How Are You Supporting Your Work Family?
Whether we're in an office, sitting right next to each other, or we're working remotely from across the country, we all have a work family.
We celebrate birthdays, marriages, and babies together with our work family. We watch and support each other as we grow, both personally and professionally. When we fall down, we’re there to pick each other up. And our work friends and colleagues are often more honest with us than most others—and they help us get out of our own way!
They know whether we like the lights dim or bright. They know exactly what temp we prefer (and if we sneak in and crank the heat up or down once in awhile).
We spend a lot of time with our work family, don't we? In my work as a coach and business consultant, I often meet with people and companies who have a goal to create an improved work culture, but aren’t quite sure where to start. They often tell me that building a great work culture just seems so complex and sort of mysterious. They ask, “How do you know when you actually have a great work culture?”
Our work cultures are created through the little things we do for each other and how we treat each other.
What we do day to day is what creates a work culture. Let’s go back to where we started: What if we thought about work culture in terms of what we’re doing to take care of and support our work family? Perhaps this way of thinking invites us to put on the same pair of glasses that JFK was wearing in the early 1960s.
What are you doing to support your work family? How are you showing up for the people you work with, whether they are actually in the same room or if you connect most often through phone, video chat, or an internal chat system?
What is it that makes an awesome work culture so awesome?
I was lucky to be part of an organization that put a lot of energy into building a pretty amazing work culture over about 8 years. When we were acquired, I was able to look at the “culture” from a different perspective. And it was even more special than I had imagined, which really surprised me!
I’d like to share a few of my own insights around company culture-building that may help you with your own company culture challenges. I hope that these nuggets help you think about culture-building in a new and fresh way: we all play an important role in building a company culture and we can all make a positive difference each and every day.
1. Echo effect: You will notice that when someone is describing your company, they all say the same thing. Employees, clients, business partners, vendors, investors, employees’ families, and communities all talk about the company in an eerily similar way. The business word is “alignment,” of course! The real life description is simple: they’re all saying the same thing. And I just learned that the “Echo effect” is a real thing that comes from Greek mythology.
2. Every which way: That “awesome culture” exists inside of the organization itself, in the eyes of clients, in the communities that the business serves, and even in the families of employees. It’s everywhere you turn, look and listen.
3. Even at home: It’s what people talk about at the dinner table after work, when someone asks about a great company they might know about, and when a client is making a decision about who to do business with (or not).
For many years, this is what I heard new employees say over and over again, after their first month of employment with our organization. It was such a funny thing for a new employee to say that it made me giggle every time I heard it: “Everyone is so kind and energetic. During my first few weeks I thought it was really weird and must not be real. Then I realized that they actually do care about me as a person. I’ve never been in a workplace like this before. The CEO even talks to me and asks me how I’m doing. Everyone works very hard. Very very hard. They’re all so supportive of each other that I’m still getting used to it!”
This was not an accident. Our core values were easy to spot because we put a ton of energy into making this happen. “Enjoy the Journey” was one of the core values and that value was woven into everything we did. You could feel it. That’s what new employees were talking about.
Great work cultures are built by people who care about each other, who treat each other with respect and kindness and transparency.
What are you doing this week to support your work family? Have you ever thought about how those actions are building your work culture each and every day?