📖 This article is part 5 of wider series on “How to build a winning startup culture” – you can check-out earlier instalments here.
Healthy cultures tend to correlate with clear, unfiltered communication. Early on, a brief conversation can resolve most misalignment; later, the organisation becomes whatever its communication patterns allow. The founder’s job is to make openness habitual, to ensure information moves without friction, and to set a norm where trust and candour are baseline expectations.
One of Sarwa’s core values was trust, and they put it into practice when deciding on work policies post-COVID. Mark Chahwan recalls the decision to allow remote and flexible work:
“We were like, we trust you… work whenever you want. People really love that trust of feeling like they own their environment”.
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By trusting employees to do the right thing instead of micromanaging, they saw productivity and morale improve.
Trusting your team means being transparent with them, too. Mohamed Al Fayed’s approach at Grubtech is almost extreme:
“We’re going to be excessively transparent with our customers, with our employees, with our partners – to a point of fault”.
Day to day, that meant no literal closed doors, shared metrics, and a default assumption that information should be accessible. This transparency signals that the company operates as one team, not a set of tiers. People are trusted with the reality of the situation and expected to handle it responsibly.
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