Council Post: Why Now Is The Right Time To Reexamine Company Culture

By Hajmil Carr, founder and CEO of Trueline, an independent full-service marketing company in Portland, Maine.

One year ago, our company held a two-week-long ping-pong tournament at our Portland, Maine office. More than 30 people signed up—well over half our team. For the championship round, we wheeled the table out to the main lobby so everyone could gather around and cheer the finalists on.

A few weeks later, we had an outdoor cookout for our staff and their families in a beautiful field overlooking the ocean. The week after that, we hosted our annual Halloween party, stopping work early so everyone could enjoy a beer (or a seltzer) and show off their costume.

At Trueline, “company culture” is more than just a buzzword. It’s coded in our very DNA, and it’s one of the biggest drivers of our success. But when it came time to maintain and strengthen that culture amid the biggest crisis our company has ever faced, we didn’t do enough.

In fact, we failed.

By all accounts, our business has done remarkably well: record-breaking sales, super-low turnover and a 15% increase in hires. In terms of sheer numbers, we’re way better off than I thought we’d be.

But if our employees feel disconnected from that success, and disconnected from one another, how sustainable is it? If your business is in survival mode, as so many are, focusing on commerce at the expense of your culture is bound to backfire—and end up putting both of those things at risk.

Looking back to those first few months after Covid-19, the biggest mistake we made was taking our culture for granted. We naively assumed that the bonds we created could withstand anything—a global health crisis, an overnight shift to remote operations or unprecedented political turmoil. If it wasn’t impacting the bottom line, we’d be fine.

As we closed out Q3, I had to remind myself not to be fooled by the numbers. If anything, our revenue was a lagging indicator of our post-Covid-19 response: the inevitable result of our redoubled efforts to make as many sales calls as we could, not knowing whether (or to what extent) business might dry up.

The good news? Those habits stuck. Once we started to see our hard work pay off, we wanted to keep that momentum going. The heightened expectations became the new baseline. We kept hammering the phones with greater frequency and urgency than ever, and our earnings grew as a result.

The not-so-good news? With everything else going on in their lives—having to home school their kids, wondering how safe their roommates were being—our employees were being challenged to produce in a way they’d never been before. But when you don’t give them something fun to look forward to, like a random happy hour in the middle of the week or a midsummer rafting trip, those cultural bonds are bound to be strained.

By September, I realized that to keep our business rolling—not knowing what the months ahead will bring—we can’t lose sight of the culture that made our resilience possible. Like every process we have, building culture takes effort. It requires constant reflection and recalibration. If you don’t use it, you lose it. Simple as that. And we refuse to lose what makes us great.

To that end, I’m working with our team to ensure we’re really thinking and talking about what our culture means and what we need to do not just to keep it intact, but to improve it in tangible ways. That back and forth has already generated some great ideas for the future: mailing bottles of wine for virtual tastings, book clubs, flavor-tripping parties (if you don’t know, you should!)—things that bring us together and remind us what Trueline is all about. 

At the same time, we can’t delude ourselves into thinking that everything will go back to the way it was. Even if the virus subsides, the economy recovers and our business booms, “normal” will mean something very different. The question is: How do we make that new normal better than what we had before?

The days of having our entire team on-site five days a week? They’re gone. And while we want to accommodate those who want to work on-site, we know most people won’t be comfortable with that. Who can blame them? It could be years before the anxiety lifts—if it lifts at all. So we have to be flexible. Accommodating. Understanding. That’s culture. As much as any Trivia Night or after-work cocktail.

One silver lining to this crisis (from a business perspective) is companies like ours realizing that we can be successful working remotely. We just needed to make it happen. And I think the employer-employee relationship will be stronger and more equitable because of it.

But it’s how we nurture that dynamic—how we use it to strengthen our culture—that will determine our fate as a company. We’ve rested on our laurels for far too long. Now it’s about creating new ones: new excitement, new engagement and new ways of thinking about what company culture really means.

To us, it means a lot. And now it’s time to prove it.