Thanks for the question @Krish!
I think you need to make 1 thing crystal clear to your employees → they are here to win.
I believe what people really want (and ultimately need) are ambitious goals and achievements (making an impact). If you are not winning, no amount of creativity, friendly people-first culture etc… will make up for that void.
Typeform was a typical first-time entrepreneur hitting hyper-growth story. We were winning, but it was purely product-led growth early on.
The culture that emerged from those early days was based on goodwill & friendships. These sound like good things, however without enough boundaries, what we ended up with is a consensus-driven culture where everyone just wants to keep everyone else happy. As we grew, these cultural norms made us increasingly slower.
What you end up with if you optimize only for employee happiness is a culture/company that is more self-serving and less customer serving.
My mental model for how companies should think about employee happiness is based on creating a flywheel where you aim to 1st…
Blow the customer’s mind,
in order to make your company look amazeballs,
for your team to want to work with you,
so that you can be fulfilled and fully realized as an employee,
so you can once again blow the customer’s mind
and so on…
On top of that foundation, you can lay the good cultural norms like good environment, creativity, fun, good people (don’t hire assholes) etc… and hopefully, you’ll have a winning formula!