What We Learned by Auditing our Company's Culture

Tile’s culture is purpose-built to create high employee engagement and strong company performance. Together, we designed a place where our employees can thrive, grow, and align their strengths to drive company impact and their careers.

Leading Life @ Tile is Lissa Minkin, our VP, People and Workplace. Before joining the company, Lissa built her career at companies like Facebook, eBay, and Time Warner. Since joining in 2018, employee engagement at Tile has increased by 37% and, according to CultureAmp, is now nearly 10% higher than the industry average for tech companies. In fact, 97% of our employees rated Tile a Great Place to Work in the 2021 GPTW Survey for Bay Area Small and Medium Business. 

She’s often asked to contribute to industry talks and discussion panels. Recently, she was invited to be a guest on The HR Roundtable, a club on Clubhouse where influential HR leaders discuss the topics impacting people operations and companies today. They were discussing organizational culture when Randy Knaflic (@randyknaflic), the host of the club, brought up the topic of a culture audit--what it is and why to do one--which in turn inspired Lissa to bring the idea to Tile. 

What is a Culture Audit?

A culture audit is a bottoms-up reflection on the everyday things that make up a shared culture, such as: how the group thinks, what language they use, and how they behave. In our audit, we met as a company in various breakout groups to discuss the following eight core elements of our own culture, including:

• Beliefs

• Rituals

• Artifacts

• Symbols

• Stories

• Norms

• Food

• Language

The reason for doing a culture audit can vary by organization. At some companies, it’s a quickstart way to identify areas of opportunity for engaging and empowering their employees. At Tile, we have a bottom-up culture that was built by all of us, so our goal was to codify the pieces that make up the Tile experience to make it easier for Tilers to keep the culture we love alive as we scale our team. 

In the following sections, we’ll review the highlights from our audit in every category, including behind-the-scenes trivia and quotes from Tilers. Read on to learn more about what makes Tile’s culture a culture of transparency, inclusion, and impact. 

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Beliefs

What we accept as true or real; our firmly held opinion or conviction.

There’s a famous Chinese proverb, attributed to Lao Tzu, that reminds us of the power of our thoughts: “Watch your thoughts, as they become your words. Watch your words, as they become your actions...” it goes. At Tile, we have no shortage of beliefs that empower us to be our best selves at work:

• We believe that our values are our North Star,

• And that everyone’s voice matters because good ideas come from everywhere. 

• We believe that Tile gives us a Small Company Experience with Big Company Opportunities,

• And in punching above our weight class and standing up to a challenge.

• We believe in meaningful feedback and telling the truth, even when it’s hard.

• We believe in respecting and celebrating each other’s uniqueness and implementing measurable actions for inclusivity. 

• We believe in personal choice, and we believe in our team.

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Rituals

A series of actions or types of behaviors that we regularly follow.

Rituals are essentially habits, which makes them almost too easy to set and forget. But rituals are a key piece of the company culture puzzle. Rituals show up in many of our daily tasks, and they have an impact on the outcomes of nearly everything--like our products, people, and culture. Below are some of the rituals at Tile that keeps our company growing and learning: 

• Rituals that connect us to our values, like our quarterly Values Awards and how we prioritize Company Questions and Thank You’s at All Hands.

• Rituals that connect our people to each other, like our monthly birthday celebrations, making new friends through #random-coffees, and sharing personal milestones with each other in team meetings and on Slack.

• Rituals that connect us to our business, like our bi-weekly All Hands meetings, frequent team and cross-functional standups, and regular transparency around opportunities for job mobility.

• Rituals that connect us to our problem-solving mindset, like the annual Tile Hackathon where Tilers get two days to focus on innovative new ways to solve problems for our customers, and our frequent sharing of how customers use Tile through Tile Tales.

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Artifacts

The human-made objects that represent our culture or history.

An artifact of company culture carries much more value than its cost. As one of the only things on this list that you can physically see and touch, artifacts are a tangible reminder of the company culture and how it came to be. Tile’s artifacts are relatively straightforward, but their significances run deep:

• The Tile Logo and the iconic Tile shape, affectionately known as the “squircle.” 

• The awards, stickers, booklets, mugs, and zoom backgrounds that remind us of our core values. 

• Our company swag, like our new hire welcome boxes, product launch, and new office launch t-shirts.

“As someone that started remote due to the pandemic, I think the welcome swag was great. Helped me feel like part of the team even though we weren’t in the office.” - Justin Michaud 

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Symbols

The things that represent something else, especially something representing something abstract.

Like artifacts, symbols are usually a simple visual reminder of something more meaningful. At Tile, our symbols are rooted in our values, purpose, and people:

• The Tile Values symbolize how we act and interact with each other and our business.

• We use Famous Finders, like Holmes, Watson, and even Scooby-Doo as the names of our meeting rooms to symbolize our commitment to finding.

