Bringing Your Company to Life: 8 Strategies to Create a Strong Culture

Sometimes a company’s culture develops or evolves by happenstance, but a great culture is one that is created and nurtured with intention.

Most articles on culture explore the benefits and impact it can have on an organization, but the bigger question is how do you bring it to life? How do you develop culture in a way that doesn’t feel forced? And, if you are a small company, like we are at Scooter Media, then how do you do it in an affordable way?

1. Define what you stand for.

Take your mission, vision and values to the next level. After participating in a webinar led by David Friedman (HighPerformingCulture.com), our leadership team mapped out 10 principles that represent how we operate as a company, including things like, “Honor Commitments,” “Deliver Outstanding Customer Service” and “Never Stop Growing.”

Creating these 10 principles has not only been beneficial to current employees, but has also played a key role in onboarding new team members and helping them quickly understand who we are. 

2. Communicate more.

Not communicating with employees on a regular basis can cause unrest and stifle growth. Five years ago, I began hosting one-on-one sessions with each team member every two months in lieu of annual reviews.

These timelier meetings allow employees to get consistent feedback on performance, and provide a direct line for them to share feedback — both good and bad — on everything from workloads to ideas for making our company a better place to work.

3. Don’t hide it.

It’s one thing to talk about your company’s culture, but what are you doing to reinforce it? Our office refrigerator is covered in family (human and fur baby) photos to remind us that we all have lives and reasons for being outside of the office.

You’ll also find framed photos of our team from various events we’ve attended together. A bulletin board in the kitchen reiterates our dedication to philanthropy, displaying pictures of our employees giving back, as well as information about organizations we support monetarily.

4. Let your employees lead.

When employees have great ideas, empower them to bring them to life. This strategy has led to the creation of our community giving team that executes bimonthly service efforts such as food and hygiene drives, as well as our events team, which plans things like monthly happy hours and team lunch-and-learn sessions.

5. Change with your people.

In 2018, three employees shared that they were expecting children and it became clear that we needed to define the agency’s parental leave policy. This led to the official launch of Scooter Media’s Baby-Friendly Workplace program.

This initiative allows parents to bring infants to work one day per week and provides the flexibility to work from home without using PTO to care for sick children. It also offers a reintegration period where they’re paid a full-time salary for part-time work, allowing time and space to adjust to life with their new family member.
 

6. Encourage learning.

Investing in continuing education is a win-win. Our agency pays for memberships with organizations like PRSA and provides employees with a monthly professional development stipend for events and training. After attending an event, the team member prepares a presentation with key takeaways for the agency at a huddle or lunch-and-learn. All employees — from junior staffers to our leadership team — develop their personal interests and have the ability to share with the team so the learning cycle continues.

7. Follow the rhythm of business.

Leveraging the natural ebb and flow of your business is a great way to identify low-cost and low-impact ways to provide additional benefits to your team. A few years ago, we noticed that many of our clients closed the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day.

We saw this as an opportunity to allow employees to also take off that week, with the request that they simply keep an eye on their email. Similarly, noticing that Fridays were relatively quiet during the summer months, we began allowing employees to leave at 1 p.m., as long as client work was completed. Small benefits can add up to a big boost in employee morale.

8. Bring in your partners.

As an agency that primarily focuses on public relations, we find ourselves working on teams, often with multiple agencies. Because we don’t work with these individuals every day, it’s important to find ways to develop our relationships with them outside the office. Over the years, this has led to team happy hours and friendly trivia plus cocktail and chili cook-off competitions with these partners.
While everyone can agree that getting together with our agency partners is fun, doing so has also played a pivotal role in our ability to develop stronger relationships that, in the long run, mean better work for our clients.

Culture is the common language that bonds people through challenges and triumphs and plays a pivotal role in employee retention and satisfaction. Finding simple and impactful strategies for your organization to build an intentional culture can mean realizing a range of benefits for both your business and employees.