How Do I Scale Company Culture as My Small Business Grows?

In this week’s podcast episode, Sabrina talks about Scaling HR as your small business grows. She breaks down the areas to scale into 3 categories: Processes and Systems, People and Roles, and Culture and Communication.

While she provides highlights for each in the episode, I thought I would take one of them, culture and communication, and expand on what scaling that category really looks like.

As she says, no one thinks about scaling HR until things are a bit messy. The things that work for you at 20 employees are not likely to work at 70, yet sometimes that growth happens so fast that no one thinks about what or how to scale. All 3 of those categories are important considerations before you grow, but culture and communication is the one I see causing so many problems when it isn’t scaled properly.

Before you add another person. Before you post that next job. Ask yourself this. 

Can our current culture support more people? Can our communication handle more complexity?

When you do not ask yourself that question and, assuming the answer is no, strategize how to fix it before your next hire, you are hiring into chaos. Chaos drives good people out. 

Let’s start with culture. Culture is what gets rewarded, tolerated, and repeated. At Acacia, we believe it is both organic and guided. Culture can be built, but it takes deliberate, consistent, focused effort to do so. If you haven’t taken the time to define and protect your culture intentionally, you’re scaling whatever exists now: good, bad, or  unclear.

A few questions to ask around culture are:

1. Are our values clear and lived out? Are they even current?

2. Do our people know what “success” looks like beyond KPIs?

3. Do new hires integrate quickly because the culture is strong, or struggle because the culture that exists isn’t very engaging and may even be toxic?

If you can not confidently answer those questions, pause before hiring and try one or all of these things.

1. Revisit your core values. Remove the fluff and focus on 3-5 that actually show up in behavior. Here are a few ideas for doing this.

   1. Involve more than just your top leaders

   2. Identify strengths that already exist in the business that may be driven by employee personal values

   3. Think about what success looks like and what behaviors drive towards that success

   4. Share the core values and explain how they “show up” in the workplace. Reward that behavior any time it is present.

      
      

2. Document your ways of working. Here, we call this the Acacia Way and it covers anything from how we work remotely together, meeting and chat etiquette and expectations around feedback. Many small businesses think about SOP’s for processes, but not for every day interactions. As much behavior as you can define and document, the more likely employees are to live out that behavior. Oh and pro tip: hold your leaders highly accountable to living out this behavior as well.

   
   

3. Do a culture audit but asking employees what they believe defines the culture now and what needs to evolve as you grow. 

Now let’s talk about communication. When your company is small, communication is organic. Everyone hears everything because everyone’s in the same room or on the same Slack channel.

As you grow, that breaks.And especially if you are 100% remote like us, ensuring everyone is on the same page becomes increasingly difficult with every new hire.

Suddenly, people feel left out. Leaders assume things were said or trickled down to the right people. Employees fill in gaps with their own narratives. When they don’t hear something, they don’t assume there is nothing to share, they make up their own story. And those communication cracks quickly erode trust.

To scale communication, you need to:

1. Create structure. Standing team meetings. Leader check-ins. Feedback loops. Don’t rely on “they’ll ask if they need help.”

2. Repeat yourself—more than you think you need to. As your team grows, not everyone hears things at the same time. Sabrina always reminds us that people retain only 25% of what they hear so do not be afraid to repeat yourself. 

3. Build communication norms. When do we meet? How do we share updates? Who needs to be looped in? Same as in the cultural norms. Document this like you would any system.

Remember: good communication doesn’t stifle agility, it fuels it. Teams move faster when they know how, when, and where to talk.

Unfortunately, not scaling culture and communication is something we see all the time with our clients. Sabrina talked in the podcast about 60 employees being the number that she sees where the stuff hits the fan from an employee relations perspective. I’m certain it is because they haven’t scaled their culture and communication as they grew. Something grew that they didn’t intent and now, it’s messy.

Here’s what messy looks like. New hires have no idea what is going on and take a long time to ramp. Leaders get very reactive instead of proactive. Relationships start to fracture or break entirely. Everyone is spending more time on interpersonal issues than they are on actual productive work. Small businesses can not afford to not focus on scaling culture and communication and deal with these setbacks. 

Growth is exciting but also scary. Hiring new team members is thrilling and a sure sign a thriving business is possible. But without intentional focus on culture and communication, the alignment needed to scale beyond where the business is now will remain out of reach. Focus on this before you scale to grow well.

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