I am old enough to remember a time when we did not talk about culture in human resources. I know that that makes me an old lady, and please just mind your business on my age. But there was a time when that was not a buzzword. It wasn't a word at all. We never talked about company culture. And then at some point, I don't know, a little over a decade ago, maybe even longer, somebody did a study and realized that positive workplace experiences, positive employee culture, company culture, could be a driver in overall company health. It could increase satisfaction. It could increase profitability, productivity, efficiency, all the things you, of course, want to increase in a business. And from the time that study came out, off we went. Off we went talking about how a company culture is priority, should be priority, I remember in the early days, all these slogans around how culture eats strategy for breakfast and just, you know, we thought it was a magic bullet to fix everything. And while I think after this long, we've all simmered down a little bit in thinking that it's a magic bullet, I do think we can all still agree that it's important. And that having a positive culture or what I really kind of lump into employee experience having a really positive, employee experience and a healthy employee experience does impact the overall health of the business. Inside of small employers where we focus 1 to 500 employees, everything is amplified. If you have a super positive leader, a super positive experience, then that is amplified across the entire organization. If you have a toxic leader, a toxic coworker, a toxic experience, that is also amplified across the entire organization. So company culture in a small environment absolutely matters. And I think that it's almost easier, I would say, to, uh, curate, to maintain, a culture in a small environment. But here's the thing. In order to do that, in order to curate it, in order to maintain it, you have to be deliberate about doing so. It's going to grow no matter what you do. Culture is organic in a lot of ways. Meaning that you are going to have some kind of company culture that grows, whether you, uh, are deliberate about it or not. And so the thing in a small environment that I have learned after all these years in business is that if we aren't deliberate, if we aren't focused on the daily behaviors, the daily experience that we want our employees to have, that we want to give them, that we expect out of them, if nobody's driving that, then something is going to grow and it may not be what you intended. And if that's the case, it's so much harder to turn it around than it is to just start early on and build something that really does help both business and employees thrive. If you are new here, my name is Sabrina Baker. I am the CEO and founder of Acacia HR Solutions. We are a startup and small employer-focused fractional support firm when I say small employer, I mean 1 to 500 employees. I don't care about revenue. I don't care about industry. I don't care about anything else other than the number of employees. All of our clients, 100% of them, are in that 1 to 500 range. And I would say the vast majority are probably between 12 and 80. So really small. That's who this podcast is built for. It is built for people who are managing human resources in those small environments because it is different. I've talked about why it's different in previous episodes. It is different. It is harder in some ways. It requires more soft skills. It is like managing, uh, in a small town. It's very, very similar. And so I wanted to make sure we had something focused in that space because what works at 5,000 employees does not work at 15 employees. Um, and that's really who this podcast is built for. And if you're new here, I'm glad you're here. So let's talk about this culture inside of a small employer, what I think it is, what does it help create with your employees, and then what are some ways that we can really drive culture and make sure that we are curating the type of environment we want rather than letting something build that we're not happy with in the end. So culture to me is really a set of behaviors. It's the set of behaviors that we give to employees, the way that we treat them, the way that we interact with them as leaders, the way that we communicate, um, the the environment that we set them up in, the tools that we give them. It is this daily behavior that comes from us to employees and then that we expect out of employees. And so it is an environment issue more so than a workflow or a structure issue. Culture is a stickiness factor. And what I mean by that is you can have a great pay and benefits, and that's wonderful, and certainly there is a transactional piece to work where people are doing a job in exchange for a paycheck. That is all well and why we work. I don't think any of us are working for free. Um, so there is certainly that transactional piece of doing the work for the paycheck. But culture is that sticky relational factor that allows employees to feel like they belong. It allows them to feel like they have a purpose. That they are valued. Um, and it allows them to align their drive with what the business is trying to do. We have absolutely seen clients who are for all intents and purposes and to to say it mildly, kind of a mess from a structure standpoint. They don't have structure. They have no processes, no workflows. Um, they're just flying by the seat of their pants. Yet, employees are so um valued and they are, they feel like they belong, like they are a part of something and they love working with their coworkers and they love interacting with their leaders and that experience that they have is so positive that they deal with the mess. They deal with uh the lack of structure and the ambiguity and the things that could drive people crazy. They deal with all of that because the employee experience, the culture that they are working in every single day is um so wonderful to them. It's really this relationship-focused value-added piece where somebody may stay in an environment