How to Build a Company Culture Employees Will Love

Inc. 5000 founders share hard-won lessons on fostering genuine connection and building a culture every employee will embrace.

Culture isn’t just a nice-to-have — it’s a vital, living aspect of any business, directly influencing employee engagement, retention, and even company performance. 

Many Inc. 5000 founders are low-key obsessed with it, as we learned in a recent mastermind discussion. And yet, participants said, many founders are not intentional about building the culture at their organization.

“Your culture exists whether you think so or not. It’s just a matter of: Do you own your culture, or is it just random?” said HIRECLOUT founder Avetis Antaplyan during the discussion. “If you didn’t create the culture you want, it’s going to happen on its own, and it’s not going to be a great culture.”

Here’s how to create a great culture at your company, according to this cohort.

Create the culture collaboratively

Just because you need to create the culture you want doesn’t mean culture should be dictated from on high, founders said.

“Company culture isn’t something you can just force to happen from the top down,” said Authentic founder Jennifer Zick, whose impetus for starting a company was a bad culture experience elsewhere. “You have to listen and understand.”

You also have to ensure your culture aligns with the experiences and values of your team. When Online Optimism founder Flynn Zaiger first tried to roll out a company culture, he began by authoring a mission, vision, and values, and then announcing them to the team.

“And the team responded with, ‘Nope. That’s not our values,’” Zaiger remembered.

Zick’s company operationalized its values through weekly discussions, embedding them into the fabric of the business. Zaiger and his team refresh the company’s mission and values every couple of years at a retreat, to make sure they still align. After all, mission isn’t static — it’s something to live, revisit, and reinforce regularly. “Without that buy-in from the team, the strategy is meaningless, no matter how hard you work on it,” he said.

Start at the Beginning

Establishing and forwarding your culture begins in the onboarding process, according to Antaplyan. Too often, he said, the new hire’s sense of the company’s culture during that period is negative: “People hire terrific talent then don’t onboard them properly,” leaving them to figure things out alone.

Brad Stevens, founder of talent supplier Outsource Access, spends eight to 10 hours a month writing personal welcome letters to new hires, which become natural conversation starters on favorite books, podcasts, movies, and so on.

“This activity gives me the most energy, reinforces our values, and creates a natural connection for us,” he said.

Reinforce your values, consistently

According to the mastermind participants, many companies make the mistake of discussing core values during the hiring process and then forgetting to reinforce them day to day. You must consistently reinforce your values and culture, they said.

Antaplyan reinforces the company’s core values at every opportunity: “We talk about it during quarterlies, annual reviews. We talk about it during hiring, during stay interviews, and then exit interviews.”

Stevens agreed that creating opportunities for connection and shared pride in the work is ultimately the gold standard. 

“Aside from table stakes — like good compensation and benefits — what really matters is making people feel recognized and part of something bigger than themselves,” he said.

Ultimately, the group agreed that shaping culture is an ongoing process, requiring deliberate actions, honest feedback, and a commitment to evolving with the team’s needs. The collective wisdom: culture isn’t built overnight, but it is the secret sauce in a successful operation. As the old saying goes, “Take care of your people, and they’ll take care of your business.”