Why Company Culture is Vital for Business and Client Success?

Imagine a scenario where staff excel in their roles and actively engage in activities that consistently enrich their professional growth, seamlessly enhancing the quality of service delivered to your business’s valued clients.

That’s not just a pipe dream — that’s the kind of scenario that a well-built, well-maintained company culture can create. 

Today, we’re exploring company culture and why it’s so important for employee and client success. Plus, we’ll also give you some insight into our culture here at Cheesecake Labs. 

What is company culture?

Company culture (sometimes called “organizational culture”) isn’t just one thing. It’s an overarching concept that includes a company’s values, norms, attitudes, approaches, and practices.

Think about your company culture as how work gets done within your business — it’s all the little things that add up to create your unique approach. 

This can include:

• Your company values and mission
• How you communicate (internally and externally)
• How you make decisions
• How to support, empower, and celebrate employees

All of these things come together to create your unique organizational culture.

Why is culture important in a company?

There are many different ways that your company’s culture contributes to your company’s success. Here are just a few key things to keep in mind about company culture:

Company culture impacts employee engagement and performance

Good company culture helps improve employee engagement and overall performance. Research by SHRM shows that companies with good culture have employees who are a massive 790% more likely to feel satisfied at work. And those same employees also said they were more loyal to their organization and less likely to want to search for a new job. 

Plus, Gallup found that employees who are highly engaged at work are 14% more productive, meaning they accomplish more and do it more efficiently than employees with low engagement.

So, building a strong company culture helps improve the employee experience and boost productivity. 

Company culture and values impact customer experience and success

We’re strong believers in the idea that taking care of the people who work for you means taking care of your clients and customers by extension.

After all, happier employees will produce better work, making your clients happier. 

In fact, PwC found that organizations with a distinctive company culture were 89% more likely to see an increase in customer satisfaction and 48% more likely to see an increase in revenue. 

So, it’s clear that investing in your corporate culture isn’t a luxury — it’s a strategic imperative that directly impacts your team’s performance and the success of your business.

A look at Cheesecake Labs’ company culture

At Cheesecake Labs, we’ve seen over the years that creating a value-driven culture has been essential to our success.

Let’s take a look at the frameworks we use to invest time and energy into our Cakers (employees) and then pass the benefits of our culture onto our clients. 

Dedicated time for upskilling

We allocate five hours every month for each employee to focus on upgrading their skills. This means they get to learn new things and deliver better results for our clients.

How do we do this? Through carefully curated rituals, like regular one-to-one sessions with their direct tech leader, a culture of constructive feedback, expert forums for innovation and technical discourse, and more. 

1:1 meetings: Personal development and high-level guidance 

During one-on-one sessions with an expert technical leader, Cakers receive personalized guidance and mentorship to address challenges they may be facing in their current projects. These meetings help us quickly tackle any issues and ensure we deliver a premium service to our clients.

Bakeries: Technical forums 

Bakeries are our version of chapters in a chapter and guild structure and are rooted in the art of service definition. For example, because we build mobile apps, we have a Mobile Bakery. This approach ensures that, no matter what a client has asked us to create, we’re building a collaborative environment around that activity. This helps us share knowledge and add value to our current and future clients.

Guilds: Exploring culture and tech innovation

Innovation is the lifeblood of any successful organization. That’s why we facilitate Guilds around specific initiatives. They give us the chance to discuss emerging industry trends and encourage Cakers to explore new avenues and innovations. For example, we have Guilds focusing on things like Blockchain, IoT, Diversity & Inclusion. This commitment to staying ahead of the curve is a cornerstone of our approach and ties directly into one of our company values: Collaborate and help others grow.

All Hands Meetings: Getting everyone on the same page 

We hold regular All Hands Meetings that include everyone in the company. These meetings serve as vital touchpoints for aligning teams, fostering transparency, and promoting a shared understanding of the company’s goals and direction.

Plus, they cultivate a culture of accountability and collective ownership, ensuring we practice and exhibit these values in our daily interactions with our clients.

Special Events: Promoting wellness to support top-notch delivery 

We regularly hold special events centered around specific topics, holidays, and more. Some past and recurring events cover topics like LGBTQIA+ Pride, mental health, celebrating women, and physical well-being.

These events foster a safe space for meaningful conversations and help us cultivate a culture of empathy and understanding. 

And these shared moments in our community help improve our relationships and facilitate more meaningful conversations. This helps us collaborate better day-to-day and build a culture of mutual respect.

Here’s how our company culture contributes to our customer’s success

Those are just a few things we do to build a company culture that promotes continuous improvement, transparent communication, and quality service delivery. But what real-world impact do these practices have on the clients who work with us?