that they don't necessarily love the way that it is set up, but they love the people they're doing it with from leadership all the way down to their peers. And so they are going to stick around. And that's why I say culture is absolutely a stickiness factor. A strong culture creates identity and pride. When employees are proud of the how the work gets executed, how they are communicated to, how they are treated, how they are valued, how they are recognized, how they are able to do that, how feedback is able to to be looped around, uh, both ways. When they have this connection and this pride and how that happens, they are way more loyal, they are way more willing to show up in the hard times and the times when the business might be struggling and rally around everyone around them to do what it takes to get them through that dark time. And so it creates this identity that they're a part of something. We see this a lot in our startup uh clients who have just got some seed funding, they're rolling, they don't really have much of a plan outside of maybe a six-month-to-year maybe a five-year if we're lucky, but we're going to roll with it and we're going to work late nights and we're going to be building something and it feels really stressful and messy from a work standpoint, but they're doing it together and they have this camaraderie and they're all in this together. And and leaders are very communicative with what's happening and there's value, they feel valued, they feel like they are appreciated and the work that they're doing is making a difference. It creates this pride when you have that employee experience that people can really relate to and they want to be a part of that and it gives them this sense of identity as though it's this us mentality. Now we're in this together and we're going to get through it together. A positive company culture and employee experience fosters relationships and people stay for people. I really do believe that. I know that there is this debate about the line around people don't leave companies, they leave managers. Or they leave leaders. And whether that's true or not. And I'm kind of in the middle somewhere. I do believe that when you have strong relationships, when you have strong relationships with your leaders, when you have strong relationships with your peers, you are more likely to stick around.  Again, we have seen it in our own clients where the work is stressful, the work is overwhelming, but because they feel so connected to their peers, um, because they feel like they have such strong relationships with the leadership and everybody that they're working with, and in a small environment, that can be everybody. You can have 20 people who everybody is really close and connected to one another, um, then people will stay for that. And we have had many employees across our clients come to us and say that they know they could go make more money in a bigger shop. They know they could go and maybe get better benefits or whatever it may be, but they love the people that they're working with. And so a great company culture is great employee experiences foster those relationships. You think about how do we help employees build relationships? What can we put in place to do that? Because we know that people ultimately will stick around for people that they love working with. I think one of the biggest advantages that small employers have over large employers, and I talked about this in episode two, I think, is this personalization and a good culture really can make people feel individually valued. When you have 50 people, 100 people, it's so much easier to build a culture around gratitude than perks. Um, and you can thank everybody. You can be very individualistic in how you thank people and how you show value and how you show appreciation. And doing that more and more and more, A, is easier in a small environment, but two, it has these compounding effects. Again, because everything is felt so greatly in a small space, when you can show people how valued they are, um, and how much you appreciate the work that they're doing, then that's going to have a compounding effect on them and everybody around them. In a small environment, people are wearing many hats, they're working a lot of hours, there's times where there are these growing pains and it's very stressful for people. It can be overwhelming. And it is amazing to me as I watch it in my own business and then inside of client organizations how just that culture of gratitude and saying thank you over and over and over again um can be such a game changer for how people feel about the organization. In a small environment, you can um feel like an individual, you can be appreciated and um kind of marked as this individual, but also then again feel like you are part of this greater thing, this thing that's bigger than you. And I think that's unique and really cool about small spaces where I get to be me and I get to be an individual and I'm going to be recognized as such and I'm going to be recognized for being an individual, but also for being a part of something that is bigger than me and that has a purpose that I can align to. So let's talk about how you can curate or drive culture and engagement in a small space. The first piece that I want to talk about is core values. So I think every small organizational client that we have, they have core values, they have a mission statement, they have a vision statement, they have core values. And we will often look at their website and read those core values and then we will get in and realize that they're not really being lived. They don't really mean anything. And I do believe that core values are helpful. I think they're helpful to have, but they're not helpful to have if you just copied and pasted them from the internet. Or if you wrote down a bunch of things maybe when you first started the business that don't really align anymore. And so I would say that inside of a small org, when you think about core values, those values should be about how you act. They should be about behaviors. Um, of course, you