GTP20: Creating an engaging company culture
Prime Chartered Accountants
This blog post has been produced for the Greater Birmingham Chambers of Commerce as part of the 2020 Growth Through People campaign.
Growth Through People is the Chamber’s annual campaign aiming to help local firms boost productivity and grow through improved leadership and people management skills. In 2020 this involves 8 free workshops taking place between 2nd March and 27th March, culminating in a full-day Growth Through People conference on 2nd April. In addition, throughout the campaign the Chambers will be publishing thought leadership podcasts, videos and blog content such as this.
Thanks to our Headline Sponsors – Prime Accountants Group, Aston University, Curium Solutions and CIPD - all workshops are free to attend. Interested readers can find out more and register to attend Growth Through People workshops here, and the Growth Through People conference here.
Here at Prime, we have focused on our company culture to create a working environment which supports our team and allows them to thrive and develop their careers.
This process started by defining, who we are as a business, how we want to deliver services to clients and how we want to treat our team.
We spoke to our clients and asked them what they thought about Prime. The feedback was extremely positive with clients saying comments such as we provided a personal service, took the time to build relationships and that we are always approachable. We took this feedback and created our brand values which define the way we want people to deliver services to clients and how to interact with each other internally.
Defining the brand values and giving guidance on how to conduct yourself as a Prime employee enables the team to embrace this. Of course in order for the team to embrace this they have to agree with the concept and this can easily be done by collating and incorporating the team’s opinions. Getting the team to embrace something intangible can be challenging but can be achieved by encouraging the team to take ownership of this. The culture directly affects all the team and by empowering them to contribute to defining the environment they want to work within, enables them to be in control of their own working conditions. The team are more likely to adopt and promote an attitude and action that adhere to the positive culture and will become advocates for this in the office.
Throughout this process communication is key, by putting the team at the heart of this process and listening to their suggestions. The team appreciate having their voice heard but listening without actions is a false promise, therefore it’s essential to action on what they say.
If we were to summarise our culture in two words, they would be empowerment and trust. We strongly believe in giving our team opportunities to take ownership of projects and tasks; supporting them with training and trusting them to deliver. The result is that the team are motivated to see the task through and capitalise on the opportunity presented to them.
In order to empower and to trust positive relationships are essential, throughout the organisation, across different teams, offices and levels of authority. Our brand values of ‘build relationships’ and ‘always be approachable’ are typical examples of how we want to conduct ourselves to clients, as well as internally. Building relationships takes time and needs opportunities, which is why we see our social and charity events playing an important role in building the relationships our culture is built upon.
We believe having a positive internal culture is one of the contributing factors to our positive client satisfaction survey results, which reflected the responsiveness of our team from clients, who were happy to recommend Prime.
All of the work we have done on internal culture and the initiatives we have introduced have the same goal of producing a positive attitude in the workplace, where the whole team is collectively responsible for creating a working environment they enjoy and work productively within.
Morgan Davies
Director, Prime Chartered Accountants