The leaders of the top small, midsize and large workplaces shared what makes them proud and advice for companies trying to improve their corporate culture.
Answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: What are key components of the company’s culture?
Pat Flood, regional operating partner, Supreme Lending's Southeast region: Our mission is to serve others before self. Essentially we require all who become a part of our culture to operate in a selfless fashion — putting the interest of others before their personal interest. We believe that if the organization as a whole operates in a selfless manner all of the individuals involved will maximize their benefit professionally.
Stuart Gulley, president, Woodward Academy: Woodward operates with a culture of transparency that is practiced and exhibited by the leaders of the organization as well as all departments. We believe in keeping our employees informed and engaged in meaningful work, and we exhibit appreciation as often as we can. We value integrity and collaboration. It is important to be genuine and to be available to and affirming to our colleagues. We also want to be clear about the mission and vision of Woodward Academy and to live the values of excellence, character and opportunity daily.
Tim Hohmann, founder, AutomationDirect.com: Our company's culture is called Customer Driven Leadership (with components such as monthly team customer report cards, weekly company meetings and team captains lunch, and charitable involvement). CDL is a culture of self-winding teams, which consistently delivers our promise to customers in a manner that accomplishes our vision while making our profit goals and maintaining our core values. In essence, CDL is a business laser.
Q: How are employees encouraged to find work-life balance?
Gulley: We want Woodward employees to have opportunities to care for their physical well being. For this reason, we have free weekly yoga classes, boot camps, and an onsite fitness center. To make sure they are "fueled" for physical fitness, free lunch is available every operating day.
Hohmann: Work/life balance is addressed in the "Wheel of Life" company environment, where people are encouraged to round out their personal wheel. Most people would define their wheel by six spokes: career, family, physical, financial, social and spiritual goals. The rounder the wheel, the more you are in balance. The more you are in balance, the faster you can go down the road of life/work … and the better you will feel about life and the more productive you will be at work. Also, our family-oriented culture has discouraged the 24/7 work environment. Our normal expectation is for a 40-hour work week. We do not text or email associates after hours unless it is to communicate something such as a weather-related emergency. Not respecting our associates' personal time would ultimately hurt the long-term health of business.
Q: What type of flexibility on the job is available to employees?
Flood: We have very specific measurements with regard to the outcomes we expect for each job. When the outcomes are well defined, then you don't have to tell people, you have to be in at 8:30. We have people that come in at 7 in the morning because it fits their schedule. We have people come in at 9:30 or 10. The only thing we tried to encourage people is to let us know your general idea of a schedule because we don't want to worry about you. As long as they're taking care of the responsibilities, we treat people really flexible. So if they have an event that they need to go see with their kids during the course of the week, we want them to go to it. We don't count that as time off. We encourage them to actually participate fully with their families. I actually think people work harder while they're here because of the environment that we create for them where they feel kind of trusted and supported.
Gulley: Because we are an educational setting, we have some flexibility with scheduling. We attempt to arrange a schedule so that each month has at least one workday off. In addition, we take an entire week off for Thanksgiving, not to mention the usual two-week break over the winter holidays, and a weeklong spring break in March.
Q: What does being active in the community do for morale and the company culture?
Hohmann: ADC is very active in our community, with both monetary and human support. It is 100 percent volunteer based. We never pressure anyone to be involved. The company is very willing to evaluate involvement in causes/community efforts brought to us by our teamers. Teamers feel encouraged to support causes close to their heart, hence it is organically rewarding.
Flood: Being active in the community is just part of who we are. When we serve others before self we believe it brings out the very best in us. Habitat for Humanity is probably our biggest focus. We'll build our fourth Habitat house this year. We participate as well with a one-week build in South Florida every year. We want our people to understand: If you live your life being invested in trying to make a difference in the lives of others, it winds up benefiting someone else, but it also brings out the best of us as well.
Q: What does the longevity of workers say about the company?
