Why good company culture is more important now than ever before
01 October 2020
In her first guest column, exclusive to Connectivity, Natasha Bodger, Marketing Executive at Stone Junction – the first PR agency for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, explains why company culture isn’t just hackneyed corporate jargon but a real opportunity to build togetherness in a time of uncertainty.
Company culture is the heart and soul of any business. It drives behaviour, drives trade and even drives cars – only joking. In reality, it’s the seal of identity that keeps everyone moving towards the same destination.
What do you do when that “same destination” is now multiple separate offices, in multiple separate homes, with multiple separate pyjama-clad employees at the helm? Can company culture ever hope to maintain the same significance it once had, while isolation is still the word of the day?
Arguably, it’s more important now than ever before.
While there remains a certain level of uncertainty (try saying that quickly), businesses should be taking this opportunity to provide something tangible and consistent for their teams to connect with – a lighthouse, if you will, to calm COVID waters.
Here at Stone Junction, we’ve been apart for approximately 4,704 hours – not that anyone’s counting – which has changed the way we interact and engage with one another both in and outside of work. Our old values of collaboration, efficiency and being happy to be in the workplace, although still valid, don’t reflect our new way of working and what we now know to be relevant since the coronavirus outbreak.
So, we gave our values a facelift – less Pete Burns and more Robin Wright.
From “looking after the people you work with” to “getting shit done”, Stone Junction’s revised company values now reflect the global situation as well as the one much closer to home.
Take “looking after the people you work with”, for example. Six months ago you might have lent across the desk and reassured a colleague of their worth or fixed a personal problem by the water-cooler during lunch. Checking in on our teammates is a lot easier when your only office companion isn’t a half-finished cup of coffee and a barely domesticated animal. However, by indoctrinating this ideal of “looking after” into our company values, not only does it remind people to send a courtesy “how you doing?” message to Jim in accounts, it also reassures employees that this is a workplace that both values and respects them.
In the same way your values might emphasise compassion, they might also encourage fearlessness. Working independently can be daunting. There aren’t any second opinions or creative ideas sessions, it’s just you and your computer screen trying to do the right thing. In light of this, one of Stone Junction’s newest values is to “be brave, make mistakes”. It might seem foolish of me to suggest that a simple culture statement might reassure a team of 33, twenty something PR’s to believe in themselves but it could at least encourage someone to be confident in speaking up and being proactive rather than not taking any action for fear of getting it wrong.
Never underestimate the value someone might gain from realising their employer understands them.
However, being brave doesn’t just extend to employees. This collective COVID experience will no doubt build company character and is already bringing out the personality of countless businesses in the engineering sector, many of whom have shown real resilience and determination to survive. For example, connector and cable expert, PEI Genesis, recently provided crucial connectors for biocontainment stretchers used in transporting COVID patients. Other STEM businesses are doing the same – stepping up to guide and support countries in crisis.
Yet, I don’t think this great, resourceful, supportive business personality happens by accident. The personality of an organisation comes from its internal culture — if ever there was a time to quote Sir Richard Branson, it’s now. These values affect employees, who in turn affect their employer, who in turn affects its consumers, who in turn affect its profits.
It’s quite simple really when you think about it.
So, while the UK settles into Lockdown 2.0 and we all wait patiently for another week of Great British Bake Off, look closely at your company values. What do they mean? What do they represent? And most importantly, what do they say about you and your business?
Natasha Bodger is Marketing Executive at Stone Junction, a specialist technical PR agency delivering international and digital PR and marketing services for scientific, engineering and technology companies.
If you want to discuss all things PR, company culture (or the Great British Bake Off) contact her on natasha@stonejunction.co.uk or call +(44) 01785 225416.
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