Startups That Scale Culture Win: 5 Tactics to Maintain Culture as You Grow
Why Culture Needs to Scale with Growth:
Scaling a startup isn’t just about revenue, hiring, or product-market fit - it’s about keeping your culture strong as everything else changes. The companies that do this well build engaged, high-performing teams that stick around and contribute at a high level.
The ones that don’t? They struggle with team disengagement, high turnover, and a diluted mission that no longer feels aligned with the original vision.
Culture isn’t a nice-to-have: it’s a unique or even unfair business advantage.
Here are five proven tactics to maintain culture as you scale with real-world examples from Swiss and global startups that got it right.
What’s in This Article
Define & Reinforce Your Core Values (Early & Often)
Hire for Cultural “Add,” Not Just “Fit”
Scale Rituals That Reinforce Culture
Over-Communicate (Especially in Remote/Hybrid Setups)
Invest in Leadership That Role-Models Culture
Tactic 1️⃣
Define & Reinforce Your Core Values (Early & Often)
As a startup grows, team members join who weren’t there from the start. Without clear cultural guardrails, new hires will default to their previous work habits, diluting the culture rather than strengthening it.
Founders who scale culture successfully codify their values and expected behaviors early and embed them in hiring, onboarding, and daily decision-making.
💡 What to do: Document your core values and communicate them in every stage of the team experience: from job descriptions to feedback loops and leadership behavior. Culture should be lived, not just written on a wall.
🔹 Example: On (Swiss performance footwear brand) reinforces its culture by embedding its values and “spirits” - high performance, design, impact, community - into hiring, performance check-ins, and leadership training. The result? A strong, unified culture even as the company expanded globally.
Tactic 2️⃣
Hire for Cultural “Add,” Not Just Fit
Many startups make the mistake of hiring for cultural fit, which often leads to homogeneous thinking and a stagnant team.
Instead, hiring for cultural add means looking for people who align with your values but bring fresh perspectives that push the company forward.
💡 What to do: Beyond technical skills, assess whether candidates align with your values and will bring new strengths to the team. Define core behaviors that align with company values and test for them in interviews.
🔹 Example: Duolingo has a rigorous values-based hiring process to ensure every new team member adds to the culture rather than just blending in. This approach has kept its culture quirky and innovative even as it scaled.
📌 The Duolingo Handbook is a gem on how to do it the right way.
Tactic 3️⃣
Scale Rituals That Reinforce Culture
Small startups thrive on rituals - weekly team standups, founder-led town halls, or Friday drinks - but as the company grows, these traditions often fade away or become more complicated and impersonal.
Losing them can create cultural disconnect and fragmentation across new and old team members.
💡 What to do: Identify which rituals should scale, and adapt them for a growing team. Create new scalable traditions that reinforce culture, such as structured peer recognition programs or monthly team-building events.
🔹 Example: Oxyle exemplifies sustainability and innovation, among other values. They intentionally weave these into daily practices from product to materials to ways of working, always looking for how they can do better – how they can lessen their customer’s impact on the planet AND their own.
Tactic 4️⃣
Over-Communicate (Especially in Remote/Hybrid Setups)
As startups expand across multiple locations or remote teams, misalignment creeps in fast.
If communication isn’t deliberately structured, team members start feeling disconnected from leadership and the company vision.
💡 What to do: Set up structured, transparent communication channels such as weekly town halls, async video updates, and public documentation of key decisions. Encourage leadership to be visible and accessible.
🔹 Example: Swiss startup Frontify (brand management platform) ensures team alignment by documenting key processes and updates in a central hub, making it easy for all team members (whether remote or in-office) to stay informed.
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Tactic 5️⃣
Invest in Leadership That Role-Models Culture
Early-on, culture is always founder-led. Once a startup grows past 20-30 team members, the founder is no longer the only culture carrier.
Managers and team leads shape the daily experience, so if leadership doesn’t collectively reinforce culture, it will break down fast.
💡 What to do: Invest in leadership training, coaching, and structured feedback loops. Ensure managers understand and reinforce company values in hiring, performance reviews, and team dynamics.
🔹 Example: On’s leadership framework ensures that managers are trained to scale culture while empowering their teams. They actively encourage high performance and collaboration, making culture a leadership responsibility rather than just a founder-driven initiative.
What Now?
Scaling culture doesn’t happen passively: it’s something you build, reinforce, and evolve intentionally.
Startups that get this right create companies where people want to stay, grow, and contribute long-term.
If your startup is (on the brink of) growing fast, now is the time to assess whether your culture, leadership, and people processes are strong enough to scale with you.
➡️ Take a step back and identify which values, rituals, and systems need reinforcement before team alignment starts slipping.
➡️ Want to ensure your culture scales alongside your business growth? Download the Growth-Readiness Cheat Sheet*, a free one-page guide to help you evaluate your startup’s culture, leadership, and people processes - so you can scale without losing what makes your company great.
Happy Building!
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📊 *If you want to assess your culture and next steps more thoroughly, get in touch to learn more about a tool-based culture assessment and ppl.rampup culture workshop:
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