• Our illustration of Tile holding hands with American and Canadian Bacon symbolizes us as one company across multiple countries.

• Hummingbirds represent our lightheartedness and humor. What started as lighthearted trivia from our CTO at the end of All Hands (to make it a little more fun) grew to become a company-wide appreciation for this extremely flappy bird.

“Did you know? The Cuban bee hummingbird is the smallest bird in the world, measuring two inches long and weighing less than a dime. They get their name because they’re so small they’re often mistaken for bees.”

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Stories

The tales of past events in our company’s lifetime.

In any culture, the stories that are passed down over time are a reflection of the group's most significant moments together. Whether they’re about challenging obstacles, hailing victories, or even a not-so-inside-joke amongst friends, our stories are a spoken record of how we were shaped:

• The Founder’s Story: Tile is a company founded on the principle of helping people, beginning with our founder who created this company to help his forgetful wife. 

• Tile Tales: These are the stories from our customers about how they lost and found their things with Tile. These stories connect us to our customers, remind us where we’ve been, and help inform future choices we make around our products and services. 

• Our Culture Story: Back in 2018, Tile employees and leadership made an intentional decision to build a culture that we can all be proud of. In a recent Engagement Survey, Tile employees cite company-wide transparency, mutual respect between coworkers, and trust in leadership as a few of the primary reasons they love working at Tile.

• Sharon’s Story: When one of our coworkers felt like Tile could be doing more to support social justice through corporate social responsibility, she stood up in an All-Hands and said bravely, “Do more.” Today, she inspires our corporate social responsibility coalition focused on implementing actionable tactics for change.

Bonus Story: Could you use a laugh? Ask Lissa or Mike Z: “Where’s the effing Poke?”

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Norms

Our typical standards and patterns of social behavior.

Norms essentially dictate how a group of people expect to interact with each other. For social groups, norms naturally form over time. In an organization, norms have to be created intentionally to promote a culture that’s aligned with our values. At Tile, our norms are set up to ensure transparency, effective decision making, and work-life effectiveness:

• Our Tile Values are foundational to everything we do at Tile, especially across all our people practices, such as hiring, performance reviews, 360 feedback, quarterly awards, and more.

• We’re committed to our culture of transparency, which we support with ad hoc and anonymous questions at All Hands, and regular surveys to support employee wellbeing.

• We’re data-driven in our decision making and we have a bias for action.

• We respect work-life effectiveness with personal lunch hours, no meetings blocks on Thursday mornings, and flexible work hours that we call Tile Flex. We put family first.
  
  

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Food

Anything edible that is associated with our culture.

Ah, food. Does this even need an introduction? Every culture has the foods that sustain them and Tile is no different. We love food and for us, it creates community:

• Our monthly Whiskey Wednesday and Cheesy Thursdays, where we get together over drinks and snacks in the company kitchen.

• Our catered lunches that always feature food from around the world, and specific international food days to celebrate cultural diversity.

• If there’s extra lunch, we don’t waste it. Tilers can take it home for later, and the rest is donated to shelters in our area.

• We celebrate special occasions together, almost always with food. Like new hire lunches, birthday parties, and even personal milestones like the birth of a child or an engagement. 

• Frankly, we’re a bunch of foodies. If you’re like us, you’ll want to join the #foodies or #boba-order slack to get your fill.

• “Kelly’s Award-Winning Queso” is practically our love language. Two crockpots are never enough. 

“When I started at Tile in 2017 I wanted to do something special for the team. I made my famous Texas Queso Dip and it was a hit! I made it again, another smash hit! Everyone loved it so much I submitted my dip to the University of Texas Exes Alumni Association 2018 Chili and Queso Cookoff where I won 3rd place!” - Kelly Wengert Chan

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Language

Our unique ways of communicating.

The more original language we create and share, the more unique our group’s culture becomes. Here are a few phrases you might hear if you were hanging out with some Tilers:  

• Tilers: What we call ourselves.

• Tileversaries: Tiler work anniversaries. 

• Tile Tales: Lost and found stories from our customers.

• Tile for Life: Our company mission and vision. 

• Small but Mighty: How we describe ourselves.  

• Fountains not Drains: Our way of describing our focus on solutions, rather than problems.

• Belonging @ Tile: Our Employee Resource Group dedicated to inclusion. 

• Our Values: Our guiding principles that define how we show up at work.

At Tile, we are certain that a strong company culture increases people’s career satisfaction and drives better business outcomes. We’re proud of the company we’ve built and look forward to continuing to grow together. The results from this culture audit remind us of how far we’ve come and offer us insights into how to build a better future for our company and our community. 

“Tile, hands down, has the best culture I’ve ever seen at the companies I’ve worked for. I’m glad we are not stopping there and that we continue to audit and improve our culture to make it even better” - Amir Pakzadian

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