 Thank you. Yeah, my name is Nina and I'm the VP of people and culture at Dixxer so I head up both people and culture and TA there. I joined Dixxer when we were 30 people now we're 230 people so I've seen both series B and C. I've been there through COVID and COVID lockdown and and how that affected the company and I've also been there when we expanded globally and started having more people globally and finally I also had my second child while doing all of this so it's been some crazy two and a half three years at Dixxer. I have a background in philosophy and HRM and that might seem to you like a weird combination but philosophy is really just about how you perceive the world and what does that does to the way you manage and deal with people so it's actually very relevant for for HR. I finished university just when the financial crisis was as it is high its highest and that meant that I couldn't get a job because a newly educated HR person couldn't get a job at that time so then I ended up taking a manager job in a retail chain called Emeris. They didn't want me to build their HR before I had proven myself in the shops and that turned out to be a really valuable experience for me because it showed me what does it really take to manage people also in an industry where a resource for developing people and ensuring a good culture is very scarce there is no resource for that in retail so I had to make people show up for staff meetings without even getting to pay them so that was really background for me when I finally got to build HR and work more in HR. All of my HR jobs afterwards have then been about building HR from scratch so I'm a builder and not a maintainer and that is also why I love working in the tech start-up scale-up scene. I wanted to when I was when I prepared this presentation I thought about where do I start this and I think what always happens when you're a founder you get a good idea and then you start building a product and you get the product to a point where you can actually start selling it so first you focus on product and then you start focusing on profit can you sell it can you get investment to develop it further but that is also when you come across something I called the start-up paradox and the startup paradox is when you have your sales team or your commercial side of the business coming to you and saying I need money to or we need to invest in building this for our product because this is what the customers want then you go to your product and engineering side of the business and they say no we can't build that we need to build something that is we need to build this something else because this is what our customers don't know they want tomorrow so it's this paradox between building for the future versus funding the journey to get there also your invest if you get investors and they'll also have an opinion on what you need to focus on so it's that paradox that you very quickly will be facing as a founder or early leader in a startup and the way to handle this the only way to actually handle this is through a culture that embraces this paradox because you will never be in a situation where you can do both and because resource will be scarce you will have either you won't have enough money you won't have enough people because it takes time to hire or you won't have or you won't have enough time so so so people and culture is really the key for you to move from that very early stage and dealing with the the kind of the troublesome road to success so today i'm gonna hopefully show you how you can make culture a competitive advantage in in scaling your business but before we talk more about how to do this i wanted to show you this because a lot of founders reaches out to me and then they ask and and they're like can we have coffee because i want to i want to start doing some something about people and culture i'm facing these things that is really difficult to handle and it's not i don't know what to do with it and i think what is very normal and this happens earlier than than what you would expect is a lack of focus and unclear priorities and that happens as soon as everyone isn't able to be in all of the meetings so it's already when you're seven people basically you don't have to have a big setup around culture at that time but you need to start focusing on it because otherwise what will happen is siloing so you'll have people in one side of the business working on their thing thinking that this will change the things for us so we have to focus on this and you'll have people on the other side of the business focusing on their things and they will start arguing what's more important um so already when you can when everyone isn't in the same meetings you have to to start working with this then the next thing that they that they come to me and want to talk about is um kind of the consequences of single-loop learning and and short-term solution in in the beginning it's it's very busy you want to do many things and you want to do it quickly so what then happens is um you start kind of not thinking about things you stop you don't ask the why you just uh change the how you do things so you want to target a certain segment in the market and you do a plan and you ask them to do this and somebody else to do this and you do it and you fail then you go back and then you think okay this didn't work let's change how we did it we asked marketing to do something different or we ask ourselves people to behave in a different way and you target the same segment but what you really need to do at that point is question do I do we even want to target the segment why are we targeting this segment because otherwise you can end up using a lot of time on things that will uh be uh won't work or only will work temporarily all of this kind of leads to um uncertainty about performance in the company if you don't work with it from the early beginning so you can't really give your your your employees a proper feedback on their performance and that'll then affect their engagement and they'll leave um and I think just the point with this is that this happens very early okay so culture and what it