Director of People Experience at CAIS, responsible for curating internal culture as a competitive advantage.
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Scaling a business during the “Great Resignation” comes with a host of new challenges to navigate, including the hybrid workplace and evolving customer preferences. Perhaps none is more important, however, than strengthening corporate culture.
The pandemic gave employees the time and resources to reevaluate their goals, priorities and personal identities. We have seen a shift in the employee-employer paradigm and employees now have more influence than ever before. To grow companies in this new landscape, business leaders must gain a deep understanding of what motivates their employees and should foster a corporate culture that meets their priorities.
Here are four primary drivers to maintain corporate culture during a time of accelerated growth.
1. Embrace new employee-employer paradigms.
Employees are increasingly demanding remote and hybrid work arrangements. Employers must be willing to meet workers where they are, not where they are expected to be. To operate otherwise means potentially missing out on recruiting and retaining the highest caliber of talent.
For instance, sourcing and hiring talent amid high demand for programmers and developers were incredibly challenging for our organization, so we looked overseas. Our CTO resides in the U.K. and has been a conduit for spotting the best talent across the pond who can double as carriers of our corporate culture. In the past year, our technology team has grown four times its original size.
The new norms of hybrid and remote work mean corporate culture can no longer depend on in-person experiences. Instead, leadership should establish structures that create opportunities to engage and build relationships without relying on traditional methods like ice cream socials and happy hours. One method is creating a management committee comprised of your company’s next-level leaders across all lines of businesses and geographies. This committee can focus on ways to break down silos and hierarchical barriers. In doing so, members carry the torch across these interdepartmental units to ensure culture manifests effectively. The management committee’s responsibilities also bring the next generation of leadership closer to the organization and its mission, creating further transparency and engagement.
2. Ensure everyone understands the 'why.'
As employees seek out career opportunities that make a positive and meaningful contribution to society, leaders should endeavor to "connect the dots" and help employees understand why their contributions to the organization matter. Employees today demand authenticity and accessibility from leadership, transparency around the company’s impact and clarity around its mission. Therefore, creating a “people experience” team to transcend the traditional scope of human resources is inherently beneficial. This team should seek novel ways to make the company’s leaders more accessible, including regular company-wide town halls, annual offsites, “breakfasts” or “coffee” with individual executives and frequent updates for the workforce on how the company is delivering on its promises.
One way we conduct this at CAIS is through a comprehensive, multi-layer onboarding process, where new hires across all teams convene as a cohort to meet with every business unit. As we continue to hire and scale at pace, we made the decision to start employees every other Monday. This allows us to group new employees into a “class” for onboarding, allowing them to foster new relationships on common ground and collaborate along the way.
A good onboarding program, on average, could help up to 69% of employees stay with their employer for at least three years, according to the Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM). This type of onboarding program provides new employees with a greater understanding of how they can deliver on the why.
3. Put meaning into perks.
Business leaders should balance compensation and benefits packages, including perks that would not historically have been included. Some of the perks we have found to be popular among the newer employees hired at CAIS include gym memberships, community service paid time off, group contributions to a charitable organization and a budget for continuing education and career development. A recent McKinsey study reports that 89% of employees want purpose in their lives; 70% said that their sense of purpose is largely defined by work. If that is the case, we need to ensure they find meaning through perks that go beyond the paycheck.
4. Creating opportunities for growth.
In tandem with purpose, workers are seeking opportunities for personal growth. Employers must meet this demand by ensuring that roles and responsibilities can evolve over time. Progressive leaders are creating frameworks that fuse modern employees’ desire for purpose-driven work with a continual sense of personal growth. By providing the freedom and resources for employees to grow inside an organization, leaders can mitigate the risk of employees seeking "greener pastures" beyond it. Attentiveness to the individual and their aspirations is key to navigating explosive growth at a time of unprecedented upheaval in the job market.
At CAIS, we refer to this dynamic as “an obligation to two-way obligation.” Through a mix of “hard mentoring” (i.e., direct manager-managee relationships) and “soft mentoring” (using vehicles such as the aforementioned management committee) companies should go beyond career-building to help employees find their ideal career path. This means finding the happy medium between role fulfillment and personal growth trajectory while retaining the job’s key responsibilities.
Corporate culture can no longer be a filter through which candidates are assessed before becoming part of the company. Instead, management should be looking at candidates as "culture-add" opportunities, with the understanding that every new hire can strengthen and adapt corporate culture. Every employee should be given the opportunity to grow and evolve with the company.
As we emerged from the financial crisis 15 years ago, there was a feeling that employees were “lucky” to have the jobs they had. In today’s world, individuals are more willing to be unemployed than wrongly employed. Every talented person we hire will be wooed eventually. As such, we must create a culture that, when given a choice, convinces our employees that they are in the best possible place for their personal and professional journey.
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