This week's blog post features Olya Yakzhina, the Head of People at Switchee. Olya answers some of our questions about creating and maintaining a company culture, and how to improve staff experience in order to aid staff retention.
Firstly how do you go about creating a company culture, and how do you ensure that it filters through to all members of the team?
Company culture is a vague term. Not one person in your company will give it the same definition and yet, all of them can very clearly say when it’s “poor”, “fantastic” or “not as it used to be”. Culture is a very interesting phenomenon, and in my world I treat it as a byproduct of people’s personalities, behaviours and overall engagement at work.
To build culture is to engage the right group of people with the right values and the right attitude towards the business and their jobs. It’s easier said than done. And it’s easier to do this as early in the company’s journey as possible, so that those values and ideas can be established and so that robust recruitment processes could be followed to maintain a healthy influx of people who can help you maintain those values and attitudes.
When it comes to company culture, I suggest you make it deliberate, seen and felt throughout the business. You are able to utilise the values and attitudes you wish to nourish when creating new policies and processes for your team to follow as well as ensure that the values you live by are woven into the fabric of their employee life cycle - recruitment, onboarding, probation, day to day operations, promotions, maternity/paternity leaves and exits.
There are some crafty ways of doing so. For example, at Switchee we include values in our Quarterly Performance & Progression conversations asking people on regular basis “What values have you shown the most over the last quarter?”. This allows people to actively engage with these values and reflect on how they contribute to the overall culture we are ALL building.
How do you ensure that team culture and values remain solid in a fast-growing company as more and more people join?
As your team grows, it is only natural that the processes you’ve implemented when you were under 20 people will start feeling a little bit stretched and squeaky. That’s normal, let it happen. This means that you can assess which elements of your employee life-cycle operation needs tweaking to ensure that it can withstand larger volumes of people while remaining efficient and aligned with your original values and goals.
We must keep our original values at heart when approaching scaling. For example, let’s not compromise on robust culture fit interviews we’ve put in place at the beginning, just to speed up our pipeline. Let’s not drop the number of onboarding sessions new hires get just to make sure we can bring in more hires at once. There are ways of improving processes in a way that will not sacrifice on quality and turn your culture into that dreaded “It’s not what it used to be” assessment from your future team.
Switchee is working hard to ensure we are working on building good functional processes now, so that we are not caught by surprise when scaling. Already now, when we are less than 25 people, we’ve put a Career Development Framework in place, we’ve created an efficient and custom Onboarding Process for new hires, we’ve ensured our Performance & Progression reviews align with our promotion windows and much more.
Switchee knows that culture is made by our people, therefore, creating fantastic people experiences is what is going to drive our culture forward.
How does a fast-growing business ensure that they are carrying out good recruitment and maximising staff retention?
Bringing people into your team should be exciting! Unfortunately, it is not always so due to the lack of appropriate processes in place, which results in tired and frustrated hiring managers and recruitment specialists.
Switchee follows a simple yet powerful trick to ensure we bring the right people on board and make it a fun experience for all involved. I hope that some of the below will serve as inspiration for People teams looking for the same outcome.
Start with a clear and functional job description. In order to do that you must have a template Recruitment Form. You can go to your hiring manager with this form and extract all the info you need in order to not only understand who you are hiring, but also design a great application experience. Here are some tips for your recruitment form:
- Why do you need this role now?
- What value will this hire bring to your team and to the company overall?
- What long-term career paths are available for this individual?
- What skills & competencies will make them exceed in this role?
- Who will be involved in the interview process and when?
Once you’ve got the form you will be able to design an attractive job description as well as create a functional interview template for your hiring manager to be able to assess candidates at all of the stages of your interview process.
At Switchee, I design the interview templates, share them with the hiring manager in advance and book all of the interviews, so that my team can be fully equipped with handling the process.
Finally, knowing the value this hire would bring and their potential long-term career progression will empower you to host a great phone screening conversation that will make your candidates even more attracted to your role and stick with you throughout your recruitment processes.
What steps can a business take to make the employee experience amazing for everyone, everywhere?
Employee experience feeds into your processes from the very beginning. We have discussed how you can prepare and execute a good recruitment strategy already. This is the first piece of the puzzle. The rest will fall into place as you go over your employee milestones and review the current state of play vs what you wish for the best-case scenario.
The first step is when your new hire has just found out about your role and traveled to your career site to learn more. This is when they met your Employer Brand, your “what it says on the box” site. Make sure the site is clear and covers all you can share about what it’s like working with you. Remember to have plenty of relevant photos of the team for them to imagine what it would be like to spend more time with their colleagues.
We’ve discussed recruitment and onboarding, so I won’t focus there. But I will add that it needs to be speedy, relevant and beneficial for both parties. The interview is not only for you to assess them, it is also a chance for them to assess you, so try your hardest and be engaged and interested. All too often we see some poor examples of phone screen interviews, that are very one-sided and bland - is this what it’s like with you when they join?
Once your people are onboard, they will quickly adapt to your culture and people around them. It’s always best to study the imposter syndrome carefully and ensure you are avoiding some triggers. This can help provide a space for them to integrate and transition into their new role (eg. Switchee uses achievable and relevant 30/60/90 day goals and a feedback-based probation review to ease people into our performance and progression cycles).
Personally, I treat employees as customers, I ask them what they want, I do my user research, I test and I adapt based on their feedback. Ensuring that this cycle is sleek and engaging for them is just another way of improving their employee experience and involving them in creating environments they will thrive in.
At Switchee we use Quarterly Engagement Surveys with regular action plans on the back of the results. We also measure wellbeing, we ask about their feelings towards the leadership team and we involve them in creating company-wide policies that will affect their work experience.
Treating your employees like customers and offering your culture as a product will get you a long way in providing great employee experiences everywhere, every time.
To learn a bit more about Switchee, and Olya's approach to people management, why not listen to the "Culture Before Everything" episode of our Leading Between the Lines podcast. This episode from July 2021 features Switchee's Head of People Olya Yakzhina.
Working specifically with fast-growth organisations, we offer specialist coaching and development programmes, together with assessment and selection centres, designed and facilitated by experienced and qualified coaches. If you would like to find out more about how we can help your company and workforce grow, why not request a free consultancy call?
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