is uh when I first started at Dixie we um we we did the culture and values workshop but I was like what what is the difference in culture and value what does it mean we just use it for the same thing or so we looked into it and kind of how I see culture I see it like your values and and beliefs in action so if you if you you can think about beliefs and values as the bedrock of your kind of your your your culture and then the culture is those things in actions it's the landscape and the landscape will change but you can still have the same beliefs and values when you're 30 people and when you're 230 people but the culture will be different because now there's 230 people so it can't be a culture of we all meet and look each other's in the eyes it will be a culture of uh interacting in a different way that's just an example so my beliefs and value as a leader would be that I really trust in people I think that people will if uh they'll always try to be responsible and uh be um um and kind of try to do their best so my values as a leader are kind of the the right thing to me for me to do as a leader is to enable us create a situation where they can do that I don't I don't have to control them or follow up so much um the culture will then be kind of a culture of trust again the culture even me having these beliefs and values will have look different when we were 32 now we're 230 right we will for instance have to have okay us to just understand what's everyone is doing it's not about control I still believe sincerely that people you know want to do their best but we still have to have this setting around it on on how we kind of follow up on what people are doing so as a founder you have an influence on your culture top down you both have a direct uh um influence and that's just how you behave do you interrupt do you listen do you have people that you favorizing the organization are you biased uh do you focus on data or do you focus on hearsay so that this will directly impact your culture it won't define the whole culture in the company but it'll have a heavy effect on your culture so it is very important as a for a founder to be aware of their own beliefs and values and how that kind of comes into action when they walk around in their company the next part that are also a kind of a top down effect on culture is um it's it's the indirect um factors and the indirect factors are the structures and the systems you set up to enhance your culture because again when you scale when you're seven people people will just feel you because they'll be near you all the time when you're 230 people they won't feel you anymore so you have to have some structures around it to enhance the good part of the culture and what you want to the message you want to get out there and uh my point here would be delegate this early because I see a lot of founders in cfo CEOs and cfo's they try to do this themselves for a long time but it takes such a long time that then they don't focus on developing the business so it's it's a good idea to have people in early to take this off your of your hands then I want to talk about the bottom up um influences on on culture and um we all know you know when you walk around in a company you see this kind of generic value posters on the walls nobody knows what it stands for they for sure don't live them they're like what what is this um and that is because that uh you as a leader and a founder you cannot like decide the culture and you can't decide the culture because you have to think about your company and the sub departments and the subsist um teams as systems and systems is a tricky thing to deal with because systems you can't force anything into a system it's closed um it's but it's cognitively open so that means you can't as a founder come and say you know I want people to be more accountable go do it like that won't work they'll just be like yeah whatever and go back and do their thing but you can't work with your teams and kind of these subsystems to make them understand why we need to be more accountable and so it's coaching teaching it's also expanding the system and expanding the system it's really just hiring new people into the system and it's also decreasing the system so when people leave all you split teams up and kind of organize it differently according to to the need you might have okay so so so you now know that you can affect your culture bottom up um my next point would be that don't start working with anything that you don't have data on don't do anything people and culture related that you don't have and kind of had confirmed through data because then people and culture will be at most kind of just maintaining some stuff it won't it won't add any value and it'll probably also you'll be focusing on the wrong things because to my experience anyway people there's a lot of people coming to me and they are really loud about what they need from people and culture and from their leaders but they're not the majority the majority won't come to me but they will respond to surveys and tell me kind of what they need when I ask them anonymously so that is super important people won't tell you what they really mean if you don't ask them anonymously okay so how do we work with affecting culture bottom up at Dijkse we gather data in more than three ways but I'm going to talk about three ways today we gather data on when people first join so when we add cognitive kind of space to the system we we add we we look at what do these people value so what kind of a culture will they need and what kind of culture will they enhance when they when they join and some just interesting example could be be that when we start first started looking at this data set we could see that we had a lot of people they did not care about structure at all like structure not for me which is which makes sense you join a startup because you don't want the whole corporate big kind of system thing and that's fine to a certain extent because in the beginning you'll need you'll be needing people who like and value and kind of have a culture if we'll figure it out if we don't know how to we'll figure it out but then