Thoughts on Culture - #1

I am working on company culture with several clients. When I consider what makes a great culture, four C’s come to mind.

1.     Embrace Core Values

2.     Celebrate Often

3.     Communicate Regularly

4.     Cultivate Employee Growth

 Today, I want to focus on communication. Growing a company is time-consuming work. For communication to be effective, it must be planned, regularly scheduled, and taken seriously. What is the right frequency for company-wide meetings? There is no perfect answer, but here are some of my thoughts.

 They should be frequent enough to keep people appropriately informed, but not so frequent they become routine and lose energy. I am not a fan of a company-wide daily huddle. Over time, it loses importance and becomes a nuisance habit that people attend on auto-pilot.

 I had a recent client that conducted twice-weekly company-wide meetings. The second meeting had little energy, and management dreaded organizing it. We eliminated this one and condensed the focus into one weekly session.

 At Entrada, we had monthly company-wide meetings that lasted up to 90 minutes. The executive team put as much time and energy into this meeting as we did preparing for a Board presentation. Parts of the meeting were serious and informative, while others were light-hearted and supported our core value to have fun together. One of my Boards follows this same formula.

 Today’s distributed world with significant remote work makes it challenging to keep everyone engaged and feeling a part of the organization. This dynamic makes impactful company-wide meetings even more critical to culture and employee retention. They should probably be more frequent than monthly. If so, I still like one monthly, more extended anchor meeting. Regardless, the crucial point is that the executive team takes it seriously, participates, and makes it meaningful. To go further, I feel every company of any size needs to dedicate a portion of one person’s job to owning communications.

 What has been effective with your organizations? I would love to hear your feedback. This is one time I hope to hear thoughts from many of you.

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I recently ran the Philadelphia marathon. On mile 17, a nagging hamstring injury flared up on me. While I finished with a decent time, I did slow down over those last nine miles. An interesting thing happened. As I ran, it was evident I was favoring one leg. The crowd noticed this, and one person after another signaled me out to yell my name (visible on my bib) and encourage me. Two people even ran along beside me, shouting encouragement. That motivated me to remember to be an encourager more for others.