We're building a better culture.

When I look at the work our people do at connectFirst, I’m reminded of the words of famed management consultant Peter Drucker.

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Not that strategy isn’t hugely important, but it simply won't get you very far if it isn’t supported and driven by a strong culture.?

One of the key tenets of our culture is building an understanding of each other on a human level—connecting in a way that builds trust, reduces friction, and makes everyone’s job more impactful.

To help build that connection, we recently invested in a full day culture and development event that every single employee attended. For us, that’s a commitment to bring together more than 750 people from 42 branches across Central and Southern Alberta.?

Together, we took the time to reflect on and celebrate a hugely successful year, and looked ahead at what the coming year has in store. Most importantly, we gathered to build our cultural values and connect with each other on a more personal level.

We need to be intentional about how we build our culture. Because culture is all about how we relate to each other and work together. Looking into next year, we’re thinking hard about how we want to evolve our that. And it starts at the top—with ensuring that our leaders across the organization are modelling how the pillars of our culture come to life at work.?

We’re prioritizing personal care and attention, and working to create psychologically safe, inclusive spaces marked by trust and empowerment for our people. It’s essential that our employees feel comfortable bringing forward new ideas or challenging decisions in a productive way, and we want them to feel that they can influence the direction of our organization.?

I’m proud of this organization’s openness to listening to our employees, trusting what they say and following through on what we hear. For example, employees told us they wanted more influence over how and when they worked. So, we introduced a progressive flexWork philosophy that empowers teams and employees to decide how, when and where they work. Of course, there are some roles that require face-to-face interactions with our members, but even in those front-line teams we encouraged teams to get creative and offer as much flexibility as possible.?

We developed our “dress for your day” work apparel approach in response to employee input, replacing a lengthy, prescriptive policy with simple trust that our people will make good choices tailored for the circumstance. And on a larger scale, we heard the voice of our people when they said rightsizing our compensation levels had to be a top priority. We did so in a significant way in 2022.?

Creating a strong company culture is an ongoing process, and we’re committed to continuously improving. One such area for improvement is how we solicit feedback from employees. While we certainly take advantage of our smaller size for direct in-person engagement, we currently conduct a traditional annual employee engagement and culture survey. We’d like to be in a position to get real-time feedback from employees so that we have a better understanding of employee sentiment from all our teams throughout the year — and we’ll be working on a plan to make this happen.?

Creating a better feedback cycle will enable us to follow through on creating even more meaningful changes for our teams. And it will strengthen our culture, which in turn will lead to more engaged individuals and teams ready to do their best for our members.?

We want our employees to feel supported, empowered, trusted and valued. We want them to know that we see them for who they really are—important people who are building an amazing organization.?