when you grow at one point you will have to have people in who likes working at structure because you need more structure as you scale to some extent right so that's one thing that we became smarter about when hiring kind of really looking into you know what's people what's people's preference on structure and in that way we can influence cognitively proactively the team so we can actually affect the culture proactively from from kind of the before the event join if that makes sense another kind of interesting thing was that I saw when they wrote up a few notes about my talk here they were talking about ping-pong tables and friday bar being culture and the data set here showed us that the people we had hired they didn't care about so much about the the relationship side of it so kind of the friday bar hanging out outside work and I mean this is a bit later states that was we started measuring this when we were around a hundred people and and that's because at that time people had gotten kids they needed to leave after work they need they wanted to do their work so what they valued really valued was good collaboration and then what we did was we went bad and kind of adjusted what we were going to offer as a workplace like we're going to perhaps focus less on social events and more I'm really like good collaboration people feeling that they get a lot of stuff out of the teamwork that they do and it's not that you shouldn't do like 100 you should not only do 100 percent of something of course you do a little bit of both but it gives good direction that you can act on proactively with your culture what you also want to do and I don't really understand companies that don't do that because it really takes the temperature on the organization is measure engagement so are you walking the talk on your culture if you don't have an engagement survey you won't know you'll have a feeling but it's you don't like it can be a right or wrong it don't bring any value so measure your engagement there's lots of surveys to measure engagement you can filter and segment and everything in your organization to really understand where are we really walking the talk where do we have a good culture that gives us what we want as company and you can act like also very quickly and I've seen I've worked with engagement service for a long time obviously and I've just seen when engagement is low in a team people will start leaving if it's low over a long time people will leave that team so it's very clearly an indicator of your happiness and if people are like we'll leave or not the final thing I want to talk about is the kind of the individual part of creating a good culture we work with a talent test that shows us not a personality test but rather a talent test that shows us what people like to do because if you do what you like to do you'll stay and you'll be more you'll have more energy you'll be more effective you'll you'll just have a better work life and it'll be better for the company it'll affect the company positively because you have happy employees and they talk about this company is so great I get to do what I love to do so we always want to aim to match people's preferences with the job they actually do which of course takes a lot of focus on time but it's worth it definitely in terms of retaining people and and also how people go out and talk about the company to other to other future talent we want to hire. The next thing is also about that kind of more individual kind of preference that is important when you start the company you have employees who are they love doing a lot of things they love the thing where you know they have this hat on and this then they have this hat hat on then you scale and people get more specialized because they have to you have to have people focusing on a kind of a slimmer kind of area and and and there's two things there one you need to hire people who actually appreciate that and why I'm saying it like this is that I think people who join founders and leaders early on these kind of companies they they sometimes hire people like themselves so these kind of entrepreneurial people but at one point you need to look at people who are maintainers who are specialists kind of mindset and what it also does to the people in the company is that they feel that something is taking away from them when you scale and you add more people in to do some of the stuff that they had had they had they have had that hat before they feel something is taking away from that so at that point there's really an opportunity to re-engagement relook at their role and kind of re-unboard them into the match between what they love to do and what they're actually doing and that is definitely possible if you scale because then there's always going to be more great stuff to do but again it takes focus and time team leads you want to go from these kind of people who love kind of more friendly relationship with their team and really cares about but still kind of are specialists but they just also take care of the team because they love people and to a more kind of to team leads who are more like care like are more like into the whole people management thing who really loves doing that rather than perhaps being the subject matter expert very important also because the team leads is your extension also the culture you want to implement people the team leads are going to be kind of the booster for that so you want people who are really aware of that and able to do that and then the senior leadership team obviously also that role changes you start with being kind of entrepreneurial do everything I know everything in this company and then you have to step back be less operational be more strategic look further ahead and ensure that your company asks and your team asks why are we doing what we're doing doesn't make sense in terms of where we want to go and then what you need to do is of course so this is a big thing so what you need to have you have need to have the right support set up for for working with your culture and when people ask me what we do in in HR or people and culture I tell them we do this so obviously there's