How to Build a Strong Employee Culture on the Edge

By Paul Myott, vice president of organizational effectiveness and internal communications at DataBank

Building a strong employee culture in a fast-growing company

The edge carries a double meaning for DataBank. Our 65+ data centers across the U.S. deliver connectivity that brings people close to the digital edge. That’s where they can access low-latency applications.

At the same time, we maintain a strong culture for our people while operating on the edge of a fast-growing company. In the past four years, backed by private equity investors, DataBank acquired four companies and has grown headcount by 400%. One acquisition resulted in our organization more than doubling in size. By the end of this year, we expect to surpass 900 employees.

As you can imagine, along with acquired companies comes new and different people, processes, and technology as well as cultures. All require integration and balancing to ensure we make way for new and different ways of working while also maintaining the strong culture we built along the way.

Define Your True Purpose and Create Culture Cornerstones

We started by promoting the premise that culture directly impacts our brand. How employees feel and act affects the quality of the services we deliver to our customers.

Rather than using the traditional Mission, Vision, and Values statement, we set off to clearly define our Purpose, our Way, and our Impact — not only on customers but also the world. These statements define our organization’s true “north star.” This includes why we exist and the unique way we go about delivering on our purpose.

Next, we created culture cornerstones to align our purpose with the behavior and character of our people:

• Inspire confidence
• Put people first
• Be data-centered

These ideals guide our behavior every day. They also describe the unique way we deliver on our purpose: To take away the worry of managing mission-critical IT infrastructure.

Understand the Makeup of Your People

Much of what we’ve done — and continue to do — to maintain a healthy and vibrant culture at DataBank requires an understanding of the makeup of our people. If your company is like DataBank, the industry you are in tends to dictate the types, or personas, of the people who naturally gravitate to the type of work you do.

For example, given the highly technical nature of data center work, we have a large population of technologists and system engineers who rely heavily on their technical expertise. Their ability to rigorously solve highly complex digital infrastructure problems is the ideal fit for our business.

We also know — through the use of a culture assessment tool called CultureTalk — we are an organization made up of primarily Hero, Sage, and Everyperson archetypes. The CultureTalk archetypes are characters rooted in centuries of storytelling and Jungian philosophy.

All of this comes together in a unique cultural footprint that has distinct challenges and requires us to tailor our people and culture strategy. Fast-growing companies like ours tend to move quickly, try new approaches, hire new people, and solve problems in the moment. This leaves little time or energy for pragmatic, deep-dive culture initiatives with leaders.

Building a culture “on the edge” is a marathon, not a sprint, that required us to capitalize on small wins and build on them opportunistically. Besides understanding our people and the culture makeup, the path to the culture we have today required the handful of critical steps outlined herein.

Establish Leadership Behaviors

Our mission to build a strong culture then turned to leadership behavior guideposts. We wanted every individual to lead and own the success of the organization by exhibiting these five behaviors:

• Embrace and manage change
• Collaborate before escalating
• Take extreme ownership
• Choose trust and respect
• Assume positive intent

The DataBank leadership team models these behaviors for their teams and individuals across the company to follow. We also measure these behaviors in an annual culture survey and quarterly employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) surveys — along with monthly culture check-ins with our senior management team. These processes hold our leadership accountable for maintaining a positive culture.

Creating a Common Culture Language

As I mentioned above, the CultureTalk tool has allowed us to create a common language in the organization through 12 character archetypes theorized by the renowned psychiatrist Carl Jung. We know these archetypes from the characters in stories passed down over hundreds of years — such as the Creator, the Ruler, the Revolutionary, the Jester, and the Lover.

The archetypes create a language to understand people’s behavior and tendencies and why they might act the way they do. It’s a great team-building tool and fosters collaboration while helping people resolve issues. The archetypes also help people understand the different value each person brings to the organization in the way he or she shows up.

Everyone, and therefore every organization, has at least a little of all 12 archetypes in his or her personality. However, two or three tend to be the most dominant. Going through this process, we discovered DataBank predominantly consists of three archetypes:

• Our HEROES go above and beyond to win the day and help us succeed collectively.
• The SAGE archetypes excel at understanding technology and designing innovative solutions.
• EVERYPERSON archetypes promote a one-for-all, all-for-one mentality.

This powerful blend of archetypes across all our teams has created a highly motivated workforce. We also exude a low sense of self-importance, want to win, and feel extreme ownership of technical solutions for our customers.

Creating a Rewards and Recognition Platform

The five leadership behaviors guide our daily interactions, and we recognize them along with other momentous occasions on our culture platform called the DataBank Vault.

The Vault is our online “town square” where our people engage in important company communications. We also facilitate organic peer-to-peer recognition while providing formal monetary awards and other health and welfare activities.

In a highly distributed work environment like ours, the Vault serves as the cultural “glue” that binds us together and reinforces the desired leadership behaviors.

Driving Culture Through Leadership

Building and maintaining a healthy culture is a marathon, not a sprint. It requires a commitment from leaders to invest and engage in your people, and define and uphold the behaviors that align with your organization’s purpose, way, and impact.

Establishing and maintaining a strong culture is not as simple as your CEO bringing everybody into a room, espousing the aspects of your culture, and then just telling them to go off and do it.

In the absence of engaged and committed leadership, a company culture forms and morphs based on collective mindsets and behaviors. It requires strong, engaged leadership at all levels committed to the cause and meeting people where they are. For leaders, the culture also involves working with individuals and small teams: listening, being patient, and inserting yourself where you can add value, then change the trajectory of negative behaviors.

Besides your CEO, culture change requires all levels of your leadership. They should get involved across the organization, working with their teams, and looking for behaviors that could move the culture in unintended directions. They can keep your culture bus heading in the right direction to support your purpose, way, and impact.

Also know that building a successful culture and a healthy workplace takes patience. The leadership team must feel comfortable with not changing things overnight. Sometimes you have to realize you may take two steps forward and one step back. Flexibility and adaptability are key to long-term success.

###