I recently asked Ben Watts of wattsnext HR how they determine that their people are actively involved in company culture; it's one of 3 big rocks that all of their staff are measured on.
Ben said that amongst many ways were examples of living the values, (we have a blog about measuring culture through values here) but another way was through involvement in cultural rituals.
I came to know that wattsnext have a ritual where their team ring a bell each time they win new work. It's a ritual to celebrate success with teammates, enables real-time recognition and of course, builds motivation and reputation.
This got me thinking, how do you ensure everyone is included in this, and how do you make sure that every ring of the bell is heard equally no matter where in the world leaders and staff may be at the time?
There's only one way to do that 100% effectively and that's digitally and socially.
As it happens, digital and social are 2 things wattsnext excel in, so what might that look like for them?
The Digital Recognition Ritual
We need a bell for our ritual
Firstly it's very straightforward in Pay Compliment to create a custom template for this purpose. The design of this is totally flexible and should fit with your company brand and voice.
We can make it brief, but this is an opportunity for reflection and to capture the story behind the success; what made this special, what did we learn, what obstacles were overcome?
It might look something like this .....
We need to ring that bell everywhere!
Now we need an easy way to celebrate our wins.
For inclusion and equity, we want this to involve everyone regardless of time and place.
Fortunately, the Shared Feedback process in Pay Compliment makes this very easy, allowing groups of people to be included and notified in a few clicks of the mouse.
In this case, we're going to include everyone.
That's it, we've digitized the ritual and extended the reach of our celebration to everyone.
Just by completing this simple screen
1. We capture the event of the win,
2. Share the story with the whole company being notified by email
3. All of our people gain the opportunity to congratulate, comment and learn
4. The event becomes part of the employees' life-long feedback stream making it memorable as a reflection point and allowing the employee to relive the winning feeling whenever needed in the future.
It's digital so we can measure it
Zooming out to the bigger picture, every digitized ring of the bell creates data that's available for people analytics through the Pay Compliment analytics dashboard.
Such analytics help to measure culture, and more importantly provide the insights to nurture it.
Even from a simple feedback loop like in this example, we can decern a lot of beneficial insight to support culture and belonging
- Who is winning most often; can they coach and mentor others?
- Who hasn't won for a while; do they need help or encouragement or even performance management?
- Who is acknowledging and congratulating their peers; can we involve them as an influencer/change agent?
- What common themes come up as obstacles; how can we fix the root cause of these?
- What are our most successful strategies; how do we strengthen them?
Do you want to measure culture or include more of your people in your cultural norms?
This scenario is just one simple illustration of how measuring culture does not need to be a chore.
Linking a recognition event to your measurement systems is a win-win for your people and for the organisation.
If you'd like to learn more about the various ways the team at Pay Compliment can help to measure culture, please contact us for a chat .
If you'd like to learn more about wattsnext HR, and help them to ring thier bell you'll find them on twitter or via their website.