One of the simplest ways to do this is to make your employee handbook a “living, breathing document”, as opposed to a set of rules that never change. Meaning, you normalize challenging the rules and changing them when necessary within your company.

Start-ups fear having an employee handbook because they don’t want to present “rigid” rules into a creative culture. And they don’t want to restrict their employees.

But any business (including start-ups) should have an employee handbook. Because it helps everyone on your team get on the same page of how you do things. Especially your new hires when you’re scaling your team.

And when you communicate to your team: “This is how we do things, but we want you to tell us how to do things better,” you preserve (and even encourage) that innovative culture that makes start-ups thrive.

At our 50+ employee start-up, Trainual, we do this by making one of our values “No Red Tape.” Meaning, policy doesn’t supersede logic. And if there’s a more efficient way to do something, we want a team member to point it out.

Another simple way to maintain your start-up culture is to use top-rated playbook software to house the information you typically put in a handbook. If you’re unfamiliar with playbook software, it’s essentially a modernized, online version of an employee handbook (with a ton of additional features such as testing and tracking). This way, you avoid the stodgy, boring employee handbook. And you make the information fun and engaging to digest.

Start-ups thrive on breaking the status quo. So, using a handbook-disrupting tool (such as playbook software) fits in with the creative ideology that start-ups have in their culture.

Plus, playbook software makes it incredibly easy to update your handbook’s information. Which reinforces the “no red tape” ideology mentioned before. And a good playbook software platform will let other employees know when something has changed. So everyone stays up to date on the latest way of doing things.

But most importantly, playbook software helps maintain your start-up culture because it gives you a pathway for growth (which everyone involved in a start-up is a fan of). That pathway is created by having a system to scale your processes. Because as start-ups grow, people need to get up to speed with the best way of doing things (without having teammates spend hours on live training and walkthroughs). A playbook software makes it easier to do this by streamlining the onboarding and training processes for your start-up as it grows.

Over the last couple of years, we've been working hard to develop the #1 rated playbook software, Trainual. It’s built by a start-up for innovative start-ups. So you can rest easy knowing that Trainual won’t destroy your creative culture; in fact, it’ll facilitate it.

But don’t just take my word for it. Try it for free here! (No credit card required.)