can say a core value is integrity, but isn't everybody's core value integrity? I don't think anybody has a core value to lie. So integrity feels like nothing to me. It feels like, of course, we should be truthful. Of course, we should have integrity in the work that we're doing. What's a true behavior that we're living? A true behavior around that could be that we communicate honestly and authentically in every interaction. Um, so thinking about first when you're when you're looking at, okay, I want to drive culture, I want to make sure that I'm building engagement, we have to figure out how are we showing up? What are the core values which are guiding the way that we show up for one another? Um, so creating core values that actually mean something and that actually you can demonstrate, meaning that when you write your core value, you say, here's our core value and here's how you see that. Here's how we show up. You can actually point to behaviors that happen inside the workplace that prove that is a core value. So making sure that if you are new, you're brand new, you're a startup, you're trying to figure this out, you don't have culture yet, you don't even have employees really, um, and you don't really necessarily have a culture you want to drive one, you want to curate one, you want to start thinking about how to do that, I would say core values are a great place to start, but let's make sure that they actually align with the type of experience you want employees to have. Um, let me give you an example. One of our core values is that we solve the right problem. We will have people come to us quite often, clients come to us and say, here's the problem that we're having and when we dig in, we find out that what they thought was the problem is not really the problem. And the solution we initially thought isn't going to work, we need to go down a different path. How do we demonstrate that? We ask a lot of questions. And so in our behaviors, both internally of each other and externally with our clients, you will see us asking a lot of questions to get to whatever the right problem is that we need to fix. And why do we say that that's a value? Because I want people to know when they come into my organization that we're going to ask a lot of questions and it doesn't mean that we're doubting you. It doesn't mean that we are trying to trick you or catch you in something. It means that we're just trying to get to the right problem. And so we want to be able to ask a lot of questions of each other when we need to work collaboratively and also we want to be able to ask a lot of questions of our clients when they bring us a problem so that we can make sure that what we think is the problem really is the problem. So you want to be able to make sure that you have these core values that make sense for your business and that you can demonstrate how do we show up in that core value? What is that look like for us? How do people looking in see that that's a core value of ours? Once you have your core values, you are going to talk about them everywhere. You're going to talk about them in your hiring, in your recruiting, in your onboarding, in your performance management review process. You are going to talk about and and hold people to those core values in every opportunity that you have. Now the the number one thing that I will tell you here and the thing that I think is most difficult is that we will see clients get this part right, meaning that they do talk about it in hiring, they talk about it in onboarding, they talk about it in performance review process, but the leaders themselves don't live it. And so the minute you have a leader not living a core value, those core values go out the window. They mean absolutely nothing. So while you absolutely have to talk about your core values reiterate them, talk about how that shows up, how do we communicate, how transparent are we, how open and honest are we, um, what does it mean when we are giving feedback, when we are asking questions, whenever we're, whatever it is for you, talk about it over and over and over again. Any chance you get to bring it back up and talk about it again, do that. But then the follow-up piece to this, the next session, is make sure that you are demonstrating those behaviors all throughout the organization. Here's what that means. Your employees are going to model the behaviors that they see from their leaders. If you have leaders who are not modeling positive open communication, even though that's a core value of yours, who are not modeling open and transparent feedback, who are not modeling being willing to take feedback themselves, who are not modeling whatever your core values or the behaviors that you simply just say you want to see in your workplace, if you have leaders not doing that, then the culture that you're trying to drive will never manifest. You absolutely have to have strong core values, live strong core values, but they have to be lived at the highest level. I spend a lot of my time in leadership development. So we offer fractional support services, I have a team of people who go in and they handle all the day-to-day HR, and I will take on small projects from time to time that are leadership development focused, and I'll either do individual coaching or group classes, and every single time, without fail, if I go into a group class of directors, middle managers, even sometimes VPs, one of the questions they will ask me throughout the session is, has my leader gone through this? If we are talking about communication, if we are talking about delivering feedback, if we are talking about transparency, it is always a question that I get. Has my leader gone through this training? Because they need it. We often think at an executive level, at a director level, they they know this stuff, they don't need this stuff, or they don't need to follow these rules. In a small environment, the minute they don't, your culture goes out the window. Your engagement goes out the window. And whatever is growing organically from those leaders not modeling that behavior is what