Get the party started
It started with a simple conversation and a realization that Molina was a company filled with people looking to do something more than just work. Mancini and Molina’s then-president realized they couldn’t do as much as they would like because people kept coming at them with external charity ideas and internal culture ideas that they just couldn’t act upon.
“We really talked about how we could get more engagement with the community that we serve,” she says. “And I was like, ‘Gee, I see all kinds of opportunities and we try to fulfill them, but it’s just the community outreach folks that are trying to meet all the needs from the agencies that we hear about,’ and he said, ‘Well, is there a way to make this companywide so more people can get involved?’”
There was. And Mancini says the company’s solution didn’t take a special culture coach or hiring someone to take over company activities.
At the time, there were fewer than 80 people working in her division and Mancini wanted to find a way to involve and engage front-line employees. Thus, Molina’s employee activities committee was born. Mancini says step No. 1 is about having the right people involved.
“You have to find the right people within your organization that really feel strongly that they can bring along the others and then you have to let them own it,” she says. “Because if we came to them and said, ‘OK, here’s what you’re going to do,’ it wouldn’t be as fun. This way they get to be very creative, and it’s a lot of folks that don’t get to be creative in their jobs on a daily basis. So they get to be creative and come up with the different competitions … or the different events we do and how we implement those and really how they advertise those to the office and make sure it comes through.”
Mancini says part of this includes an assessment that requires you to find the original people that can take the task. If you can think of a few people who could handle the role of successfully running your corporate culture right now, you’re probably ready to start. She started small, hand-selecting some people she knew were heavily involved in things like charity projects and often asked others to join them.
“When you work with people, you just know the ones that would take something and run with it, and I had a couple of people, one was actually my administrative assistant, and then there were various others who I knew the second I told them what we wanted to accomplish they’d be gone,” she says.
