Enjoying the Journey: Keeping Your Team at Their Best

Overly corporate dress codes, wilting Peace lilies, instant coffee, choppy WiFi, paid parking, and walls with no motivational words or affirmations: things you may feel are bringing down your office vibe.

Starting with the tech boom in Silicon Valley, Fortune 500 companies around the world decided they wanted to make themselves even more desirable places to work with whacky EVPs (employee value propositions). It was seemingly unanimous that work and play needed to be combined. Offices turned into campuses, lunchrooms into cafes, and breakrooms into relaxation pods. Since then, an unrealistic benchmark has been set, with anything failing to meet these incredibly high standards deemed mediocre by prospective employees.

Google’s office in Zurich, Facebook’s campus in California, and LEGO’s headquarters in Denmark are all great examples of where fun is tangible and can be seen written on the walls. Even here at Xeople HQ we have a gym and basketball half-court. For what it’s worth, as an employee, “enjoying the journey” at work carries a low correlation to being able to shoot hoops at our leisure. With a team of under twenty working from that location, those spaces are often vacant. Wouldn’t it also be a red flag of office culture if everybody was escaping to the gym five times a day?

There are many things that contribute to culture; a darts board could be one of them. But this blog aims to focus your attention on a different angle of setting the right office culture. You can share this with your HR team that thinks painting the office in bright colours is anything other than a branding exercise.

So where is the line between work and play? I think the majority reading this will agree that “all work and no play” is brutal and disengaging. And the opposite, “all play and no work”, is clearly unproductive. To strike the perfect balance, we propose “work with play”; both elements intertwined in the day-to-day of a company’s operations. Creativity and innovation need space to flourish, having joy and play at the centre of your work culture allows this, which keeps your team bringing their A-game and at their best every day.

HR teams globally have rebranded themselves as “People and Culture” because it’s clear that the two are strongly correlated. This doesn’t mean that they always go hand in hand though. It’s important to recognise when one is negatively impacting the other. A good culture can be interrupted by poor employees, and good employees can be flattened by poor culture.

Here are some things to consider:

Don’t let hierarchy be a demotivator: Too much ego from company leaders can make the rest of your workforce feel small. Establish clear hierarchies in your organisation that allow for those higher up to be more approachable. Having accessible leaders will promote a flexible culture and do wonders for creating elasticity in your workers.

Provide opportunities for staff to have their say: No one wants to be a pencil pusher. If your employees are to enjoy their time at work, giving everyone a voice is a free and simple way to boost buy-in. Providing opportunities to voice their ideas and give feedback opens the door for them and the company to reach new peaks.

Reward individual effort: So simple, but so often missed. Want your employees to be their best? Letting them know when they’re doing an exceptional job is an easy place to start. Don’t forget that millennials and zoomers were raised on gold stars and participation medals. Most are easily motivated through praise and positive reinforcement. An employee who knows they’re valued is more likely to own their mistakes and shortcomings.

Regular check-ins: If you have an X-Factor employee in your midst, the worst thing you can do is let them go and potentially take some of the culture away with them. Showing that you care about them, not just their work, forms a deeper connection and builds loyalty to the company.

Consider culture in the hiring process: If you’ve already got good culture, nurture it with the people you bring into your business. If you don’t have good culture, start shifting it by bringing in people who have traits you’re after. Consider the ways in which your job ads, interview questions, and onboarding process are potential magnets or repellents of the culture you’re looking to foster.

Last but certainly not least, look after your coffee machine.

An element of culture that’s often overlooked is the way it bleeds into your customer experience. Your customer-facing staff are of course a key part of this relationship, but they’re also the tip of the iceberg. Your product or service, which clients regularly engage with, should reflect your values and culture. If enjoyment and play are important to your business, are there ways you can extend that experience to foster a stronger sense of brand engagement and loyalty? As recruiters, there is a unique challenge because hiring managers and candidates are both in the customer seat. Both are relying on you to provide a smooth experience from vacancy to job filled, with a perfect fit as the cherry on top. At Xeople, we are constantly evolving our software solutions with user experience front of mind, so you can upload and parse resumes in a flash and manage applications with ease through our job flows. Finding new ways to delight our clients through simplicity and even fun is our top priority because we’ve seen the benefits firsthand.

Positivity and play are strong motivators, and are thankfully pretty contagious. Creating opportunities for your employees to build community at work has long-term benefits in retention and collaboration. You can’t spell Xeople without ‘people’ (well, mostly).