When an organisation goes through a period of growth it usually means an increase in headcount. But with more people, this can bring about changes to culture and how aligned teams feel as the organisation scales. The impact can be both positive and negative, but it’s important to keep culture in mind during growth or it could change and evolve into something you don’t want.Â
If you started out as a scrappy startup of just 10 people, your culture will inevitably change when you’re looking at 100+ employees. Similarly, going from 200 to 500 employees will have a huge impact on your workplace.Â
No HR leader wants to hear long-serving employees say things like “it didn’t used to be like this” or “I prefer how things used to be.” As you grow this negativity can fester and create a culture of old vs new. Instead it’s important to communicate and take every employee on the same journey so they know why things are the way they are. It’s about evolution. But that evolution requires conscious leadership.
Below you’ll find 10 ways you can effectively manage culture changes throughout your business’s growth and change.
1. Make it a priority
Firstly, you can’t assume that culture will take care of itself as you grow, and that things will be like they always have been but just with more people. Big increases in headcount will change the dynamics of a business so it’s up to you to define the type of workplace you want to build during the growth phase. And then you need to create actions that will directly impact and shape your business towards your desired culture. Without making it a priority and leaving culture unaddressed, the potential old vs new culture mentioned above could just happen organically.
2. Keep culture front of mind for employees
As your company gets bigger, your employees, line managers and even the SLT can be so busy that they lose sight of keeping culture a priority. So you need to regularly communicate your values so they’re clear and reflected in everyday actions and decisions. For example, don’t make reminders about culture a last-minute job on a Friday – add them as meeting agenda points instead so they’re given a good amount of time and consideration. Â
3. Communicate and repeat and repeat
Growth will inevitably create uncertainty within a workplace, so to avoid any negativity or fears creeping in as employees wonder what’s going to happen to their job, their team and their company you need to communicate to them. And do it regularly over and over again. If employees see repeated messages and behaviours from leaders that help calm concerns it helps build trust, keep people aligned and lets them focus on work rather than the rumour mill.
4. Listen to employee feedback
As well as communicating regularly to employees, it’s just as important that you’re listening as often. Set up regular ways for your people to share feedback to you about how they feel about the growth and culture in general. This could be monthly surveys (once a year won’t be enough to keep track of sentiment during growth) or confidential feedback tools that are available 24/7. You can then use the insights from the feedback to see how aligned people currently are so you can adjust your approach as your business scales up.
5. Give managers more support
Line managers can play a key part in a workplace’s culture so it’s important not to overlook them in the process. Ensure you’re investing in development for line managers so they have the right confidence and skillset to support teams through the growth.
Gallup research shows that 70% of the difference in engagement levels within a team comes down to the line manager. Which means:
- How managers behave day to day is the biggest influence on engagement.
- Simple, repeatable actions such as recognising effort, giving regular feedback, and genuinely listening matter far more than one-off big gestures.
- Trust, fairness, and clear communication create the conditions where people feel valued and motivated.
In summary, when you lead with consistency and clarity, engagement follows and managers can identify new ways of working and spot signs earlier amongst their direct reports which could have an effect on culture.
6. Protect what makes your culture special
As your organisation grows and processes and structures become more and more complex, it’s vital you don’t lose the behaviours, energy, ways of working and even humour that made you successful in the first place. If you find things are changing too much (and if your employees are giving you feedback that things could be improved) you need to act on them fast before they become the norm. By then it could be too late, and the fast paced way of working or the way employees came together and socialised could be too far removed from what you had to bring it back.
7. Introduce structure without adding unnecessary bureaucracy
Going from a start-up to a larger established business will mean it’s essential to add in more formalised ways of working. It’s needed to ensure things remain organised when you’re adding more people into the mix. But what you need to avoid is adding in too much red tape and bureaucracy as it could slow things down. Making things seem harder and slower than they were before will just foster frustrations and make people think, “it didn’t used to be like this.”
8. Hire for culture
When you’re hiring all these new people, make sure that as part of the recruitment and interview process you’re looking for people who align with your values.Â
It’s important to assess how someone will contribute to the culture you want to protect and strengthen. That means asking questions about collaboration, feedback, accountability, and how they support others, not just how well they perform individually.Â
Ultimately, thoughtful hiring helps ensure growth strengthens your culture rather than unintentionally reshaping it in ways that are hard to undo later.
9. Recognise and retain culture role models
As mentioned above in point 6, protecting your culture is important and one way you can do this is to identify the people in your organisation who live your values and positively influence others. Once you’ve identified them you should look at ways in which they can be retained, recognised (by methods like Hive Fives), rewarded and promoted, as this will help demonstrate to other employees the type of culture and values that are appreciated.Â
10. Help people grow with the organisation
Growth doesn’t just create new roles, it changes existing ones. Responsibilities expand, decision-making shifts, and the skills that made someone successful early on may not be the same ones they need as the organisation scales. If this isn’t addressed, capable people can start to feel left behind or quietly disengage.
Be explicit about how roles may evolve and have regular, forward-looking conversations about what growth could look like for each individual. This doesn’t mean promising promotions, but it does mean outlining new skills to build, broader responsibilities to take on, or alternative paths for progression as the organisation matures.
Just as importantly, equip managers to support this transition. Managers should be confident in having honest conversations about change, offering stretch opportunities, and signposting learning before people feel stuck. When people can see how they personally fit into the next phase of growth, uncertainty turns into momentum, and scaling feels like something happening with them, not to them.
Next steps and employee voice
You can use these 10 tactics to help guide you to create your next steps as you continue to grow. Ensuring you’re listening to and monitoring your employee voice during growth is really important and to help you we’ve grouped together all our resources around change management right here – we hope you find them useful.
