{
  "id": 2950458,
  "title": "How to nurture a great company culture as you scale up",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/24/how-to-nurture-a-great-company-culture-as-you-scale-up",
  "topic": "business",
  "section": "Business",
  "published": "2026-08-24T05:00:00.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Fast Company",
    "slug": "fast-company",
    "url": "https://www.fastcompany.com/91591352/how-to-nurture-a-great-company-culture-as-you-scale-up"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Maintaining a strong company culture while expanding is challenging as businesses grow. Complexity increases, and the gap between executives and front-line employees widens. New hires receive guidance from staff who may lack the same passion as the founders. Senior leadership must rely on impersonal emails and memos to communicate, weakening bonds with the workforce. As companies expand, they often form new departments, locations, and layers of management, increasing the risk of losing the senior leadership's vision.\n\nHowever, there are ways to preserve a company's culture as it scales. Southwest Airlines, Patagonia, Ritz-Carlton, and Zappos are examples of companies that have successfully kept their culture intact. The author, with extensive experience in branding, recommends three key elements to help companies anchor their culture as they grow: an inspiring purpose, crystal-clear vision, and compelling core values.\n\nAn inspiring purpose clarifies why the company exists beyond making money. When employees understand the organization's \"why,\" they are more likely to feel emotionally connected, find meaning in their work, and focus on a shared goal. For instance, Nike's purpose is to inspire and innovate in athletes' lives, driving innovation and success even as the company scaled. Having a purpose that resonates with employees can boost engagement, with research showing that those with a strong sense of purpose at work are 5.6 times more likely to be engaged in their jobs.\n\nA crystal-clear vision explains where the company is headed. A clear, specific, and easy-to-understand vision helps employees grasp the organization's direction and fosters a sense of purpose. JFK's challenge to NASA to land a man on the moon exemplifies a compelling vision that unified the workforce in pursuit of a singular goal.\n\nCompelling core values clarify how the organization will achieve its vision and how employees should behave throughout the journey. Shared organizational values provide meaning and purpose to work, resulting in better performance. Southwest Airlines' core values—friendly service, low-cost travel, and employee satisfaction—have contributed to its exceptional customer service, ranking first in JD Power's customer satisfaction among economy travelers for five consecutive years.",
  "summary": "The larger your business grows, the more difficult it is to maintain a highly engaged culture where employees are excited about the work they do and are committed to helping the organization meet its business and branding goals. Why? Because growth automatically introduces complexity in the workplace and causes the distance between the boardroom and the front line to grow as workplace head count…",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}