Thanks to intentional culture-building, startup workplaces have evolved to become much more than offices—they’re where people take meals, cultivate friendships, and find their purpose. Great culture attracts and retains great talent, encourages people to spend more time working toward company goals, and rallies the team around a mission. For many employees at these companies (and the other companies that emulate their cultures), the role of the workplace has taken on an outsize importance.
But as round after round of startup layoffs have occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, the downsides of this type of culture are becoming rapidly apparent. As a founder-turned-venture capitalist, I find myself contemplating the total costs of this indoctrination-style approach to culture. When people are laid off, they lose income and health insurance—devastating losses in the middle of a global health pandemic. But they also lose some things that are far less tangible but potentially even more costly. Intentional and immersive culture-building has tied our identities, self-worth, emotional security, and life’s purpose to our jobs, leaving both employees—and employers—vulnerable.
Years ago, after a round of layoffs at TaskRabbit, the company I founded, I had to face some hard truths about the culture we had so painstakingly built. We spent years cultivating an environment that could offer fulfillment, purpose, and a sense of belonging to every team member—a family in a very real sense. Our success in doing so meant that layoffs suddenly became about much more than discontinuing a person’s income. We had power we shouldn’t have had as employers: Thanks to the culture we’d built, separating a person from their job also separated them from their sense of self, their purpose, and their closest friends. There isn’t a severance package in the world that can soften that blow.
There isn’t a severance package in the world that can soften that blow.”
Just as record-high unemployment has made it crystal clear that relying on employers to provide healthcare is a faulty and dangerous idea, it’s time to stop propping up the very Silicon Valley notion that a person’s identity, life’s purpose, and belonging should go hand in hand with their place of employment. This moment requires a total shift in mindset. Instead of building cultures that emphasize a company’s role in people’s lives, what if we dedicate our efforts to prioritizing the individuals themselves?
As the founders I work with have started to grapple with this very question, many find themselves arriving at the same conclusion: Shifting as much autonomy as possible to the employee makes companies stronger.
This simple mindset shift meets the moment we’re in. As parents—particularly moms—shoulder compounding responsibilities at home and many young people pour off-hours into social justice, it’s becoming more apparent than ever that employees require greater control over how they spend their time, energy, and talents. Workplaces must adjust to accommodating the full lives of their employees to navigate this new reality. The solution isn’t as simple as switching to Zoom meetings and remote project management—it requires a culture that gives employees greater agency over their own work.
Recognizing the full life of your employees requires accepting that we all have multiple roles to play. People can be engineers and activists, marketers and moms, dev-ops and dads. People who write code by day might write short stories by night. That star support employee might also front a band. Every team is full of people with obligations to their families, social circles, passions, and communities. By giving each employee full control of how and when they work, they can better integrate their work into the rest of their lives—and their workplace will cease to become the central place where people feel a sense of purpose. Instead of encouraging employees to stay late at work, push them to set a schedule that helps them find balance—and meaning—in other parts of their lives as well. This isn’t just the necessary remedy for getting through this particular moment, and it isn’t just a fluffy nice thing to do—it’s a pathway to creating stronger companies over time.
It will bring a greater wealth of experience to your workplace. When individuals are encouraged to prioritize their other life roles, they bring those experiences and skills back to their work. This diversity of thought and perspective is something that many startups lack, and the positive impact of it is incalculable. Imagine: Spending more time helping his aging parents leads your designer to have an UX epiphany that streamlines your app. The community organizing your product manager does on the side shows up in the way she marshals resources to get that feature done on time. Helping her kid with history homework gives your copywriter an idea that becomes your next successful lead generation campaign. Moving away from an office-centric life also makes groupthink much more difficult, which means you can approach problems with more perspectives and get to clarity (and solutions) faster.
It increases a company’s resilience and agility. Companies with more individualistic cultures—like those with distributed teams and greater employee autonomy—adjusted much more quickly to our new work-from-home reality than companies with office-centric cultures. Working parents suddenly juggling home education and childcare on top of work responsibilities at companies that didn’t take an individualistic approach found themselves in an impossible bind. Imagine how much productivity could have been gained had every working mother simply been empowered to figure out her own schedule and workflows.
This ability to swiftly adapt to changing circumstances is often the difference between survival and death for early stage companies. There’s no such thing as an entirely future-proofed business, but trusting the individuals on your team to make the best decisions for themselves and for the company is a solid start.
It boosts the value, productivity, and momentum of your employees. Giving your employees the leeway to invest in themselves and their lives doesn’t just increase your chances of retaining them, it increases the value they can bring to your company. All that energy people spend figuring out how to juggle the many obligations in their lives on the margins can actually be used for productive work. What’s more, people experiencing success in other aspects of their lives can use that momentum in the work they do for your company.
There’s no doubt that culture can make or break a company. As an ecosystem, startups have been wise to prioritize it and approach it with intention. But the cultures we built before simply aren’t good enough for what comes next. This moment of uncertainty provides a unique opportunity to do things better, and founders thinking about the future understand they must adapt. Rather than turning a company into employees’ whole world, focusing culture-building efforts on giving employees agency and celebrating their lives beyond work is a good place to start.
Leah Solivan is the founder of TaskRabbit and the general partner at Fuel Capital.
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