Does your culture transcend your organization?

Culture extends beyond a company’s four walls.

An interesting test: can customers tell when they are talking to someone from your company versus one of your competitors? What would your employees’ personal and professional networks say about your company on Glassdoor? Do vendors see you as a “Great Place With Whom To Do Business?” The type of relationships groups like customers, vendors, and your team members’ support systems have with your organization are important clues when wondering if you’re really living your values and articulating your purpose.

It’s hard enough to create an engaged workforce, to engage your customers, and now vendors and your employees’ personal networks need to be honorary members of your culture too? Maybe!

Learn more about transparent culture in my piece on Great Place to Work, “Three Ways to Lead a Transparent Culture.”

New methods of candidate engagement

Some companies are taking job board spend and using email marketing campaigns to develop candidate talent pools. Zappos earned some attention when they eliminated job postings (although, we noticed a few have returned to their site). We love Sodexo’s continuous candidate communication. Companies are finally learning that talking to your targeted audience produces better results (higher engagement) than talking to everybody. It’s never been an effective use of recruiter time to read through hundreds of applicants to a posting, of which only a handful are relevant to the search.

That’s one reason why we’re particularly excited to partner with SmashFly, a recruitment marketing platform for content campaigns aimed at specific talent pools within your applicant tracking system. It helps companies create talent networks. We develop the story-based content about your organization or for a specific talent category, and SmashFly distributes it and provides you with analytics. Let us know if you’d like to learn more about improving your time to fill and quality of hire metrics.

Shoes Off at Gusto

In the process of selecting a payroll system, we came across Gusto. We met with their team earlier this month. Upon arrival we saw a wall of cubbies…for your shoes! Because Gusto wants people to feel at home while at their office, they ask everyone to either wear slippers, socks or go bare footed. This is a new idea for making workplaces feel like home. Some workplaces have onsite laundry, and we’ve met with companies where dogs are there with their owners.

If your workplace has similar home elements, does it make you more productive and connected to the company? We’d like to hear from you!