Summary
You might not have HR (yet), but culture is already shaping your team. This post shows how to build it intentionally—even in a 5-person company.
Most WordPress product companies don’t start with an HR department. And that’s okay.
When you’re a five-person team juggling development, support, marketing, and product all at once, “HR” sounds like something you’ll get to later—somewhere between hiring your tenth team member and finally fixing that half-written SOP doc.
But here’s the thing:
While you might not need an HR department yet, you absolutely need culture.
Not the kumbaya, foosball-table version. We’re talking about real, foundational culture—the invisible system that determines how your team communicates, collaborates, and gets things done when nobody’s watching.
“Culture isn’t written down. It’s modeled by leaders.”
What your team sees from you day to day is the culture—regardless of what’s written on the website.
Culture is the system. Whether you design it or not.
Every team has a culture. The only question is whether it’s intentional.
And in founder-led WordPress companies, culture tends to flow directly from the top—your leadership habits, your defaults around transparency, your appetite for feedback, your tolerance for ambiguity. These early choices set the tone for what your company becomes.
Without intentional culture-building, you’re more likely to inherit a patchwork of unspoken rules, emotional residue from past jobs, and inconsistent practices that confuse (and eventually frustrate) new hires.
No HR? No problem. Start here.
The good news: you don’t need a full-stack HR function to build a healthy, high-trust culture.
You just need three things:
1. Clarity
You can’t scale what you haven’t made clear.
Too often, teams rely on “vibe-based leadership.” Things work because you all kind of know how things work—until you hire someone new and suddenly it all breaks down. What was implicit now needs to be explicit.
Clarity is about writing things down, yes—but also about making expectations visible through how you work. How are decisions made? Who owns what? How do you give feedback? What does “good” look like?
It’s not about red tape. It’s about reducing friction so people can do their best work without second-guessing what matters.
Try this: Run a “clarity scan” across three core areas: communication, decision-making, and accountability. Ask your team: What’s clear? What’s fuzzy? What’s assumed? Then document one shared agreement per area.
Bonus: Use the Culture Audit to see where your team might be operating on legacy assumptions—and where a bit of written clarity could save you hours of misalignment.
2. Consistency
Every decision you make—big or small—is either reinforcing or undermining your culture.
If you say you value transparency but your team only hears about decisions after they’re made, that gap creates confusion. If you say ownership matters but step in to micromanage every project, your message doesn’t stick.
Consistency is about the alignment between your values and your actions. Especially in small teams, consistency creates trust. People learn what to expect, how to operate, and where the boundaries are.
This doesn’t mean perfection. It means showing up in a way that reinforces the culture you’re trying to build—even when it’s inconvenient.
Try this: Pick one of your stated values or principles and ask: Where are we living this well? Where are we not? Start by looking at common moments like team meetings, 1:1s, or retrospectives. Then make one small change to bring your actions back into alignment.
Bonus: Choose a recurring ritual (like your weekly team call or async status update) and embed a small behaviour that reinforces your principle—like “one thing I changed my mind on this week” to signal openness and humility.
3. Commitment
Culture doesn’t happen once. It happens over time.
It’s tempting to treat culture as a project you’ll “get to when you have time” or something you’ll “fix” once you hire a Head of People. But by then, you’ve already built habits that are much harder to undo.
Commitment means treating culture as a long game—a system you refine, not a task you complete. It’s about making space to reflect, adapt, and evolve as your team grows. The best founders don’t just lead teams; they tend to them.
Try this: Block time once a quarter to revisit your Culture Audit results with your team. Reflect on what’s changed. What’s improved? What needs a nudge? Make one culture-focused adjustment based on what you learn.
Bonus: Add a standing agenda item to your leadership check-ins: “What signals are we sending about what really matters?” It keeps culture on the radar—even in busy seasons.
Culture now > HR later
HR is important. But it’s not the first thing you need.
Culture is.
Because culture helps you retain your best people, even when compensation isn’t competitive. It gives you leverage in a hiring market flooded with remote opportunities. It protects your team’s energy and momentum when you hit your first real conflict or burnout moment.
And the best part? Building culture now makes HR later way easier. When you eventually do bring in an HR partner, they’ll have something solid to work with instead of trying to untangle a mess of legacy habits and unclear values.
TL;DR
You don’t need HR (yet).
But you do need culture.
Start by auditing your habits and building systems that scale the kind of team you actually want to work on.
Want a head start?
Take the Culture Audit — a 10-minute self-assessment aligned with the 8 Future of Team Principles. No fluff, just clarity on where you stand and where to focus next.
