How vCom Is Scaling Their Culture Through an Internal Training Program - Glassdoor for Employers

How vCom Is Scaling Their Culture Through an Internal Training Program

As anyone at a quickly-growing company can tell you, it’s not easy to maintain culture as a company matures. With an ever-increasing number of new employees to onboard and train and evolving business priorities, company culture can sometimes get lost in the shuffle.

But while growing companies have many urgent needs, culture should still be made a priority — preserving what makes a company great from the beginning is much easier than trying to regain it at a later point. And after all, company culture does have intrinsic business value. Companies with strong cultures tend to attract talent more easily, retain existing employees and even financially outperform the competition.

With this in mind, the talent management team at technology lifecycle management company vCom decided to create a program that would allow vCom to continue cultivating and strengthening their culture, even as the company expanded at a rapid clip.

“In the fourth quarter of last year, vCom added 13 new hires bringing the company to nearly 100 employees. Considering the influx of new hires to the org, I felt compelled to develop a culture-based onboarding program,” explained Cassandra Allen, Talent Management Specialist at vCom. “It was my hope that the program would provide new hires with the history of vCom along with exposure to many elements of our culture” — which Allen describes as “challenging, flexible and fun” — “allowing them to carry the culture forward as our teams continue to grow.”

[Related: The Onboarding Checklist That Puts Culture First]

After gaining executive buy-in, Allen and her team began designing the curriculum for the program, which they dubbed the Ambassador Class, with the idea that attendees would be able to serve as cultural ambassadors.

“We held our first Ambassador Class course in June 2018 — History of vCom. We offered it as a webinar for our remote employees and an in-person session for those that are in-office. The first session included an overview of how vCom came to be and a presentation of key facts over the years. To cap off the session, we played a fun (and competitive) game of vCom Jeopardy,” Allen shared.

The second Ambassador Class, which followed a few months later, covered vCom’s internal peer-to-peer awards program, which “creates opportunities for employees in all roles to be recognized for embodying key values and behaviors, like teamwork, impact, customer champion and more. This was an interactive, discussion-based session where attendees shared stories of spotting award-worthy behaviors,” Allen said.

Upcoming courses will focus on topics like vCom’s philanthropic efforts, the ideal team player, how to communicate with others based on their Myers–Briggs Type Indicator assessments, career growth at vCom and more.

Although the program is still in its early days, the reaction from employees has been overwhelmingly positive so far.

“Attendees from our first Ambassador Class enjoyed it so much that word spread quickly. We’ve more than doubled our enrollments in the class and we’re now offering repeat sessions of both courses we’ve already launched,” Allen said.

[Related: The 9 Pillars of Employee Engagement]

Allen offered a few words of advice for those who may be interested in implementing a similar program at their company:

  • Consider the elements of your company culture that you want to foster, reinforce or develop
  • Create courses and content that are interactive, engaging and fun
  • Provide opportunities for your teams to connect with each other and the culture of your organization
  • Encourage ongoing expression of the culture through recognition programs or other types of storytelling

“Employees are excited to engage with our culture through these courses,” Allen shared. “While we’re still on the early side of seeing the benefits from the overall Ambassador Class program, we anticipate the impact to ripple positively through the org.”

Learn More: 

2018 Employee Engagement Checklist & Calendar