a job for me in aligning our people and culture efforts with the business strategy everything I do needs to kind of add values value to to to the journey to where we want to go as a company but the other thing that I think people don't think so much about is really the capacity for change you really want to have and that's the kind of dealing with them with the the startup paradox that I started talking about like making sure that your team can embrace that kind of constant change the admin side obviously when we speak about culture is about delivering the data you need to understand that the people and culture efforts you do that that brings that that actually is makes sense in relation to what people actually feel and then the last part the employee contributions or the engagement this is where you affect the culture bottom up cognitively by developing and training and kind of putting a lot of things from from from button up into your teams and and what do you need to do that and I know when I when I talk to founders and I say this is what you need to do this they tell me like okay but I want to hire more developers and then I like yeah so what do you want to do do you want to set something in place that will make your success long succeed long term or do you want to have more developers in who can build a feature for you right now so it's again like the it's the it's a startup kind of paradox right and I face that too in my role when I want to build my my my department out but basically what I've learned is that you want to have people partnering you want people partners hrbp's that's what we call them formally who are there and close to the teams and kind of develops and and make sure that we have a healthy good culture and develop that as we need to do then you want the operations and process management team to ensure the data and all the structures and that especially gets important when you scale when you're not only located in one company anymore because it gets it starts to get really painful if you don't have control over your kind of basic hr processes and there's also a risk to it of course then what I've realized is the lnd part is important and it's about creating that capacity for change you need someone in who focus on developing your team your team leaders but also develop who can develop and talk about the difficult things being in a startup with the employees so that's important too ta you always want to split it out from pnc you never want people who do both people partnering and ta because then your you won't be effective on your ta side and if you need to hire quickly you want a very focused ta department who only does that then the executive coaching is important in my eyes because founders who found a company and you know take it to four or five hundred people or whatever you know that role is so different and it is so difficult it is so tricky to to to go through that journey for the for this for the senior leaders and the founders and they need to they need of course support in that and they probably need someone from outside to give them input on it so somebody who can see it with fresh eyes and the final thing is the internal comes an employer branding kind of role where it's it's that's really also just a booster for all the good stuff you're doing all the resource you're putting into people and culture if you don't have somebody who makes sure that we communicate it right to the organization when we when we hit a certain size then then we'll have troubles with them with the with getting the credit for for all the great stuff we're doing and then just the checklist for for how to kind of ensure that your culture is a can be a competitive advantage so you need to focus on it from the early beginning and it's already when you're like as many people so that you can't be in the same meetings all the time and then you want to understand your own beliefs as values as a senior leader and as a founder because that does affect the company and it's really hard to fake it if you just if you're a person and that's a normal thing that you just don't trust people like you think they will perhaps take like take advantage of freedom or like you're more of a controlling kind of person if that's how you are it's better to just realize it and then start working on it you can also change cognitively but it's better to not try to fake these things as a founder because people will see through it and it'll create a lot of mess in your organization so rather just be honest about what you really what your beliefs really are and your values then you want to retrieve data and you want to like do that from now on until forever and you want to act only on data on your people and culture initiatives then you want to using that you want to affect the culture bottom up but you can only do it to cognitively so it's the developing it's the teaching it's the hiring in the right mindset and it's also like letting go of people who don't have the right mindset anymore and then ensure of course that you have the pnc setup who can support you in doing this because you won't have time for it as a senior leadership team you need somebody who can who can kind of do this for you and really support you the final part here is just something I wanted to bring up because we of course we hire a lot of people at Dixie and when we hire people they tell us things about what they're looking for and these are some of the things that are really like coming up and I think what the takeaway from that is that people are looking for a job that can be a great not only a great addition to their life but like a job that can kind of change their life for the better and it should never be them changing around the job it's always the other way around at least for the talent we're looking for they can they they can pick and choose between jobs right now and so we have to really think about how do we attract them how do we give them that kind of life situation that they're looking for while working with us so it's not so much about the job selling a job anymore it's about selling a lifestyle more I'm on time that's it thanks