I think company culture is a product problem rather than an HR one. It has users, it has a feedback loop, it degrades if nobody maintains it, and it is largely determined by what leadership actually rewards rather than by what is written on a wall. That belief is why I gave four years to AOL’s Cultural Ambassador Programme alongside the day job, and why I keep finding myself on stages talking about it.

Four things guide how I work: customer, collaboration, commitment, and values that get used rather than framed. Three of the four I did not write. I inherited them, spent four years applying them to hiring decisions, and kept them because they went on working after the company that produced them had gone. That seems like the only endorsement a value can really earn.

Where these came from

AOL was spun out of Time Warner at the end of 2009, and as part of the turnaround that followed, Tim Armstrong commissioned an internal Culture Workgroup to codify what the company actually valued. Fifteen employees, drawn across levels, departments and geographies, wrote them in 2011. They became the CAP Core Values, after the Cultural Ambassador Programme that carried them.

They were not a poster exercise. The values were used in hiring, which is the only real test of whether a company means them, and they were the standard the Cultural Ambassadors assessed candidates against. I did not write them. I joined the programme in 2012, went on to lead it in the UK, and spent four years interviewing against them. By 2014 they had been published in a culture book, filled with employees explaining what each one meant in their actual job.

There were six:

  • We trust and root for each other. We win as a team.
  • We are in the business of helping people. Period.
  • We hire and empower smart people who love what they do.
  • We embrace change and a DNA of curiosity. We think big and take chances.
  • We say what we mean and we do what we say. We act with integrity.
  • We take fun seriously.

The culture book opened with a line I have never quite shaken: culture is defined by those who live it every day. AOL itself has since been absorbed and renamed twice over. The values outlasted the company, at least in my case, and I did not set out to keep them.

What I kept

Values are only useful if they are decision-making tools. Anything that cannot help you choose between two reasonable options is decoration. Taking each of the four in turn, a decade on and still in use, personally and professionally.

  • Customer

    Throughout my career I have kept a close interest in customer experience. It is the easiest thing to say and the first thing to get traded away when a roadmap comes under pressure.

    From we are in the business of helping people

  • Collaboration

    Trust each other. We win as a team. Product work fails far more often on the seams between functions than on the quality of any one of them.

    From we trust and root for each other

  • Commitment

    Say what you mean and do what you say. It sounds like the least demanding value on the list and is comfortably the hardest to hold to, because it costs you something every single time.

    From we say what we mean and we do what we say

  • Values

    Using values to make decisions is a deliberate choice to focus on what is important. Written down and never used, they are worse than having none, because everyone can see the gap.

    Mine, learned from watching the other three get used properly

How that plays out

I lead product teams with the intention of enabling them to innovate effectively, in line with business objectives that keep changing, across global and regional markets that rarely want the same thing. Mostly that means coaching rather than directing, and pushing teams to work with their stakeholders rather than around them.

The practical test of a culture is not the away day. It is what happens when something goes wrong, whether people tell you early, and whether the person who raises the problem is thanked or quietly blamed. Everything else is decoration.

I have also seen this from the other end. In 2016 I led a global programme to help colleagues at Microsoft Advertising, Yahoo! and AOL arrive at a shared set of values during a messy consolidation, which is an excellent way to find out how much of a culture is real and how much of it was just the office.

Employer branding in practice

From 2012 to 2016 I was a Cultural Ambassador at AOL alongside the day job, latterly leading the programme in the UK, and in 2016 I led a global programme to transform culture and help colleagues at Microsoft Advertising, Yahoo! and AOL settle on a shared set of values during a messy period of consolidation.

  • 120candidates I interviewed for cultural fit
  • 60events per office each year
  • 10external speaking engagements a year

I interviewed those 120 myself. I also wrote the training programmes and culture handbooks that made the assessment repeatable and handed it to the other ambassadors, who ran it across offices worldwide, so the programme as a whole will have assessed several thousand people. The work also meant persuading local managing directors to fund the thing, and getting employees to take ownership of the culture around them rather than waiting for it to be issued.

On the external side, I made content. AOL Engineers: Build Your Future ran on the corporate site and social channels, and the #ThisIsAOL and #IamAOL campaigns handed the official social accounts to employees for the day, which was as alarming as it sounds and worked rather well.

Video

And the other kind of culture

Culture in the smaller sense matters to me too, and I have been keeping an accidental record of mine since 2007. Every track I listen to gets logged, without my doing anything, by the one account I hold that has never once asked me to engage with it. It is the least performative thing on this website. What I actually listen to is a live feed, and it is frequently embarrassing.

Where I have said all this out loud, and the employer branding work behind it, is on the talks page. What I have actually built is over here, and the working history is under experience.