Culture as a Service

On Thursday 26th I was invited to speak on the panel of the first-ever NI Chamber of Commerce: Future Workforce Summit in Titanic Belfast. There were some really interesting talks and speeches throughout the morning that I listened to and have put my notes below to see what we might be able to extract some value from here at Instil, these notes are not my own thoughts/opinions but just interesting notes from speeches:

• Changing the culture by using benefits at the top - “Leading by example by leaving loudly“ - we need leadership to openly use the benefits and flexibility that a company offers because this shows employees that they don’t need to feel bad for taking advantage of the flexible working/benefits when managers do too which in turn promotes a safer environment.
• Remote first isn’t just for parents - there was a lot of discussion about how being remote-first doesn't just mean that people with families and kids are more likely to be happy, but it also means that we’re able to hire from a much larger more diverse group of people for example, as the company will be more accessible for people with a disability or who are elderly.
• Alchemy grew to 160 people in 5 years and put it down to their mentoring and flat structure - they found that by giving their employees a mentor who was only ~1 year ahead of where they are they were able to keep staff and allow them to grow at a fast pace.
• Too much competition - we need to structure an organisation so employees aren’t competing against each other for the next promotion or big win but instead, they collaborate. This is a culture and company structure thing, we want teams to be supportive of each other and collaborative as this is where the most growth will come from instead of waiting for each other to fail.
• We can’t grow if we don’t know what’s wrong - We’re too nice about giving feedback in 1 to 1s, this is because mentors aren’t trained enough on how to give negative feedback. We need to provide more training for mentors to give negative feedback and for employees to take negative feedback and learn/grow from that. Once we have this we can provide more constructive criticism and mentorship to help employees grow quickly.
• Higher retention from being open about salary - This company found that posting salaries online so everyone knows they’re getting the same and are open about what the next promotion will bring them led to a massive increase in retention of employees.
• People don’t leave jobs for more money - Research has shown that most people don’t leave jobs for a pay increase, instead, they leave because they don’t feel like the work that they’re doing has purpose - how can we make people feel like their project is important and that they have purpose in their team?
• Mentoring training for any leaders - a common theme throughout the day was of people celebrating their success in mentorship programmes for their leaders - “mentoring programme has totally transformed our retention rate”, it allows us to retain talent and grow that talent.
• We can’t just train on technical skills - It’s so clear that no organisation can work with employees who are all incredibly talented technically but have no soft skills and this is something that employers generally forget about. Companies can be too focused on performance gains due to technical training that they forget that soft skills are a massive part of how successful teams are, training needs to be provided for soft skills not just technical skills.