Project: Building a Healthy and Fun Organizational Culture
Project: Building a Healthy and Fun Organizational Culture
When you need a compass, try making a culture deck!
DelightRoom's very first culture deck was born in 2022, and I'm here to introduce it!
I could just drop a link and brag, "Ta-da! We made a culture deck!" But knowing there are folks out there who are just as interested in or currently preparing their own culture decks, I thought I'd share our humble yet rewarding background story, the production process, the lessons we learned along the way, and a few little tips for making one :)
In Q3 of last year, creating a culture deck popped up as an action plan tied to the People & Culture team's OKR objective of improving internal branding. A culture deck?? I'd heard the term a lot, but why? And what for? 🤔
There were various reasons we started, but if I were to summarize why DelightRoom specifically needed one, it comes down to the following.
Purpose
External branding: There are still so many people who don't know about DelightRoom and Alarmy! Both our company and service are fantastic, so how can we communicate this pride more effectively? We want to provide high-quality information to prospective Delighters so they can resonate with our vision and mission, and we want to hire people who vibe with us!
Internal branding: We have a ton of internal materials, and we generally have a "gut feeling" about who we are, but isn't there a more effective way to help all Delighters look in the same direction? We needed to sync on our identity and success formulas, and we needed a compass for the direction we should head in the future!
Guide for a flexible organizational culture: Our organizational culture possesses both clarity and flexibility, which means moments constantly arise where we need to make ad-hoc decisions. We needed a guide that everyone could check and utilize together in those exact moments!
Production Process
With the definitions set above, we kicked off the culture deck project last November. At first, I was completely at a loss... I looked up references from other companies, studied them, read tons of books... but the more I did, the more I thought, "Ah... these are all cool and great, but they don't fit us." So what do you do then? You just make your own! 😎 We had plenty of materials, so I decided to find a partner who could craft this into something impactful from a user's perspective!
That's how we fatefully met a highly professional, extroverted agency called AfterMoment (hereafter AM).
We looked into several agencies, but I had a gut feeling during the first meeting! These guys are the real deal!!!! In just a one-hour meeting, they scanned us up and down like an X-ray. They thought from the perspective of the users reading the culture deck while instantly pinpointing concepts that would perfectly suit DelightRoom. I was already excited.
From this point on, our culture deck project started taking steps forward and gaining momentum. The good news was that we didn't need to create the content for the culture deck from scratch—we already had all the necessary materials! But how on earth were we going to organize them? Trimming and refining turned out to be way harder than creating something new! I decided to use this opportunity to do a massive spring cleaning and organize all our internal data (which naturally forced me to study up). 🧐
Also, since we were already at it, instead of the company deciding things unilaterally, we held a mini culture workshop with our Delighters to sync on our core values and ideal candidate profile. I kind of expected it, but seeing all the Delighters share similar opinions made me realize once again that our identity is truly working well. It was a heartwarming moment. 🥺
At this moment, our partner AM worked on pagination—dividing sections and adding subtitles to map out what themes we'd use to tell our story. From then on, we started filling out a massive number of pages together.
Filling it out, revising, revising again, revising yet again, deleting, and starting over... nailing down the design concept, discussing it, looking at references together... "Can we do this?" "How about that?" It was an endless relay of ping-pong 🏓. Towards the very end, when I mentioned I wanted to get feedback from our Delighters as well, the CEO of AM apparently had a minor heart attack. So I confidently told him!
"Don't worry, we're alignment masters, so there probably won't be any wild deviations or massive overhauls like you're fearing. Heh."
The AM CEO was so impressed by this that he later wrote in a Brunch post that Delighters are absolute legends 😎~ (Check out the AfterMoment Brunch post)
After two solid months of hard work, the online version of our culture deck web file was finally born~ If it had ended there, this blog post probably would have come out much sooner, right? But we decided to add our own special touch to make it different from other companies' culture decks: we decided to print it as a physical book. (At this point, I was internally muttering, "Past me, why did you do that??" 🤦♀️)
I'll neatly tuck the full link to the online version at the bottom of this post for those curious! Stick around just a little longer for the rest of the production story :)
Since it was my first time making a book, my soul almost left my body again, but through agency recommendations and our own independent searching, we finally found a printing company called Arest that was a perfect fit for us!
I thought it was all over once we handed over the print files, but I was wrong.
What paper for the inner pages? How about the epoxy? What colors? What kind of hardcover binding? How many millimeters? Glue it, fold it, or stitch it...? Huh???? There were endless moments of choice left. (I wasn't the only one who thought everything looked the same, right?) On top of that, to get the exact results we wanted, we had to go through a press check process. Oh my!!! Turns out the printer was located in the Paju Book City~ We had to travel all the way to Paju... from Gangnam... Well whatever, let's! go! 🔥
After finishing the press check and going through cutting -> epoxy -> coating -> binding, the hardcover culture deck finally arrived in our arms. Is this what being deeply moved feels like? The design concept captures the feeling of a sunrise 🌞! Can you feel the texture of DelightRoom slowly rising from the horizon and being dyed in morning colors 👀?
And with that, the grand journey of creating the culture deck came to an end. Now that it's made, as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, we have to make excellent use of it so it achieves its purpose, right?
If you're curious about our hardcover culture deck or want a copy for yourself, please apply via the link below! We'll gift it to the first 00 people :)
👉 Apply for a hardcover culture deck
Lessons
To wrap things up, I'd like to share a few personal reflections and lessons I learned during the culture deck project, even if they aren't anything grandiose.
As always, the most important thing is the purpose! The moment you forget it, your ship sails into a mountain!
: We had so much we wanted to include~ So much to say... and before we knew it, it was a chaotic, disorganized mess. What is this!!! 🤯 But every time that happened, we reminded ourselves of our original purpose, which helped us stay on track and craft it exactly as intended.While the expected effects after making a culture deck are definitely there, the value gained during the creation process is massive as well.
: It was a precious time to think deeply about and truly understand who we are. They say things become more powerful when you express them in words rather than just keeping them in your head, right? This was an experience where I truly felt that.The power of collective intelligence is immense. Especially when combined with alignment masters, the synergy explodes.
: When I was brainstorming, organizing, writing, and proofreading on my own, there were so many blind spots. Is this right? Is this the best? That's when I thought, as mentioned earlier, we have great alignment, so let's get some help! I sent out an SOS to the Delighters, and not only did the quality skyrocket, but all the contexts and meanings became much clearer and cleaner. I'd like to take this moment to send a special thanks. (Alarmy's ancestor Jay, research fairy Lucy, business context god Sean, spelling genius Chan, and design concept master Bom—thank you all~! 😘)A solid base is more important than color makeup to ensure your makeup doesn't ruin over time or in the water.
: Working on this, I constantly thought about how people, systems, services, and environments are all important in a company, but what ultimately encompasses them all is culture! We've made our base even stronger this time around, so it will never crumble!!!! 😠Meeting a great partner determines the quality.
: We were incredibly lucky to find partners who took pride in the project as if it were their own and mixed in their expertise to push the output quality to its absolute peak. I'd like to express my infinite gratitude to CEO Park Chang-sun of AfterMoment and CEO Kwak Min-ju of Arest. 🙇♀️
And just like that, over two months, DelightRoom's first culture deck was born. It's not just a one-and-done deal—our culture deck will grow and evolve alongside our own growth, so please look forward to it and show it lots of love~!
I'll be back with more news from DelightRoom, where fun things happen all the time :D
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