The 7% of your employees that can change culture

Course content (16 lessons)

Everyone at your company has a role in creating the culture. Though as the leadership, you have the opportunity to influence and guide the culture, you want to see. In this lesson learn how we think about culture at Shopify, and why it’s important to pay close attention to as your business grows.

🎉 You have officially made it to the end of Hiring Top Talent (And Keeping them Happy)! We hope you are able to take a few key strategies or pieces of advice to apply to your growing business.

[MUSIC PLAYING] HARLEY FINKELSTEIN: Most people assume that culture is set at the top and trickles down. And I think as leaders of these companies we have an opportunity to talk about the culture but ultimately it's everyone at the company sets the culture. And so I just recently heard the stat that, if you get 7% of any group, any cohort, any collection of people to disagree with someone, 7% or more can actually sway the entire other 93%.
And so if you think you've a great culture, let's say you have 100 people at your company, and you have this great culture but you have this group of seven who simply just doesn't believe in it, doesn't actually see it. In fact, they may be detractors, they actually may cause-- they may not agree with the culture, they may not agree with the mission of the company and you may think, well, they're just those seven people. Remember 7% of a population can actually change the minds of the other 93%.
So be careful that you hire people that culture understand. I don't like the term fit because fit needs to evolve over time. Someone that may have been a good fit for us years ago may not be the right fit now and vice versa. So I don't really like the term fit very much because it's so subjective. One thing that I think Reed Hastings of Netflix did really well was him and Patty McCormick, they created the Netflix culture guide. It was a set of norms, it was a couple-- I think it was five or 10 pages of here's what we care about from a cultural perspective at Netflix.
And he didn't distribute that to existing employees. He actually made that public and so that new people that were thinking about joining Netflix prior to even providing them with their resume or their application for a job there, they really understood what the culture was at Netflix. And you know one thing that was very contentious was I think they wrote something like mediocre performance will be met with higher than average severance. And that's a pretty bold statement to make that if you're mediocre you probably get the door here.
But what it does is it teases out the wrong types of people. Well in advance we've been going through the application process and by the time they sat down in that chair, that applicant, to get that job and have that interview they know what the vibe of the office is. They understand what is important at Netflix. And I think that's a great example. [MUSIC PLAYING]

The 7% of your employees that can change culture

Course content (16 lessons)

Module 1: Where do you find top talent?

01 |Module 2: Acing the interview process

02 |Module 3: Hiring a salesforce that helps you scale

03 |Module 4: Creating a culture where talent thrives