Building Healthy Cultures for Startup's Continuity & Longevity
The paths towards a healthy organizational culture are numerous. As the saying goes “All roads lead to Rome”. On Startup day, let’s explore some of those roads that lead to Startup’s continuity and longevity.
Road 1: Innovation
Does it sound weird that we put Innovation as the number 1 road for startups and business continuity? Well, we chose Innovation because it has become a priority in today’s business world. After all, a startup has come to life primarily because of innovation. Therefore, If you cannot create a culture that fosters innovation you might not be able to survive in the future.
Innovation is no longer a luxury. Therefore, encouraging employees to develop new ideas, try new approaches, and come up with different solutions, should be part of a system that encourages innovation as part of the daily activities. Innovation needs to be embedded within both the strategy and culture. To further clarify, an innovation culture depends highly on collecting ideas, studying those ideas, filtering them through teams, panels, and stakeholders, and prototyping ideas.
This is a huge process that highly depends on several teams, some of those will be responsible for applying some innovation techniques, others will be responsible for developing innovation KPI's, while some for collecting and filtering ideas, and then for prototyping. Hence, for innovation to succeed, some teamwork needs to be in place.
In addition, a culture for tolerating mistakes and risk needs to be in place, for the term innovation imposes “the new” therefore if you do not risk, you do not innovate. Moreover, some reward system needs to be set. Also, giving employees the time to try and explore.
One more thing, adding Innovation to the set KPIs is of great importance to support the process, where employees are accountable for what is important for the organization, thus tying the strategy and culture to KPI’s. An important product that focuses deeply on Innovation is the ITS – Innovation Thinking System, which explores innovation in a deep sense in terms of its systems.
Road 2: A Future-Oriented Business Framework
As mentioned earlier, startups chart uncertain waters. Entrepreneurs wake up each day and face different challenges than the day before. Living up to those challenges, managing them, surviving through, and even benefiting from them, requires a new methodology. The FSSD (Frameworks for sustainable Development) is a future-oriented business framework developed by Dr. Karl Henrik: a winner of a Blue Planet Award. It is considered the only framework that helps you consider the elements necessary for your business to sustain itself in, as it helps frame it from a future perspective.
How does this happen?
- Create a vision of what your business would look like in the future. Retrospective analysis not only focuses on solving current problems but also frees you from disability.
- Analyze your current situation to identify gaps, critical issues, and opportunities for change.
- Explore innovative pathways to reach the future vision.
- Prioritize and devise an implementation plan.
Considering the vision of the future, you can prioritize initiatives that will bring short-term benefits while maintaining flexibility and long-term prospects that are realistic and will provide benefits in the short term, maintaining flexibility and long-term prospects.
Road 3: Employee Wellness
Who will carry out the strategy? Who will come up with innovative and new ideas? Who will form teams and work on a vision they have been recruited to fulfill?
Yes! Employees.
You set the vision, you bring the right people on the bus, and then you put each of them in the right seat. Yet, after this process, it is important to retain them, otherwise, you will fall into an endless loop of hiring and recruiting, which does not only cost you time and energy but money as well.
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