A few years ago, our copywriting agency needed to hire a strategic client relationship manager – someone who could quickly build trust and rapport with senior executives and proactively help us grow. They also had to be willing to roll up their sleeves within a very lean team of seven, from facilitating strategy to chasing invoices.
It was a unicorn role, and we didn’t have a unicorn payroll budget to play with. Yet we were able to attract someone who brought valuable experience as a creative agency managing director.
Why? She fell in love with our culture.
Job security and pay are, quite rightly, top of mind for job seekers, according to Korn Ferry’s latest workforce survey. However, they’ll also decide to jump ship or stay based on an employer’s respect for personal priorities outside work, flexible hours and the company’s culture and values.
Culture is the vibe of your business, the way your people experience their work. It also does a lot of heavy lifting in attracting the right clients. Culture is the sum total of all the big things, like your company’s shared behaviors and the way decisions are made.
And lots of little things, like giving everyone their birthday off.
Culture can start small
When I started Writers Australia almost 18 years ago, I wasn’t planning on building a team. I liked working independently, and I’d seen the very real toll that stress had taken on my small business-owning parents.
But I very quickly had more copywriting work than I could manage on my own. After a few years, I yearned to take a proper break with my young family and leave the laptop at home. So I took on two staff. The business kept growing, and without realizing it, I’d set the first intention for our fledgling workplace culture: you don’t take work with you on holiday.
It takes a little more thought to build a business that works for people – and can still be profitable as you scale.
As strategic writers, our projects have taken us into boardrooms to unpack corporate values, turning them into employee value propositions or brand voice guidelines. We’ve also dug deep into the research on why and how culture works when writing for global HR consultancies.
And we’ve put everything we’ve learned to work within our own business.
Culture conscious
It’s relatively easy to build a business that people will work for. It takes a little more thought to build a business that works for people and can still be profitable as you scale.
As a small business, we can’t afford to splash cash on shiny incentives. We also know it’s hard to wind back initiatives if they suddenly become unaffordable.
While researching my book on the many different business growth models, Beyond Solo, I spoke with dozens of business founders who’d introduced what seemed like great workplace initiatives, only to learn their hidden costs. Regular group-wide self-care days can become untenable if no-one is available to respond to clients during a project peak, or if the team jumps from five people to 50.
Culture is the vibe of your business, the way your people experience their work.
At Writers, we focus on the little things that resonate with everyone, whether they’re working parents or recent grads. That means flexing across time and space: while we have a studio where we aim to work together on Mondays, all other days are on the table. One person works a compressed nine-day fortnight; another works part-time across school hours.
Benefits like bonus birthday leave and a flexible curiosity budget are wrapped up in our values: we trust each other to get the work done, we set boundaries on who we will and won’t work with, and we have each other’s back.
Nearly two-thirds of executives at the World’s Most Admired Companies attribute around 30 percent of their company’s market value to its culture. I’d estimate the same is true of my much smaller enterprise because business success fundamentally depends on people. And culture is how you make sure the right people are on board – whether they’re employees, investors or clients.
Turning values into action
Whether you’re leading an ASX-listed organization or a company of one, you can create an intentional workplace culture. These three principles can guide you:
Make it clear
Too often, we see vague or vanilla corporate value statements gathering dust in a long-forgotten corner of the server.
The Board may have signed off on a set of values with words like integrity, execution or innovation. But what does that really mean for the way decisions are made? Does innovation mean everyone is expected to challenge the status quo, pioneer completely new ideas or work collaboratively to solve problems?
Your true values might be found in the more conversational language high performers draw on to rally others – phrases like Atlassian’s ‘don’t #@!% the customer’, or insurance broker GSA’s ‘we’re a people business, and life’s too short to get stuck in the dull stuff’.
GSA takes its values one step further by explaining how everyone is accountable for maintaining them in its little blue book. I love this because culture is a two-way street. It’s not just on the employer to provide benefits and opportunities or the CEO to lead the way. Culture is everyone’s responsibility, and you can only be accountable for culture when those expectations are clear.
Make it meaningful
It’s one thing to make your values clear, it’s another to embed them in the way everyone works across every part of your business, every day.
For example, one of our values at Writers is ‘care’. But this can mean very different things, depending on the context of our work.
Whatever the size of your business, try to make culture visible – and see what it means for your people and partners.
We care about our clients as people, which is why we instinctively offered to help those made redundant in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic with their LinkedIn profile.
We care about our words and the impact they will make. We care about our community and the work we do for not-for-profits. And we care about each other as a team. If someone is under pressure, we take stuff off their plate, even if it means adding to ours.
Make it measurable
How is the performance of your senior leaders measured – by shareholder returns or behaviors? What does the tone of your Slack channels (or Glassdoor reviews) say about your culture? Do you openly use the language of your values when making strategic decisions?
These are all ways to measure the impact of your culture. External benchmarking can also help you validate your efforts.
When Fuller, an Adelaide-based brand communications agency, became Australia’s first marketing agency to achieve both B Corp and carbon-neutral certification, it was after three decades of intentional culture work. Founder Peter Fuller told me B Corp’s regular “warts and all audits” continually challenge his team to keep doing better.
Whatever the size of your business, try to make culture visible – and see what it means for your people and partners. And, like any transformation, it’s never done. Your culture can continue to evolve and flex around the changing needs of your teams, your customers and your strategy – creating a workplace that works for people.
