Company culture is strongest when it is organic, and follows a clear set of shared values, according ... [+]
Resilience is in short supply these days, but for companies, as with people, the right set of values can help businesses not only survive but thrive in trying times. Strong company culture can guide so much about how a business operates, but more importantly it can shape the goals, strengths, and motivations of the people that make the company what it is. As the pandemic continues to change everything we thought was fixed about our working lives, falling back on strong values and a culture of self-leadership could be the answer to staying resilient no matter the circumstances.
I spoke with Movable Ink CEO Vivek Sharma about leadership from within, wellness and mental health, and how a strong, employee-led culture can help weather any storm.
Curiosity, grit, and empathy
Company culture is slippery, and often any attempt to ‘improve’ it from above can feel excruciatingly forced - think mandatory pizza parties or treating colleagues ‘like a family.’ But a culture based on some fundamental traits and shaped from within can change the working dynamic completely and ensure that the ‘cool boss’ trope never sours the mood. For Movable Ink, a personalized content platform provider in the digital marketing sector headquartered in New York with around 300 employees and a global presence, “the company’s core values were revealed early in its lifetime,” says CEO Vivek Sharma. Rather than imposing these values as a way of guiding the company from above, however, these values came from “observing our cultural torchbearers [who] cultivated three traits: curiosity, grit, and empathy.”
While “cultural torchbearers” is a rather vague pseudonym for those people that seem to rally the whole team, the principle of observing these traits and using them to guide the company at all levels has helped Movable Ink to quickly adapt in trying times. “When the pandemic struck, the instinct would have been to hunker down… after the initial shock, our employees found strength in our values,” says Sharma. Far from dusting these values off in a time of crisis, however, company culture needs to be instilled from the get-go, so that these mutable and person-centered traits can grow organically and come to the fore when they are needed most.
Cultivating a cultural core
Mental, strategic and cultural adaptability comes with caveats and can not be approached in the same way by every company - Sharma notes that “companies like us are smaller, so it's easier to guide the culture and change behaviors.” Indeed, defining a set of “non-negotiable values” that allow employees to lead themselves is easier as a smaller company, and a key facet to Movable Ink’s cultural strategy. “We start with hiring and elevating people who will thrive at our company [from] a diverse hiring field,” says Sharma, before “sharing the same context with everyone [in terms of] the company's vision, values, strategies, objectives, and key results... which makes it easier to organize around the right activities.”
The right activities are also driven by employees, and Sharma points out that distinguishing between management and leadership has been central to defining which activities are important. “Anyone has the potential to lead, even if they are not a manager,” says Sharma, “employees have stepped up to lead BCC (our culture committee) and our DEI Committee (diversity, equity, inclusion), and have organized and galvanized several employee resource groups including Movable Pink (women at the company), Inklusive (LGBTQ+), MIA (employees of Asian descent), and Black Ink (Black employees).” Encouraging employees to lead themselves and to represent, support and empower each other has allowed the C-suite at Movable Ink to not only hear their employees, but to step back and let them lead the activities and strategies that are vital to an employee-driven culture and a culture-led organization.
Culture in the time of Covid
When the pandemic struck, it was Movable Ink’s emphasis on employee-led culture, self-leadership and wellbeing that helped the company pivot its strategy while maintaining a focus on the people at the heart of the organization. “Over 2020 we wanted to lower our employees’ mental burdens and allow a lot more flexibility in work-style,” says Sharma, “it's easier to give people the choice on how they integrate work with personal lives when everyone shares the same vision and objectives.” Working with employees to understand their “changing needs”, Movable Ink opened a variety of wellness activities to support people physically and mentally, including virtual therapy apps and at-home workouts, employee assistance programs involving “mental health support, legal counseling and financial planning” as well as “frequent no-work breaks and speakers talking about managing through adversity,” says Sharma. Rather than simply rolling out extracurricular activities to satisfy wellbeing requirements, Movable Ink also changed its training and learning strategy away from “emotional intelligence training at the start of 2020” to focus on more urgent concepts like “managing a team remotely, motivating a team digitally, time management skills and unconscious bias,” says Sharma.
This was also a chance for Movable Ink to test the resiliency of their cultural values and see how curiosity, grit, and empathy could be put into practice. “Our clients’ marketing plans had dramatically changed [in 2020], and the curiosity and ‘beginners’ minds’ of our employees was central to helping clients navigate a changing world.” Empowering employees to try radical new approaches can make all the difference when it comes to quickly pivoting company strategy. As the pandemic put a damper on all marketing strategies, Movable Ink’s employees helped their clients to deploy “strategies like ‘buy online pick up in-store,’ real-time inventory, and live store opening updates” was a testament to the grit of their employees, says Sharma. A focus on empathy also helped employees to “realize that everyone was going through unique, difficult times, [and take] the time to listen and support each other,” says Sharma.
Strength in numbers
Building a strong company culture is not an easy task, and indeed does not come from the top-down at all. As much as Movable Ink has directed and molded the culture through its values of grit, curiosity, and empathy, it is the employees who have used those values to create a resilient culture and embodied these values in uncertain times. Even if it has to start from one person’s vision and be embedded right from the first hire, culture must always grow from within because people will always follow their own will - those in leadership (or management) positions need only to step aside and let people manage themselves for a resilient culture to bloom.
