Team performance and culture
Your employee handbook could be doing a lot more. Write a culture guide.
Most handbooks are policy documents nobody reads. A culture guide codifies why you exist, what you do, who you are, and, most important, how you work together. Here’s what goes in one, how to build it, and how to keep it alive.
Your organization is growing, or forming, or changing shape. New people keep asking the same questions. Long-time staff carry the real rules in their heads. And the employee handbook, if you have one, is a policy document that people open once, to look up the holiday schedule.
What if the handbook did more? What if it codified why you exist, what you do, who you are, and how you work together?
That’s a culture guide. It’s one of the most underused tools for setting the tone of a team, and one of the most practical pieces of organizational infrastructure we help leaders build. We’ve seen organizations use culture guides to form new teams, to transform the culture of an existing organization, and to codify the parts of their culture they want to keep as they scale.
Culture isn’t a document. But a document can help.
Culture emerges from how a leadership team actually operates, not from a values poster (we’ve written about that in Culture by Design). A culture guide doesn’t manufacture culture. What it does is make the important things explicit: the agreements, rhythms, and expectations that shape how people experience work every day. That turns unspoken expectations into shared agreements, which is one of the most reliable ways to build trust.
What goes in a culture guide
The guides that actually help tell the story of the organization and codify the agreements that help the team work together in its own way. The outline we use with clients has five sections.
- Why we existA warm welcome, a brief history, the vision, and the organization’s role in the world.
- What we doThe approach, products or services, and current priorities, connecting the why to the what in concrete terms.
- Who we areValues, people, structure, and the relationships around you, plus the words only your organization uses.
- How we work togetherThe heart of the guide. It describes the culture explicitly, and it’s truly unique to each organization.
- Policies and proceduresTime off, benefits, travel, purchasing, and payroll, written in a way that’s on-brand and easy to use.
“How we work together” is where most of the value lives. It’s where you name how decisions get made, what each meeting is for, and what people can expect from one another. In other words, it’s where you document your containers.
Making the guide is as valuable as having it
Creating a culture guide isn’t just about the finished product. The process is a chance for the organization to get clear on who it is and how it wants to work. Here’s how it typically unfolds.
- Gather and form a working groupCollect artifacts and perspectives on the culture and vision, and identify a core team to lead the effort.
- Draft with hypothesesWrite a first draft full of hypotheses. It quickly shows what’s already clear and what isn’t.
- Discuss and decideFacilitated sessions help the working group fill gaps and turn hypotheses into decisions.
- Get feedback and iterateShare the draft with staff, gather feedback, and refine until it resonates.
- Launch and build it inIntroduce the guide to everyone and make it part of onboarding.
- Revisit it regularlyUpdate it every six or twelve months so it keeps pace with the organization.
Drafting with hypotheses is the secret. People react more easily to a concrete draft than to a blank page, and the places where the draft feels wrong are exactly where the important conversations are.
How to use a great culture guide
- Onboarding
- Make it the core of how new people learn the culture and values, quickly.
- Accountability
- Refer back to the agreements it contains. It makes feedback less personal and more about honoring shared commitments.
- Alignment
- Give every team and department the same understanding of the vision, culture, and practices.
- Source of truth
- A single place for how the organization works together, which cuts down on misunderstandings.
Keep it alive
A culture guide sets the tone, but only if it grows with the organization. Change happens regularly and quickly, and in a fast-moving organization it’s easy to lose track of how everyone stays on the same page.
Use the guide to keep people up to date, to engage them regularly, and to notice when something needs to change, either in the guide or in behaviors that have drifted off track. Build a review into your operating rhythm, like a semi-annual retreat, and the guide stays a living document instead of a forgotten one.
- Are new hires asking the same questions over and over?
- Do long-time staff carry “how things really work” in their heads?
- Are you forming a new team, merging teams, or growing quickly?
- Do different departments work by different unwritten rules?
- Is your handbook mostly policies, with little about how you work together?