From identifying culture principles which enable the effective delivery of the University’s digital strategy, to ensuring we create channels to allow celebration of everyone’s achievements and a space to share and ask questions regularly; we have multiple initiatives in place to ensure our culture is positive and enables us to deliver. Read this blog post written by our Digital Culture Club leader, Aalishya Power, to learn about our culture principles and how they help our team to deliver.
Company culture – why is it important?
The average worker in the UK will work will spend over 3,507 days at work in their lifetime[1]. Sometimes it feels like we see our colleagues more than our friends and family! When we are spending such a large proportion of our life somewhere, it is very important that we are within an environment where we can thrive. Not only is culture important to us individually, it should be of massive importance to employers as almost one third of UK workers say they’ve quit a job because of negative workplace culture[2].
Be bold, be innovative, be different!
For us here in Digital our culture is literally embedded in our Digital Strategy. In order to achieve the level of transformation our department is targeting we need to have the right behaviours and mindset to allow us to truly drive change. We built our culture principles by looking at our 2030 digital strategy and pulling out key behaviours we would need to deliver it, as well as consulting the team to identify what was important to them. By bringing together the human and strategic priorities, we were able to form our culture principles which are shown in the image below.
Here are some top tips we found helpful in creating and implementing our culture!
Get leadership buy in
One way to ensure buy in from your senior team is to ensure your culture principles are linked to your departmental strategy and ways of working. For example, below are some examples of the direct correlation between elements of our Digital Strategy and our culture principles:
“We will enable people to be the best version of themselves, to share ideas and insights.” Developing our staff is integral to achieving our Digital strategy goals. It is also super important that all our employees’ health & wellbeing are the best they can be and that we are providing the best support to allow our staff to be their most authentic best self.
“We will bring people and brands together to create belonging, collaborate and exchange value.” By ensuring our initiatives give people the skills to collaborate it allows us to be confident that we are effectively working towards our objectives.
“We will connect people, especially those who have minority representation, enabling communities to create safe environments for support, societies and subject matter engagement.” We are lucky to have an amazingly diverse team in Digital and we celebrate this diversity to create supportive environments for engagement and collaboration.
“We will create ‘shared’ capabilities that multiple parties can make use of and therefore reduce duplication.” We ensure our culture is based on visibility and feedback, allowing us to work well internally and with the wider university without duplication.
The Culture Club
We have a central group of cross disciplined, passionate individuals who share ideas on how we can implement and support the Team’s working culture. Not only do we help orchestrate the fun socials for the team like a typical departmental social committee would, but we also create and champion initiatives that drive feedback, communication, upskilling, leadership and much more.
Having Culture Club members across our whole team helps us drive engagement and gives us an excellent feedback loop to keep everyone’s voices heard.
Enabling regular communication
As we become increasingly used to hybrid working, it can can be difficult to navigate how to keep a good “office dynamic” when we’re all online. One book I’ve found that has great ideas on how to combat this is ‘The Culture Playbook’ by Daniel Coyle. We’ve used lots of these ideas to help keep our team close even when working far from each other.
Utilise the time you already have. Meeting fatigue is real, so why not try to utilise team meetings you already have, just five minutes can make all the difference. We regularly invite a guest speaker from elsewhere in the University or from our Digital Advisory Network to keep us learning from across our institution and other industries. We have also introduced a feature called “5 minutes of me”, where each week a different member of the team gives a deep dive into what they’re working on recently, sharing achievements and updates to ensure all of our team have the chance to celebrate and share their work.
We also have our quarterly away days where the whole team gets together in person to celebrate the past quarter and share goals for the upcoming quarter. Not only are these days vital for us to collaborate and align our priorities, but we also utilise these opportunities to socialise and reconnect. Read this blog post to learn more about our last away day.
Feedback is everything
Regular feedback enables frequent celebration of our teams’ achievements, identifying and resolving of issues efficiently, and enables a culture of honesty and continuous improvement. Not only do our Culture Club members push the University-wide feedback initiative to ensure maximum engagement through giving monthly awards, but we also conduct regular pulse surveys gathering thoughts on all aspects of work – from project management to team dynamics. This provides an avenue for expressing opinions and allows leaders to identify trends and address concerns proactively.
Additionally, interactive tools like Menti or Mural bring an engaging twist to team meetings, enabling real-time feedback on ideas or decisions. Embracing these technologies not only streamlines the feedback process but also reinforces a culture where every team member’s perspective is valued; ultimately contributing to a more transparent, collaborative, and thriving working environment.
In conclusion
Having a good working culture is integral to having motivated and productive employees. If you want to do any further reading on this, I recommend ‘Built for people: Transform your employee experience using product management principles’ By Jessica Zwaan and ‘The Culture Playbook’ previously mentioned. LinkedIn is also a great place for inspiration. But most of all my top tip is just to try new things – not everyone is going to like what you do, and fixing your company’s culture requires a lot of resilience but the results are so valuable!
– Written by Aalishya Power, Recruitment Lead for Digital
Get in touch if you’d like to learn more about our approach to enhancing our culture in Digital.