In April, we were thrilled to hear that we made the Inc. Best Workplaces 2021 list, a true testament to our team’s open, engaging, and growing company culture. With a staff topping 24 people for the first time, our culture is always evolving, but still filled with meta jokes from days of just the founders. Our team prides itself on making time for fun and emphasizing the human element of work. Despite doubling our team size during a pandemic, and staff working remotely, we’ve taken a proactive stance to prioritize our company culture over the past year. Following are our five tips for creating a contagious company culture.
The new norm of remote working, coupled with the doubling of our team within a year, also meant finding creative ways to continue to build the EnsoData company culture. EnsoData has always had a unique and contagious culture that the leadership team has strived to cultivate, even when in-person meetings and activities were unable to take place. This resulted in a number of after-hour virtual activities, such as Friday Night Happy Hour and EnsoGaming Night, where our team played the fad game of the pandemic, Among Us. Gens X, Y, and Z all took to our phones and traversed the halls, playfully eliminating each other, lying our faces off, and laughing hysterically. It might have sounded odd at first, but the Among Us rounds were an outstanding team building exercise worth replicating.
1. Be Open and Embrace New Ideas
Keeping an open mind is not only a must for start-ups like EnsoData, but also for any established company. Like many workplaces during the pandemic, we went from an in-office setting across from the capitol in Madison, WI, to remote home offices, with a heavy reliance on video calls for collaboration. The EnsoData team fully embraced this change to the business environment both strategically and culturally. Coincidentally, we received our series A funding when the pandemic began and were charged with adding to the team to achieve high growth over the next few years. Due to the successful adaptation of the existing team to this new remote environment, the leadership team felt confident to geographically broaden their search for new employees instead of solely relying on a talent pool from central Wisconsin. In fact, 8 of the 13 new hires over the past year are located in states other than Wisconsin, including Illinois, Ohio, Tennessee, and South Carolina. Adding employees from different areas and professional backgrounds is a great way to ensure an influx of new and different ideas. The culture at EnsoData fosters a workplace where idea sharing is encouraged and expected. Likewise, companies pursuing a contagious company culture should ensure that employees’ ideas for process improvement or potential solutions to problems are not only heard, but acted upon. Leadership must trust and enable employees to try out new ideas to help reach the collective goals of the organization. This will result in increased employee satisfaction and ownership of company goals and objectives.
2. Schedule Time to Build Relationships
Due to the success of the Among Us game night, regular team activities have been scheduled to intentionally set aside time for camaraderie. In addition to after hours fun, the team shares a lot of what’s happening in Slack, a channel-based messaging platform. Besides having channels for non-work water-cooler-type conversations such as #parenting, #hackjams, #volunteering and #hobbies, one specific functionality in Slack that encourages our teammates to get to know each other on a more personal level is the Donut meetings function. Occurring biweekly, Donut meetings are scheduled conversations that rotate among all staff. Employees are randomly matched with a different co-worker each time and encouraged to use the meeting to get to know each other better on a personal level by limiting conversations to non-workplace topics. These 30-minute meetings are a great way to get to know and find common ground with staff that are on other teams and are critical to building a company culture of inclusiveness and acceptance. Oh, and we love them, with average donut meeting rates around 90%! So, whether it’s donuts or some other method of intentionally getting to know one another, intentionally set aside time can significantly help build co-worker relationships, especially in a remote working environment.
In 2021, EnsoData’s team made 245 donut meetings, or nearly one every working day of the year!