Anne Krog Iversen built, implemented and manages corporate mindfulness as Co-Founder, Chief DNA, People and Culture Officer at TimeXtender.
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How do you build the focused corporate culture that you desire — one that drives results, passion and purpose for your company, while enhancing effectiveness and general well-being?
I don’t hear business leaders questioning the need to build a corporate culture anymore, but rather wondering what's the best way to go about doing so.
I set out years ago to create a culture that would make a difference in the lives of our employees and enhance productivity and well-being by bettering work-life balance. It was important to me that we had a business that offered more than just maximizing revenue and minimizing costs. I wanted to provide a place where people looked forward to engaging, growing and contributing every day, and from where they could go home feeling good about what they had accomplished as individuals and part of a team — it’s what we call “striving for a greater purpose.” While we have made steady progress with our corporate culture over the years, refinement is an ongoing process since culture is very dynamic.
As I set out to modernize our culture so that we worked with corporate purpose and key results, we implemented programs to work with mindset and life skills such as corporate mindfulness, tenets of Dr. Stephen Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, recharge sessions and other activities.
For one example, we recently updated our employee handbook, which details the work behind our program based on five cornerstones from our circle purpose strategy. A handbook is a reference guide for the company and a foundational communiqué for cultural onboarding with new hires. Our manual spelled the five cornerstones that are central components of our company DNA, the tools that help us reach our potential as individuals, teams and an organization. These cornerstones are the essentials for our organizational purpose circles that form the basis of our business structure. They are:
• Connection: People do business with people, and therefore, creating win-wins is the key to building and sustaining meaningful relationships with the people we do business with.
• Resilience: Recognizing that change is constant in the digital age, we offer virtual mindfulness; moments of silence in meetings to reset and reflect on important decisions; weekly body, mind and heart recharge sessions; flexible work hours to accommodate individual needs; personal karma days to reflect; and health exercises during work to support employee well-being as we work as “one global team, working from anywhere.”
• Personal leadership: Becoming the best version of ourselves to fulfill our purpose as individuals and an organization. This can be done by providing training at work that acts as a collaboration tool and a shared language.
• Core purpose: Understanding why we do what we do, why it is important, what we need to overcome and how we know when we have succeeded. This involves working with individuals and team roles, goals and responsibilities that our management team has been deeply inspired by.
• Core beliefs: Establishing a solid ground on where we stand as one global team. The beliefs are a way to always know how to prioritize and put first things first.
Three Steps To Building Your Culture
For those in the HR, people or culture business who are looking to build a more focused corporate culture, I would advocate beginning with ownership, management and employees to determine the topics that your company values and puts great emphasis on. Identify your vision, mission and purpose that you believe in and build from there. One saying I hear often is “we are what we give.” Also, one of the Covey principles that we hold near and dear is to “begin with the end in mind.”
Then, following your guiding objective, create a strategy based on what this vision looks like and support this plan with action points by importance. Dr. Covey called this “putting first things first.” Having worked in the field of corporate DNA and culture for the past six years, I offer the following as a blueprint for proceeding:
1. Start the dialogue with your management team and employees to find inspiration, then seek out three to five inspirational focal points that you will share and discuss for your rollout plan. These are the topics that you care deeply about as an organization.
2. Know your role in DNA and culture and make it clear why you exist in your role and who’s driving the culture. For example, my team’s role with DNA and culture at TimeXtender is to inspire, communicate and educate our people about our five focused DNA topics.
3. Set up long-term goals and three to five short-term goals for each focus point and go to work.
There are many other ways to build a modern-day work culture. This is just a small sample of some ideas that we have found work for us. Another business model that we have been inspired by is Salesforce’s V2MOM model. V2MOM is an acronym for the following:
• Vision: What do you strive to achieve as an organization?
• Values: What values do you cherish as you attempt to reach your vision?
• Methods: How will you prioritize your action steps to accomplish your values and vision?
• Obstacles: What potential roadblocks might you face along the way, and how will you go about overcoming them?
• Measures: How will you measure progress and success, and what data and metrics will you use to objectively measure this success?
Simply put, with a program in place to develop the focused corporate culture you yearn for, you’ll be better prepared to achieve the vision you’ve always aspired to while meeting any challenge head-on that might come your way during your vision journey.
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