Culture Club: Supporting company goals, values and practices through COVID

Culture Club

Supporting company goals, values and practices through COVID

If you walked through the virtual doors at Frontera, pretty soon you’d hear the words ‘Learning with Purpose’ and ‘Campus’. That's our culture in action during a time when it's needed most. Let me explain...

Back in March of last year, as you have experienced, the way we work changed dramatically overnight due to Covid. We were no longer able to enjoy the usual office banter with face to face brainstorming and meetings. And that end of week well-earned Friday social. Instead we’ve learnt to rely on technology to connect us, with virtual meetings replacing the physical.

It’s during this time that our company culture has become even more important. Our attitudes, behaviours and shared purpose created an energy that helped us to thrive.

Why culture is crucial

A great company culture is not just about values. It should be more tangible than that, feeding positive employee engagement and providing the blueprint for success. It sets the foundations for business growth, longevity and results - regardless of the economic climate.

We did a lot of work on our company culture last year and into this. Specifically, this included holding leadership sessions and running a series of all agency workshops. Positive navel-gazing, which involved mobilizing everyone in the company to reflect on our culture, our ambitions and the future we want to be part of. Arriving at this shared purpose created an energy that has helped us to thrive.

Delving deeper into different culture styles

Part of this work included exploring distinctive corporate cultures, as defined by Harvard Business Review: The Leader’s Guide to Corporate Culture. The view here is that understanding a company’s culture requires determining where it falls between ‘people interactions’ and ‘response to change’. By applying this insight, they identified eight styles that apply to cultures and leaders: Caring, Purpose, Learning, Enjoyment, Results, Authority, Safety and Order.

Every culture style has its pros and cons, but these eight styles can be used to diagnose and describe complex and diverse behavioural patterns in a culture, and to model how likely a leader is to align with and shape that culture.

What we identified with

The direction our contemplations took us was an aspirational one. We are driven to achieve success. Externally this means transforming the lives of patients, by capturing and integrating the patient voice in everything we do. Our company mantra is ‘We Speak Patient’.

Culture-wise the two key styles that spoke to us, with our aspirational ambition, was ‘Learning’ and ‘Purpose’. And thus, our Learning with Purpose (LWP) culture was born! So, what does this say about us? We are inventive and brave. We explore, we’re curious, committed to self-learning and stimulus sharing. And how do we go about it? With agility, adaptability and experimentation. With collaboration, fun with shared purpose.

Walking the culture talk

We’ve been living our LWP culture in various ways. A key launch was our internal training programme ‘Campus’, with a curriculum of different learning sessions planned across each academic term.

We want you to be involved

Campus is designed in conjunction with you - clients, employees, innovators.

Because content isn’t something that is dictated but devised collaboratively. Everyone has learnings to share that can improve what we do for patients today. Ask yourself, what session could I run?

If you would like to be involved, please drop me a line HR@frontera-group.com

Rachel Dyer (Assoc. CIPD)

HR Lead at Frontera Group

HR@frontera-group.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachel-dyer-assoc-cipd-3ab1b94/