Here’s how our company culture has helped some of our clients sharpen their competitive edge in the market: 

Our bakeries led to innovations for MoneyGram

At the Bakery, our service is not just about the individuals assigned to your project — it’s about a collaborative space where any Caker (even those not directly involved) can contribute to its success. 

For example, our team discussed testing methodologies at one of our Bakeries. This discussion led to a new innovative approach that enhanced code quality for our client, MoneyGram.

Developed by @CheesecakeLabs in partnership with @MoneyGram, the solution will officially debut in Q1 2024 and will be available as a fee-free service until June 2024.#Meridian2023 #cryptowallet #MoneyGram
⤵️🧵 pic.twitter.com/y7RgWuzieN

— Cheesecake Labs (@CheesecakeLabs) September 26, 2023

Because MoneyGram had support from Cakers directly working on their project and insight and ideas from additional specialists, we helped them build a higher-quality product.

Our Blockchain Guild helped Stellar create a GitBook and squash bugs

Our Blockchain Guild has led to some unique benefits for our client, Stellar. For example, the Cheesecake Labs Blockchain Guild now curates a Stellar-focused GitBook.

This comprehensive GitBook includes documentation revolving around the Stellar network, meticulously assembled by our blockchain guild. Every month, these experts meet for hour-long sessions to delve into discussions and promote best practices for enhancing projects within the company. 

What’s more, our former Blockchain Guild Master, Fabricius, discovered a bug that greatly impacted Stellar’s business. They even issued a statement disclosing that the bug discovered in Stellar Core v20.1.0 “could impact applications and services that use fee bumps for Soroban transactions.”

The Guild’s close attention to Stellar’s technology proved to be an invaluable resource for Stellar, offering them a new level of insight and support.

Our Diversity & Inclusion Guild can help improve client success

Our Diversity & Inclusion Guild is made up of Cakers from various teams within Cheesecake Labs and works to discuss diversity and inclusion across our organization and our larger community.

This includes sharing experiences, lessons we’ve learned, and best practices when it comes to diversity. During monthly meetings, the Guild aims to empower Cakers on diversity and inclusion topics from unconscious bias to equality, equity, and affirmative actions to empathy and psychological safety, and many more. 

Exploring diversity and inclusion in depth is beneficial both for Cheesecake Labs and for our clients — and research supports this. Here are a few key takeaways:

• Millennials already constitute 50% of the workforce and tend to actively look for prospective employers to offer diversity and inclusion programs meaning that companies that offer D&I programming can capture the top talent.
• Organizations with diverse teams make better business decisions up to 87% of the time and improve team decision results by 60%.
• Teams with diverse backgrounds can better adapt to their customer’s needs and requirements — a particularly useful skill when creating apps and needing to understand the needs of end-users. 

With all these statistics in mind, this Guild’s mission dovetails perfectly with another one of our core values: Respect people and embrace differences.

Not only does learning about diversity help bring us together as a community and improve our relationships and productivity within Cheesecake Labs, but it also opens the door for better communication and collaboration with our clients from all walks of life.

The better we can communicate and empathize with our clients, the better we can help them reach their goals.

Our clients help us learn and grow, too!

During one of our All Hands Meetings, we had the pleasure of hosting Stephen, the Product Advisor for our client, CaribCoin. Stephen shared insights about his software development experiences with us.

Since then, our connection has grown even stronger, and Stephen has become a valued Blockchain consultant for our organization. He brings his wealth of expertise and insights to enhance the success of our client projects.

You’re not just hiring one team of Cakers — you get every Caker’s knowledge and expertise

You’re not just getting a team when you hire a Cheesecake team for your project. You’re also getting specialized internal support from the rest of the Cakers in the company. 

Our client, School Journey, quickly saw the benefits of our collaborative culture. During the early stages of their project, the allocated Software Architect noted a lack of defined development workflow, which could cause problems as the project progressed.

He took advantage of a 1:1 meeting with his technical leader, an Engineering Manager, to discuss the issue and its potential negative effects. 

With support from this Engineering Manager and the rest of the company, we quickly found a solution. Our Engineering Manager promptly connected him with specialized colleagues from other areas within Cheesecake Labs.

Together, they developed a workflow model that saved School Journey valuable time and allowed them to focus on strategic business initiatives. School Journey relied on our top-notch team to prevent problems and provide productive solutions. 

Experience the benefits of Cheesecake Labs’ culture firsthand

It’s all well and good to tell you how our culture improves outcomes for our clients, but we’d much rather show you!

If you’re interested in learning more about how our unique culture can help you with your projects and ideas, we’d love to help.

We offer different services and approaches to development projects based on your needs. Looking to add some pre-vetted, highly skilled experts to your team for a project? We can help you with staff augmentation and all the benefits it offers.

Or maybe you’re looking for a whole team to help you bring your ideas to life. We offer a dedicated team approach that could be just what you need.

Send us a message today, and we can start finding the perfect solution for your project!