The biggest investment a company can make is in its culture. Culture is what connects business goals, values, and people.
Since our founding, Asana has been committed to cultivating our culture in many ways, from hiring great people who embody our values to supporting those people in the best ways we can.
Hiring
Hiring is the first step to building a lasting culture that will support the growth of your business—in both good and bad times. We’ve invested in hiring practices that encourage us to get to know the whole person, allow candidates to show their strengths, and find candidates who bring a diversity of perspectives to our team.
Support
Culture doesn’t end with hiring—your team needs support. By investing in robust onboarding programs, emphasizing both professional and personal growth, and focusing our culture on mentorship and learning, we support our employees by investing in them. Other additions, like generous benefits that focus on wellness and happiness—our culinary and yoga programs, team outings, and office environment—take us the extra mile in supporting our employees.
Practice
A set of values or mission statements painted on a wall (which we have, actually) isn’t enough to bring values and culture to life. Companies need to put their values into practice. At Asana, we enforce No Meeting Wednesdays, encourage productive, agenda-driven meetings, and share meeting notes across the company. By practicing what we preach, our teams feel better connected to the company’s values, mission, and the rest of the organization.
Communication
Culture is an ongoing conversation: it’s constantly changing and growing, just as a company is. Each employee brings their own individuality to your company, and talking about it is a great way to encourage everyone to contribute.
Having open channels of communication, like feedback boards, employee surveys, or maybe even an “Opportunities” project in Asana encourages everyone to take part in the conversation. We keep an “Asana Opportunities” project open for everyone to add ideas to, and regularly make culture—or some subset of it—a topic of discussion for leadership and planning meetings.
An evolving culture
Culture is everyone’s to build and, as your company grows, it will evolve. The evolution of our culture has involved the revision of our values—several times!—as well as our processes. We even created a new role within the company (Heart of Culture), to drive all of our cultural efforts and work closely with our new Head of People Ops in connecting our ops, people, and culture. We wouldn’t be set up for success without someone thinking about how to mindfully evolve and scale our culture 100% of the time.
An updated #CultureCode
The Asana culture not only exists within our walls and amongst our team members, but also in our industry and community. A few years ago, we were asked by SlideShare to join a new online-presentation campaign they were launching with companies like Asana, Netflix, and HubSpot, called #CultureCode.
It’s been a great way to share our take on culture with everyone from candidates to customers, and we encourage all companies to share their own #CultureCode decks. Today, we’re publishing a new deck that reflects the changes and growth here at Asana over the past two years. We hope you can check it out, and let us know if you have your own to share!