Culture Club: How our small business built an award-winning culture
By Barefoot PR
For the first ten years of our business, our culture was unwritten. We had a small group of four full-time employees, and we were able to communicate our values through our actions because we spent so much time together. However, when we set our sights on growth, we knew we needed to be more deliberate about our culture. Here’s how our small business set about creating a culture that has won awards, attracted talent and contributed to high employee retention.
Define your values.
As a PR firm, words are our thing. However, defining our company’s core values by ourselves was a little like trying to write your own bio. The best decision we made was to bring in a facilitator who could help bring our most valued aspects to the forefront. What resulted were our six core values and our purpose statement.
Create a cult(ure).
What good are values if all they do is live on your website? After defining them, bringing them to life became a full team effort. Today, we incorporate our values into our hiring process, employee coaching and evaluation, and review them weekly as a team by illustrating how one another has demonstrated a value or how we have seen them in action in the world around us. We have committees named after our values, which we incorporate into our marketing, and we present an internal award each year to the employee who best demonstrates our values. You cannot create a culture without creating a cult of values. To do that, you need to be explicit, repetitive and instill unwavering faith in them.
Define growth paths.
Defining our values made quadrupling our staff size easier. It helped us to hire well and onboard quickly. However, it also meant we were faced with a new challenge – having a clear answer for employees who wanted to know what the next step was for them. With a small team, it was easy to reward and promote based on performance. With a larger staff, we needed to clearly show employees where they could go with us and how they could get there. We defined career paths and created a core skills guide for every role at Barefoot. By making it clear and accessible to every employee, it has opened up dialogue about strengths and areas for improvement, empowered employees to take ownership of their careers, and encouraged managers to identify opportunities for cross-team mentoring.
Survey and respond.
Five years after defining our values, we check in on how we are doing by asking employees to participate in an anonymous survey about our values and culture. While this practice is commonplace at large companies, we have found it incredibly valuable on our small team. We have identified areas where our employees lacked clarity, discovered what it means to put purpose first for our team, and learned that our staff loves to celebrate together in both big and small ways. The key to our survey success has been responding to the feedback we receive. We don’t move forward every idea, but we are sure to share what we learned and what we are doing with our full team so they know their voices have been heard.
Cori Streetman and Sarah Hogan founded Barefoot PR in 2010. Their agency now has a full-time staff of 17 professionals who provide public relations and design services to nonprofits, foundations, government agencies and businesses focused on community impact.
Learn more at www.barefootpr.com.
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