Company Culture: Knowing me, knowing you

When creating internal communications and employee engagement there are some essential pieces of information that need to be in place first to generate maximum impact.

• You need to know everything about your workforce (via employee survey)
• You need to have a suitable place to engage with them face to face away from their day to day working environment on or off site
• A metric of measurement to make sure that each piece of outreach (should you want to evaluate it) is effective

With that in mind, at Bugler Smith has grown substantially in the last couple of years particularly and with a range of new faces (including myself) the management team thought it would be an ideal time to check in and make sure we were doing everything possible to make sure that everyone was happy and settled.

So, to ensure everyone has a strong level of communication with the business, we put out an employee engagement survey. In our view, an employee engagement survey doesn't have to be limited annually, if it works to capture data make it a regular channel for feedback and communication.

What was our aim with the survey?

With the new starters coming into the business, Bugler Smith's focus was on getting to know those little things that make a BIG difference to the individuals within the company and the management team is aware that those things can't successfully guessed (just for reference I have written about company culture in creative agencies previously and there is a disconnect between what is 'cool' and what is needed by staff in the creative sector in my opinion). If you are looking to build a company culture you need to know what makes people tick, so this is what the management team did...

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1) We produced a list of questions which included:

If you were an animal what would you be?

In your lifetime you can only do 1 of these 4 things, which one and why?

1) Swim with Sharks

2) Go into space

3) Perform at the Royal Variety Show

4) Discover the next Spice Girls

What’s your party trick?

&

What’s your favourite film?

Not groundbreaking but definitely provoked insight from the staff...

2) We distributed the questionnaire in physical form as apposed to digitally. (To promote conversation as highlighted in this Forbes article)

3) We captured the data and informed the team what we want to do with the findings

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Now, for Bugler Smith the size of the company helps in order to action this type of work however if you are a large outfit that doesn't mean that it should be more complex, it comes down to planning, organisation and infrastructure.

As a result of putting the survey out Bugler Smith now have a resource of information that means a range of great things can happen internally, such as:

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? Team building - The management team know exactly what people like to do and can organise events, get togethers or even break outs that reflect that.

? Individual goal setting - There are a multitude of things that define what the team have interests in, and in turn if they had more opportunity to do them how they would be motivated outside of money and career progression.

? Personality insights - With a range of personality focussed questions, tailoring the best day to day working structure and environment to each person becomes a reality.

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The takeaway from all of this is that, if you are responsible for a workforce it's so simple and quick to action a level of feedback from your team that allows you to provide them a better, more productive working environment.

If you are an employee, have you completed a company survey recently?