“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” – Peter Drucker
In a post-pandemic era of distributed and hybrid workforces, building and maintaining a strong sense of team camaraderie and trust requires more intentionality than ever.
While some companies are still using central offices (we’re biased, but hopefully at Industrious), others are using hybrid work models or working in mostly remote environments. Casual conversations at the coffee machine, lunches, and happy hours can’t be the solution for these companies to build a strong culture.
The fastest growing segments of workplace services are company offsites and culture as a service. Both of these segments are addressing the new ways companies need to build culture, and the pace of growth proves how strong this trend is.
As we’ve grown as an organization at Industrious, our team has become more distributed and we’ve faced similar challenges to making it feel #SoIndustrious like it always has. In the last two years, we’ve invested in key areas that strengthen the connectivity between our teammates. We believe the strongest way to build culture is in-person, but have also created a few unique and engaging digital programs as well.
Bee Collective
Each month, we hold at least one event with a single purpose to better connect our team. These events are organized by the Bee Collective, a coalition of Industrious employees who are always thinking of fun and exciting ways to bring our teams together. Some of the events are in-person in each local market, such as a picnic in a park, or holiday parties. Other events are digital, and range from learning opportunities to talent shows.
Offsites
Teams that offsite together stay together. Industrious has installed budgets for team offsites once per year, where coworkers collocate for a couple days to connect and focus on solving bigger challenges together. In addition, some years we have a larger North America team offsite for a large portion of the organization to meet each other in person.
Recognition
Finally, we have a few fun ways that we recognize our coworkers for great work and living our values. We do this in our #shoutouts channel on Slack, a hotspot of micro-recognition moments that shine a real-time spotlight on Industrious team members that go above and beyond. Employee recognition also features prominently in our monthly All Hands call. This segment is called “The Dusty Awards,” and spotlights employees who live into our cultural values of Head, Heart, and Hands for the entire organization to see.
We are proud of the progress we’ve made, but also plan to continue to innovate and invest in ways for our team to be as connected as possible. For Industrious, being best-in-class at company culture is non-negotiable.