Developing a healthy company culture takes time and intention. Over the past few years, Connico’s leadership team has worked to create a culture in which the quality of the work we deliver to our clients is matched by the ways in which we support, invest in, and care for our employees and their loved ones.
We know our industry can be demanding. Sometimes, it is necessary to work long hours to ensure clients get deliverables on time. We know work-life balance, mental health, and leadership support are vitally important to the success of our team, so we aligned our strategies, updated benefits, and added new resources to ensure our culture helps our team thrive. Here are a few of the ways we’ve enhanced our culture to ensure the success of our people, clients, and business.
Meet employees where they are
In recent years, more employers are recognizing the importance of mental health and the impact of wellbeing on both their company cultures and bottom lines. To ensure we’re supporting our team in every way possible, we make it a priority to provide mental health support and resources. In 2022, we engaged the expertise of a Chief Happiness Officer (CHO) to host mental health-related conversations among our employees. Our CHO teaches techniques for controlling stress levels and improving well-being and happiness. Two of these techniques include Power Pauses, which encourage “pausing” as a way to calm the central nervous system and help people respond to stressful situations, and Emotion Naming, which involves describing feelings in simple terms to help determine how to handle certain emotions as they arise.
Following these sessions, our team shared that learning these concepts has helped them become better, more well-rounded people and professionals. To extend mental health support outside of the workplace, it’s important that company insurance plans include counseling or other mental health support. We intentionally chose healthcare insurance that includes free resources and counseling options.
Encourage employees to recharge
Work-life balance is something many companies say they value but have a difficult time putting into practice. From unused paid time off to working while on vacation, a world of 24/7 connectivity has made it even harder for employees to find balance.
It is important to actively encourage employees to use their time off. In addition to repeating that message, it’s critical for executives to lead by example. Leaders that take time off, and truly log off from work while away, show others they too can take time they need, worry free.
Work-life balance doesn’t stop at vacations and holidays. If an employee has had a particularly tough or demanding week, or if something is going on at home, we make sure each employee knows they can come to Connico’s leadership, and we will go out of our way to offer support and give them time to recoup, even if it’s just checking out early or coming in late.
Implement benefits based on your team’s needs
Select and offer benefits that your team values and uses. Offering benefits team members care about conserves company resources and makes employees feel like leadership understands their needs. This may take analysis and probing, but a good place to start is by simply asking employees what benefits are most attractive and important to them.
Connico previously offered birthdays as paid holidays. However, most of our team rarely had the opportunity to take time off because of client obligations. Now, we offer employees an additional flex holiday, which allows them to take PTO on any day that matters to them, whether it is their birthday, a spiritual celebration, or just a Tuesday in June.
We’ve also found that our team values work schedule flexibility as well as in-person professional interaction. We introduced a hybrid model that allows our team to work remotely on Mondays and Fridays and in person on the remaining “anchor days.” Having folks report to an office on our anchor days allows us to have in-person training and synergy that occurs when our team is physically together. We find that our team solves problems more effectively when our senior and junior team members come together collectively. In addition, we know our employees have lives and important responsibilities outside of work, so we do our best to accommodate team members who request additional remote days.
Create an environment that reflects company vision
Consider your company’s core values and how your culture embodies those values. Write down how you want employees to feel at work: perhaps you’d write supported, heard, cared for, or respected. How can you make these feelings a reality in the workplace? By creating an environment based on values, analogous company policies, attitudes and benefits will more easily fall into place.
One of our goals is to create an atmosphere where every employee feels like they are a critical part of the team, and their colleagues have their best interests at heart. To help achieve this, we cross-train employees so they can more easily help one another outside of their defined roles. This has created a culture where team members step in to help when needed and know how help should be delivered.
At Connico, we strive every day to improve, not just the quality of our work, but the quality of our staff’s lives. We believe showing employees we care and improving benefits are sound business decisions that serve as recruitment differentiators. These initiatives are also a factor in our ability to retain staff long-term. In the end, for me, our approach comes down to what I personally believe, and what we stand for: treating people well and continuing to improve is simply the right thing to do.
Bryan Hafertepe, PE, COO and Project Specialist, is a licensed professional engineer focused on cost estimating, value integration, project management, and construction observation. As COO, he leads Connico’s retention and recruitment efforts, including training and mentoring.
