Everyone Wants Cake on Their Birthday!

EDITOR'S NOTE: Special thanks to Alison Bruns for writing today's blog post. You can connect with her on LinkedIn. 

The importance of maintaining company culture, teamwork & recognition in a telecommuting, multi-state company.

As a Human Resources professional, I constantly have company culture and employee engagement in the forefront of my brain. Are we doing enough to make sure our employees love working here? Do they feel engaged and included in the team?

In a more traditional business setup with brick and mortar locations and employees working 8:00a-5:00pm in office, it is often easier to gauge these crucial metrics as the ability to physically get ‘a feel’ for the energy is possible in such a setting. And though perhaps a bit more effortful, in a company with several remote employees across many states, it is still very possible to not only maintain, but also foster a strong company culture full of employees that truly feel like part of the team.

Pulsara is a progressive company, not only in our mission, and effect on the standard of care in the healthcare industry, but also as an employer. Pulsara has mastered what many others have difficulty defining and managing: organization, forethought and priorities. You only need to glance at our Team Page or have a brief conversation with our CEO to learn that Pulsara has intentionally made culture a top priority. Operationalizing that is the difficult part and often where most companies fall off.

Pulsara truly believes we hire the right people for the right positions, and that is half the battle. There are many ways to foster company culture, ‘touch’ each employee enough and build and strengthen the team as a whole. This blog concentrates on the two essential qualities any company that wishes to attract and attain top employees needs to live and breathe.

Recognition

Employees are primarily motivated by one or a combination of the 3 R's: Reward, Recognition, Responsibility. While the study of what motivates employees is fascinating to me (not you?), I have found that one of those R’s in particular is crucial at the individual and team level: Recognition.

Everyone wants cake on their birthday. Well, maybe not necessarily cake and perhaps not necessarily on their birthday, but recognizing employees (not just their professional accomplishments and efficiencies), strengthens the team and individual levels of engagement in a company. Providing recognition also encourages this type of support amongst team members, no matter the degree of separation in workflow, departments or physical location.

Leadership should be sure to publicly give “shout-outs” or “kudos” to employees for a job well done, as well as for personal accomplishments (i.e. a great barbershop quartet performance over the weekend, or running a race).

Communication and Trust

You will simply not find a successful multi-state, telecommuting company without strong communication and trust. Pulsara embodies cutting edge employee policies but there are many other companies that have implemented discretionary PTO and flexible work hours because they are ‘cool’ ... not because they function in reality within the organization.

While I touched on hiring the right people (and an entire blog series alone could be attributed to that topic), the biggest part of having a trustful team is ensuring the actual team members are in the right roles. And, further, within a team full of the right people, in the right roles, who all trust their managers, each other and the executive team, consistent, effective communication is the cog that connects the wheel.

From the top down, bottom up and all around, there must be communication and trust. Between the leadership team, management to employees, employees to management, and coworker to coworker. In this day and age, communication comes in many forms and the business must support the different means for communication to better enable the flow of information, teamwork, and brainstorming without interruption.

Communication needs to begin with the leadership team constantly encouraging open lines of conversation in person, over Slack, email, or the telephone, and eventually this style of consistent, clear, and open communication will be established as company culture among all employees.

Alison Garvey – twirling her green scarf in the white clouds of Bozeman Spring snow, thinking of new ways to excite and develop humans to their fullest potential.