Working at a company like S2M over the last few years (more like decades, but let’s go with years for now) has been such an amazing opportunity.

Being able to build the culture every day is something that I have to say, I’m extremely proud to be a part of. People always ask me though; “how do you manage to maintain such a great company culture for so long?”

The answer is simple. It’s about caring. Caring about your staff, your clients, your candidates and of course, yourself. Probably not much of an answer really, but if you pause for a moment and think about it, how many companies have you worked for where your boss has cared about you as a person as much as they care about the business. It’s the reason we take our best performers on holidays while providing training and support for our lowest performers simultaneously.

What I mean by caring is not in the superficial sense, of showing care through grand gestures or saying it out loud in front of an audience to they’re all acutely aware of your actions. Caring isn’t what happens at town hall meetings or daily stand-ups, by publicly recognising a high performing employee’s achievements .

Caring goes a lot deeper than that.

The great angel investor and CEO Ben Horowitz once said, when asked how he was able to manage his companies through two severe stock market crashes, responded with the following:

“whenever I was in a room speaking to anybody, I imagined that the entire company was in that room with me”

Though this might seem easy on paper, it’s really hard to put into practice. But that’s how I start with the culture. Toxic cultures develop from looking after personal interests instead of the interests of the group, and the individuals within the group. It’s tough to do, but once you get a real sense of who you are looking after in every meeting, your culture starts to take shape.

If care is what drives a good culture, what maintains a good culture is the ability to live in a world of contradictions: flexible, yet firm, driving without being forceful, and so on and so forth.

Keeping a good culture means building on the culture with every single hire. We try hard not to hire only based on experience, and instead try to form a wholistic view on who the person is. Some of our best successes have come from hiring people with no experience, and instead training them up to be amongst the best in the business.

Ultimately, culture all comes down to one thing; How much you care and how you show it. What you do from there is up to you, but as long as you can show it in the right way, that’s where truly great company culture happens.