How can you be deliberate about your office culture? The first point is to define it. You can use defining your culture as an opportunity to engage with all of your team. Ask them questions like: How would you describe the type of firm they want to work for and be associated? What do you see as the core values of such a business? Where do you feel these are not being lived?
Once you get this first step right, you are on the start of your journey. The next step is to ensure your business visibly lives out the culture you aspire to set.
Your culture and values shouldn’t be something you dust off once a year and review at your team day. Your business should live and breathe it every day, creating an atmosphere that allows for your team members to thrive.
When something is visible long enough, it becomes part of your fabric. Think about what you can do to make your culture visible on a daily basis. You can do this literally, by putting your values on the wall or as employee computer screensavers. Or you can simply work hard to embed the theme constantly in all areas of the business.
Get this second stage right and your people feel at the heart of the business. You’ll foster a true sense of belonging with everyone pulling the same direction. Once your culture becomes visible, the challenge becomes to empower employees to take action when they feel these expectations are not being met.
In my experience, this is the most difficult part. At Paradigm Norton, we’ve always been a value led business. But the difficulty we found was that people will interpret these value differently based on their own beliefs and expectations. Setting the bar high for one individual might be meeting the minimum expectation for another. We needed a way for everyone to be clear on what our values meant, not through their own individual lenses, but through the company lens.
With input from our whole team, we created The PN Way, a working document that not only defines our culture and values, but gives clear examples of what is and isn’t expected. The aim was to give all team members, especially new people, a very clear guideline of the standards we set, and empower them to hold us to account if we aren’t walking the walk.
Once people are empowered to take action, your cultural loop is complete:
Your culture is clearly defined
It’s lived and breathed every day
And most importantly, people take action when they see a breach
That’s how you make culture the heart of your business.
Courtesy of Tommy Watson
Tommy is a Client Manager at Paradigm Norton’s London office, becoming part of the PN team in 2017 following the merger with The Red House.
A Chartered Financial Planner and Fellow of the PFS, Tommy is responsible for delivering a highly personalised, holistic, financial planning service to a select group of clients. Tommy co-leads Paradigm Norton’s London office, is a Trustee of the Paradigm Norton Employee Ownership Trust and a member of the firms Culture and Values committee. A Business Finance graduate from Durham University, Tommy has over 10 years’ experience working in financial services, both in the UK and Singapore before joining The Red House in 2014.
Outside of work, Tommy is a fan of most sports and enjoys following his beloved Everton around the UK. Always keen for a physical challenge, he has climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, cycled the length of the UK and completed a number of marathons, triathlons and open water swims.
The views expressed in this article are that of this author and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Voyant.