you're going to have in a culture. And so you have to have leaders who buy into the the values that the business is trying to drive, who buy into the behaviors that they need to model and that they want to see out of employees because it starts with them period. Uh, they absolutely have to model that. So take your core values fantastic, but please make sure please make sure that your leaders from CEO down are modeling that behavior and encouraging the same behavior in employees. Finally, the one of the best things I think that you can do in a small employer to really drive engagement outside of, of course, the way you communicate, giving feedback, and those things we've already talked about, is celebrating every single win, no matter how small. Um, we have to make a big deal out of everything because working in a small space can be daunting. It can be overwhelming. It can be stressful. And so when we have something to celebrate, we got to celebrate it even if it feels small. Even if to a larger org it would feel minuscule almost, to a small org it's probably a big deal. And so you want to make sure that you are celebrating every single small win. We are a 100% remote environment. Um, we don't have an office, we don't see each other. Our office space, what I tell my team is our office space is our G Chat. We use um Google products and so we have G Chat and anytime I get a note from a client, about something positive from a member of my team, I share it in our our shared space. I make sure that everybody knows that I got an email praising this employee. If I'm on the call with a client or anything, even if it's something little they say in passing, like you know so-and-so handled this project really well for us, something small, I will try to put that, try to always remember to put that in our chat um because I want to celebrate all of those big and small wins. We have fractional support, we also sometimes take projects and some of those projects are little. Sometimes it's just reviewing a handbook. Um, because that's all that the client needs at that moment. And those are little projects and they're just kind of quick little hits that we do and then they're gone. Um, but we celebrate those. We celebrate that uh as part of our sales pipeline and part of the the work that we're doing because it matters. A handbook revision in a small space can really make a huge difference to that company. And so we try to celebrate every small win and I think that as I was talking about earlier, when you build a culture around gratitude versus perks, when you don't have the budget for perks, when you don't have the budget for big benefits and and high pay and bonuses and all of these things, you can then build your culture and engagement around gratitude um and thank yous and recognition and celebrating all of those small wins and that's going to make people feel like they are a part of something that they really want to stick around for. Now, please know that in that, as I was saying that, I could hear it in my head, I could see all the memes on Instagram or TikTok around like the company um posted a million dollars in revenue last quarter and gave us all a banana. That please don't do that. That's not what I'm talking about. The gratitude I'm not saying that you say thank you instead of sharing um actual bonuses when you can or actual money when you can. I'm not saying replace those things, but I'm saying that in lieu of that, when you have done all that you can possibly do around the pay, the benefits, all of that, you know that with the budget you have, you are maxed out on that. Um, then that's when and even before that is is when you really start to think about rewards and recognition a little bit differently and you build this environment where people are so appreciative of one another. They are wearing many hats. They are collaborating at a high level. They are relying on each other a lot. So let's make sure that we are all saying thank you as often as we possibly can um because people want that. They want that recognition. They want to be thanked. Um, they want to be seen. And valued in the work that they're doing. Again, in a small space, my business is an example. We are eight people. And so one person doing something that affects a client positively or could bring up more work our way or that could just really have helped out um another individual inside the business, that's huge. That's a huge impact when you have only eight people. And the same is true for so many of our clients. Even 20, 30, 50 employees one big thing that was helpful can have a huge impact. And so you really want to make sure that you are celebrating all of those small wins. Let me tell you one of the ways that we do this inside our our business. Outside of just putting in the G Chat anytime we have something positive, if a client says something nice, I'll make sure that I share that. But one of the other things that we do is every Friday we have a shared space for highs and lows. And I ask all of my team members to go into that space, that chat space, and enter at least three highs and three lows for the week. So what are things that they were really proud of that they got to work on that was really exciting for them? And then what are three lows? Maybe things that didn't work out or that just really kind of stress-inducing? Um, what are those? And I love seeing things every single week. I love seeing what they think are highs and what they think are lows because then if I have the power to curate more of those highs, I want to. Um, but also it allows us all to celebrate in those wins. We can sometimes work a little siloed based on the way that we work. And so getting to see what um people are working on that sometimes it's projects and things for clients I don't even know we were working on or I didn't even um, you know, have any idea of what was important to them or what they thought was important. And so seeing that on the highs and lows can be really this shared experience of recognition because oftentimes we'll have somebody put something in the highs and then