Pinterest and its culture.

What is organisational culture?

Culture in an organisation means how people do things repeatedly, consistently, observable patterns of behaviour. (Watkins, 2013) How people feel, think or believe. It also focuses on the forces that shape organisational behaviour. The outcome of this is ethics, how they make a decision, and how they operate the organisation.

The organisational culture may decide trends of organisation, such as the culture in which most people tend to ignore the issues in the organisation, it will be a culture of inaction. And in the future become a standard of human behaviour in that organisation. The pattern of organisational behaviour that emerges from a corporate culture can either be a supporting factor or an obstacle to the operation of the organisation, especially the decision to solve issues. Culture affects the form and content of general-person relationships within the organisation.

About Pinterest

Pinterest, Inc. is an American social media company. The company was founded by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp in December 2009. (Meng, 2019) It is a social network platform using a pin to bookmark their online content. Pinterest has 300 million active users per month as of August 2019. (Fiegerman, 2019) Pinterest is available in more than 27 languages. It makes money by digital advertising market competing with Facebook, Instagram, Google and Amazon. The company grow slower than all of its competitors in the industry.

The culture of Pinterest is far away from all its competitors in the social media industry, where they actively encourages their employees to confront and debate. For example, the CEO of Amazon asked employees to “disagree and commit” which means, employees are welcome to disagree, but when they made a decision, they have to do their best to achieve it. (Weise, 2017) Pinterest has always wanted to be a different company. Kent Buller, one of the Pinterest’s manager until late 2017, said “They wanted it to be truly progressive. As long as you focus on your business goals, we will make a world-class experience.” (Rodriguez, 2019) This provides a culture where people can do meaningful work without anyone being in disagreement. But the philosophy sometimes backfired.

Problem with Pinterest

Pinterest seeks up to $9 billion in valuation, $3 billion different from their expectation of $12 billion in 2017. (Walko, 2019) The company shows slow growth but steady: It has $756 million for its revenue in 2018, up 60% from its previous year. However, early investor, Andreessen Horowitz, expected $2.8 billion as he said in 2015 presentation. From the interviews of Pinterest’s staff at many levels, they shared some experiences working in the company. It reveals situations where a lack of clear input and quick decision-making contributed to employee turnover and strategic errors.

The consequences of being so nice

Meetings at Pinterest were always full of complement, but no direct feedback was given. They usually arrange more meetings. Positive feedback will be delivered directly, but the negative one will be shared privately. This causes the company to take a misstep and make it slower to make a decision.

What makes the perfect team?

The answer could be found in defining its characteristics (Mullins, 2016):

• A belief in shared aims and objectives
• A sense of belonging to the group
• Acceptance of group values and norms
• A feeling of mutual trust and dependency
• Full participation and consensus in decisions
• A free flow of information and communication
• Open expression of feelings and disagreements
• Conflict resolved within the group
• Low levels of staff turnover and absenteeism

This phenomenon is not good according to the characteristics of a perfect team which is the open expression of feelings and disagreements, to keep sharing feedback for each other (Mullins, 2016). The company should insist on all employees to be more open, discussing their opinions and even disagree sometimes. This dynamics will help the company to get direct feedback and can make the right decisions quickly.

The organisational iceberg

Despite the underlying conflicts in the communication pattern and the employees’ “too-nice” attitudes, Pinterest is still performing well, which implies the company’s steady revenue growth. It shows a significant increase of 60% compared to its previous year and reaching up to $756 million in 2018. This indicates that the behavioural aspects of the company have not shown any impacts to its formal aspects. Nonetheless, if no measures are taken to cope with the issues, it will undoubtedly tremble the whole business’ stability and threaten its sustainability.

Look closely.

When looking closely onto the problem at employees level, it can be explained by the Johari Window. It is the model which describe the relationship and mutual understanding between members of the group (Loschinin, 2015).

From this diagram, employees at Pinterest might have massive hidden behaviour. This shows the state of an individual known to him but not known to the others. These employees are introvert and do not like to share their feelings, ideas or thoughts to anyone. That makes it hard to find the mistakes in the company and to make the right decision since their employees do not open up enough.

What is next?

There are several improvements needed to do within Pinterest’s organisational culture. To move forward quicker, every employee must open up enough to each other, disagree sometimes and share their idea to improve their organisation. To do that, all the managers level in the company must show how important the disagreement is. That is how they can improve their organisational culture. These will help the company to find the mistake and fix it in time. Then the company can move to the right direction and accomplish the target profit that they hope.

References are on the next page.