Water your seeds
As you continue to build up your culture and recruit new employees who embrace your company values and begin to build a presence of employees who can act as advocates for your culture within your company ranks, your job turns from a planter of seeds to a grower of fruit.
In other words, you need to keep the cultural soil of your company fertile and watered.
There is a time and place for large-scale communication centered on culture. You will always have opportunities for all-hands meetings and columns in the company newsletter.
But the most effective opportunities for building and strengthening your culture don’t involve a podium, webcam or keyboard. They involve the shoes on your feet — and not always dress shoes.
Maguire makes opportunities to engage employees by walking around the company headquarters on an informal basis and asks those on his leadership team to do the same. But he goes a step further, taking employee interaction out of the office and into nonbusiness situations.
“I would encourage business leaders to look outside the office as a way to bond with employees and better yourself as a company,” Maguire says. “We support the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia through various activities. We sponsor the Philadelphia Insurance Triathlon, and we sponsor a [5 kilometer] race. We have many employees come to those events, and through working with them and interacting, all employees come together and you get great feedback. So I encourage those sorts of things, both as a benefit to the community and a way to benefit your employees and your business.”
Back inside the walls of your office building, you can take more formalized steps to reinforce your culture through periodic training. At Philadelphia Insurance, training covers both the technical aspects of the job and the cultural aspects of working in the company’s environment.
At Philadelphia Insurance, interaction between new faces and company veterans doesn’t stop after the recruiting process. It ramps onto an extensive mentoring program designed to help new hires get on board with the company’s culture, values and practices.
“Of course, you do need the technical skills to perform effectively at your job, but we also have an actual cultural training program that takes place through our training and development center,” Maguire says. “That takes the form of personal interaction with veterans of the company. We have a stable management team that has been here, on average, between 18 and 20 years. There are 60 to 70 veterans of the company that we involve with the training process for new hires. Through the actions of our veteran managers, our new hires come to understand our culture much better.”
Veteran mentors are selected based not just on experience but also on their level of achievement within the company ranks and their level of influence within the organizational structure.
“For the teachers, they need to epitomize your company’s culture and be effective communicators,” Maguire says. “We want to single out the people who have the most influence, the most experience, and who can impart the most culture and wisdom to the new trainees, particularly on the management level. From the trainees’ standpoint, we try to identify the people who have the most potential to move up through the organization, those who really embrace our culture, who share the same passion for the work we do and who are really trying to take the company to the next level.”
As part of the training program, Maguire and his staff also encourage the pursuit of professional designations, which help to further the careers of new hires while lending an extra layer of credibility to the company as a whole.
“We’re very big on pushing the educational aspects of our business, because it is a people business,” he says. “The better, stronger and more professional your people are, the more successful you’re going to be and the more successful your company is going to be.”