Culture by design: startup founders on creating an enduring company culture.

• Author: Nemelka, Heather Dunford
• Position: SILICON SLOPES

When the iconic Peter Drucker coined the phrase, "Culture eats strategy for breakfast," he could never have predicted how important it would be in today's workplace.

According to Deloitte's 2015 Global Human Capital Trends survey, employee engagement and culture issues rose to the top as the No. 1 challenge companies face around the world. A company's culture impacts engagement, productivity and employee turnover. Because statistics suggest that 25 percent of startups fail in the first year and 71 percent fail by the 10th year, startups are finding the need to focus more on culture than ever before.

Company culture is often ignored by founders as many startups find it difficult to define their culture at the onset. Functioning in high-growth mode with too little capital and too little time, startups shift their focus to "more important" things. Often too late, founders discover that culture determines sales success, healthy business relationships and the ability to execute.

"When culture comes from the founders and there are people now in the organization who haven't even met the founders, you start to get noise or corruption in the communication of the values to certain people," says Entrata founder Dave Bateman. "The bigger your company gets, if you're lazy about your culture, it will take on a life of its own, and you will end up with a culture that you didn't ever want that isn't a reflection of your own values."

Is it ever too late to change company culture? "Changing culture is hard," says Degreed CEO David Blake. "It's never too late but it absolutely is hard ... If you haven't been explicit in the way you're going to act and react and operate, then you've likely created an enormous amount of dissonance across the organization."

While it may never be too late, it is better to determine company culture by design rather than by default. No one knows this better than founders of tech companies in Silicon Slopes. Here is their advice for creating great company culture:

1. DO IT AND DON'T WAIT

   Blake suggests that just like there is the concept of tech debt in the startup world, there is also the concept of cultural debt or culture as capital. "Like so many other things, like your brand, whether you are explicit about it or not--it is being shaped," says Blake. "There's nothing perhaps that has helped us scale efficiently more than having articulated these principles very early on ... There are so many decisions that come up along the way...