right Questions

Your boss may have a number of objections to green-lighting your request for a raise. Understand that timing is everything when it comes to salary negotiations. In the event that you face an objection from your boss, ask him or her these questions:

• “Under what circumstances would you be happy to give me the raise I’m asking for?”
• “Which of my statements do you agree with? Which do have concerns about?”
• “What specific things need to happen so that we both agree this raise is merited at our next performance review?”

Remember that “no” doesn’t mean “never.” It means “not right now,” which is precisely why asking better questions will help you navigate and pre-determine the factors involved in scoring your next raise.

That’s right. I’m the person who takes my calendar with me everywhere — although online calendars have made this easier. In fact, I love my calendar so much I even started my own calendar app company. With it, I’ve found my own method of madness when traveling.

Remind Yourself of Important Dates

I’ve gotten into the habit of color-coding or highlighting important dates on my monthly calendar. This could be for deadlines, speeches or the days I’m traveling. Let’s say that I’m delivering a speech on March 10. I’ll color code that date in red. This way I won’t schedule anything else for that day. I also won’t make any plans for the day before or after since I’ll probably be traveling on those days. More importantly, blocking out this time gives me a chance to think, prepare and practice my speech.

Keep Time Open Before and After Your Trip

Regardless if you’re traveling for business or pleasure, you probably have a million things to do before taking off. It could wrapping-up a work project, packing or washing all of your dirty dishes. To make sure that all of these last-minute tasks are done, I take off work the day before. I also take off the day I return. This way I can unpack, decompress and ease my way back into the daily grind. That’s not to say I won’t respond to emails or phone calls. It just means that I leave my schedule as free as possible.

Account for Travel Time

I think sometimes we underestimate how much time it takes to travel. For example, if you’ve been to Denver, then you know it takes at least 30 minutes to go into downtown from the airport. As such, it wouldn’t make sense to plan a meeting at 4 p.m. if your flight arrives at 3:30 p.m.

The same is true when going from your hotel to a meeting or from a conference to a restaurant. Unless you planned in advance, you might have to travel across time. The last thing you want is to show up late to a dinner meeting with a potential client.

That’s why I schedule buffer and travel time in my calendar. If I have an appointment at 6 p.m., I put in my calendar that it’s at 5 p.m. This gives me plenty of time to get to the appointment on time. It also gives me a chance to collect my thoughts and prepare myself.

Prevent Time-Zone Mistakes

I’m sure that I’m not only one who has made a time-zone mistake. There have been a handful of times when I called into a conference call late because of this. While most online calendars and scheduling tools take this into consideration, always make a note in your calendar. Lifehacker published a useful article that explains how you can prevent time-zone mix-ups using Google Calendar or Outlook.

Create Your Travel Itinerary

Google Calendar does a pretty solid job of putting together an itinerary. That’s because I can just view my monthly calendar to see the dates I’m flying, checking-in out of a hotel or speaking. I even create reminders on my phone. But apps like Tripit do all the legwork for me. You just forward your emails and the app automatically generates your master itinerary. This keeps all of my plans in one convenient location. This may not seem like a big deal but having a master itinerary keeps me organized while traveling. It also ensures that I don’t overload my schedule and when to plan buffer/travel time.

Keep Others Updated

As I’ve discussed in the past, sharing your calendar with others is important. That also includes your travel calendar. Sharing your travel calendar lets your clients or colleagues know when you’ll be out of town. If you’re meeting them, then they’ll know when to expect you and when you’ll be free to meet.

If you have family, then they obviously want to be in the loop. It’s only fair for them to know when you’re leaving and when you’ll return. That won’t just keep your family happy, it will also save you a significant amount of time.

In a fast-growing global technology company like ours, we recruit talents from the baby boomer generation to millennials. We have over 60 employees from more than 25 different nationalities. We are present in 10 different countries and are still growing. The wide range and set of diversity prompted us to take culture very seriously early on. In order to preserve our company’s culture and ensure our core values are embodied throughout the organization, we abandoned the traditional way of establishing the company’s core values. Rather, we let our people create and own the culture themselves. Here’s how you can look to do the same within your own organization.

Creation: Collective Thinking

During our company’s first-ever annual retreat in 2014, we asked all employees to independently think about what values matter most, both in the people they work with and the company they build. We then grouped the ideas into different categories based on their semantic definitions, and picked one word to represent each category. Each person then had an equal chance to vote for the value of his/her preference and decide which ones should define our company’s core values.

Based on the results, we discussed the outcomes together and consequentially narrowed down the list that same day. We decided on four elements. Just like that, our company core values were created.

The first people we hired to build our company collectively established these values. By taking collective thinking one step forward to collective ownership, we empower everyone to become a culture bearer of the company.

Preservation: People Culture

We work to preserve what we have as we grow. Hiring the right people for the right job is very important, but in order to do so, you first have to find those people. We designed our recruiting process in such a way that every candidate is interviewed and evaluated by the “People Team” before they go through any formal assessment with our different business units.

Hire people who possess both the personal qualities and technical skills required for the job. Because this is easier said than done, we use this recruitment process to reduce the potential risk of compromises that the business units may make — especially when they need to fill any time-sensitive hiring needs. Take advantage of your employees’ professional network: If our team values someone’s capability and trusts their character, this candidate is more likely to be a cultural fit for our company. It is equally important to search for the right people outwards as it is from within.

Evolution: Feedback and Growth

Most large companies have formal employee feedback system and provide managerial training to ensure that employees can give and receive feedback for personal and professional development. The intent is to keep employees engaged at work and improve their performances. However, a Deloitte public survey shows that more than half of executives believe that their current performance management approach drives neither employee engagement nor high performance.

We believe the traditional feedback system needs to be revamped. All companies, large or small, matured or high-growth, should have feedback mechanisms in place that keep up with their evolving culture. Instead of using a score sheet to quantify employees’ performance and satisfaction, we use only open-ended questions to guide the feedback sessions, like:

• “Imagine you can take up any role in the company today. What would it be?”
• “What types of skills do you use the most day-to-day, and what do you think are your strengths?”
• “Do you enjoy doing what you are good at, or would you rather do something you are unfamiliar with? What do you think is the current split between the two types of tasks?”

Conduct feedback sessions more frequently in a flexible and personalized manner. Focus your discussion on the employees’ future goals and aspirations rather than on past performance. Such systems yield more candid and realistic feedback for both the managers and employees, and as a result, a higher level of mutual understanding and communication.

As the saying goes, “The only constant is change.” Corporate culture is no different: One static instruction manual cannot provide the secret sauce to managing ever-evolving company culture. Empower your people to decide the culture that will help them and the company thrive. Managers will stay nimble and keep an open mind.

Looking back, I was fortunate to be able to develop our company culture from the ground up. We are able to preserve the essence of our promise to employees, business partners and shareholders. Today, we feel very confident about our culture of success, and putting these systems in place should help you elevate yours as well.