Hohmann: ADC has incredibly low voluntary turnover, especially when you separate retirement and family issues from the calculation (less than 1 percent). Longevity is a great indicator of healthy morale.
Flood: It starts with our hiring process; we are intentional in bringing people with the same values as us and are intentional in maintaining those values. It has led to longevity.
Gulley: We are unlike many other organizations in that many of our employees want to continue with us throughout their career. Last May, for instance, we had 13 people retire, representing 267 years of Woodward experience. The average tenure of a teacher at Woodward is 13 years. We feel this is indicative of the true community and family feeling that exists at the Academy, as well as our professional development programs and our extensive resources and offerings (such as health and wellness offerings, daily lunch, comprehensive health plans, opportunities to coach and participate in co-curricular initiatives).
Q: What type of mentoring happens among employees and management?
Flood: By strategy, we are a developmental organization. There are many positions that pair less experienced associates with those who are experienced. It helps younger associates learn about career paths within our company.
Gulley: The Mentor Intern Program at Woodward Academy provides individualized opportunities to welcome and integrate faculty members into the threads of the Woodward community. Mentors are provided to each new faculty member to ensure seamless integration into the working environment. Collaborative assignments, engaging workshops, personalized meetings and social events are combined to provide strategic support and encouragement to sustain the highly qualified and talented teachers at Woodward.
Q: What hiring activity has your company experienced recently?
Hohmann: Our company has made an effort to use more social recruiting methods to expand our reach beyond just the traditional posting sites (it has hired 15 employees in the past year). Our applicant tracking system has the ability to allow our team members to socially share our open jobs to their social network using Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to allow for better exposure. We have doubled the number of candidates that apply to our positions over the last year and a half.
Gulley: Woodward has been fortunate over the years to have long tenured employees, with the average tenure of a teacher being 13 years. However, with the recent increase in retirees, we have recently hired several new faculty members (71 employee hires in the past year). Our hiring process has been highly strategic in nature, with a goal of increasing diversity on our campus to reflect the diversity of our student population.
Q: How have you or are you refining your hiring or retention processes?
Flood: Our turnover last year was probably 5 percent. I think most of it is because we're careful in our hiring. We believe that we have a very specific, intentional set of values as a business that if others share those, they're going to love working here. So if you hire that way as opposed to just hiring people that could potentially benefit financially the business. You wind up not getting disjointed with them along the way because all the decisions and choices that we make are consistent with ones that they would expect us to make. We're hoping the young people we've been hiring in the last couple of years dig really deep roots and make this their home for a long period of time as well.
Hohmann: We do not have a retention problem with 1 percent voluntary turnover, excluding retirement and family issues, but we always look for opportunities for improvement. The only thing we immediately plan to do for retention is leadership development (called Servant Leadership Development). Studies prove that most people don't leave a bad job, they leave a bad manager. As we continue to grow, we find it more and more important to make sure our leaders are the best. Investing in developing great leaders is the best retention process, in my opinion.
Gulley: Of course, continuing to offer a competitive benefits package to attract the best caliber employees to Woodward is key to our hiring and retention process. In terms of retention, we believe the work-life balance benefits that we offer go a long way toward showing employees that we care about every aspect of their lives, not just their performance on the job. These wellness programs are having an impact on both hiring and retention.
Q: Do you plan on implementing or expanding any benefits in the coming year?
Flood: Yes, we plan to extend our benefits. We think there's more we can do to invest in the lives of people in terms of training them to be better financial stewards. I mean, there are so many people that make a really good living and wake up stressed financially every day. We're going through our strategic planning and we're going to be focused on deep diving in those categories of life (relationships, physical, financial, fun and recreation, faith and community service, and business) that we think are really important to people.
Gulley: This year, we launched a financial wellness program with Momentum OnUP providing online tools to help employees feel confident about their finances. Each year, we refine and increase our wellness program offerings through our affiliation with Cooleaf, which now include boot camp and yoga classes, nutrition and healthy cooking demonstrations, and activities like step challenges, which unite employees Academy-wide in achieving fitness goals.
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