somebody else will be like, oh my gosh, that's really cool. Or that's exciting. That's I know you've been working on that for a while. It's cool to close that out. And then on the flip side, you have the lows. And I think in a small environment, we have to be honest about the fact that there are going to be lows. And a lot of times our lows are more around um, you know, clients that things that things shut down for them. Maybe they were recruiting and then they're not. Or they they just had a stressful week because something happened with the client or whatever it is. It's usually not anything that we can't overcome. But it's good to know what is um, kind of top of mind and is being stressful for people. Again, it allows the others on the team to say, oh, hey, I can help you with that. Or I've been through that. Or here's a few ideas. Um, or it allows me, because I'm not always aware of everything going on with every single client, it allows me to jump in and say, oh, can I help with this? Can I talk to the client? Can I do something for you? And so it's such a small thing sharing highs and lows. Um, and I stole it from a colleague that I had, so it wasn't my original thought to do it. But it's such a helpful thing when you have a small environment to allow people to say, hey, what's really cool that you're working on that you think is such a high for the week? And what's something that's a little bit stressful to you? What's something that maybe um, is keeping you up at night a little bit or feels a little bit overwhelming? It's those very small things like that that help build engagement and relationships in a small space. Uh, you can give all the perks in the world. You can have all the game tables in your office that you want. But it is the experience that they have getting the work done? What does that feel like? That's what we're talking about when we talk about building engagement, building culture, building employee experience in a small environment. And having strong core values that you can actually see a behavior tied to modeling those behaviors, celebrating every single win and making employees feel like they are seen and heard and valued? That's it. That's the formula to making sure that you are on your way to building a very strong culture inside your small org. So let me give you a few actionable steps um, I said that's the formula and that is. It's definitely the starting point. Is there more that goes into it? Of course, over time you have to be able to continue to curate that and add things as you can. But to get started, if you are sitting in a space where you think I want to curate a really good uh, culture inside my org or oh, we are struggling right now, our culture is not great and I need to figure out how to turn this ship around, I want to give you a couple of things that you can do to start on that today. So the first one is to define or refresh your core values. If you have not looked at them in years, please pull them out and say, do these still define us? Do these still fit with the work that we're doing, the clients we're doing it with, the work environment that we have? Define those core values and make sure that you can attach behaviors to them. So um, you know, we have integrity, great, but how do we measure that? How do we see that? We always tell the truth. Well, how do we know if somebody's always telling the truth? So um, try not to be, I love to be descriptive in these. It's why one of ours is we solve the right problem. I love to really define out a core value that means something and that you can say, we solve the right problem and how we demonstrate that is that we are going to ask a lot of questions to get to the root of the problem so that we can make sure that whatever we're putting in place is the right thing. So you want to be able to define that core value and then how is it demonstrated? What is it that people looking inside your organization will see that they can say, oh, that must be a core value of theirs? So that's your first piece. If you have not looked at your core values in a while, let's get them out. Let's refresh them. Let's make sure that we can attach behaviors to them. And then once you have that, step two, is to decide how you're going to model some of those behaviors. So if you are not modeling those behaviors now, let's start modeling them. If you have five, six, seven core values, it's totally fine to pick one or two. Just don't don't think you're going to fix this whole thing or drive this whole thing from day one. Uh, you want to build habits and so you want to model behaviors that you feel like are most important. So if one of your core values is uh, transparent feedback, for example, how are you going to demonstrate that? Let's model that. That's one that we can start to model right away. So how can we model that? Let's decide as a leadership team that we are going to model that behavior. So you would share if you're changing your core values, do you want to share it, of course, and then talk about how you're going to model that behavior and make sure that it's happening. Holding people accountable to modeling that behavior whenever they can in every interaction that they they possibly can. So define or refresh your core values and then in those figure out those one or two behaviors that uh, you can start to model right away. And then once you have the habits built around those, then you can pick another two or three uh, behaviors that you want to model and so eventually, hopefully, you're doing all of your core values. And then the third piece of uh, homework or the third actionable step that I would give you is to make sure you have some kind of feedback loop. There's a lot of times where we will go into a client and the client will say, oh, our culture is great. Employees really love it here. They're really engaged. And then we get in and not so much. Uh, we we find that maybe they don't aren't aware of what the culture is really like. And so um, you want to understand how people feel about your business. And that is through pulse surveys, engagement surveys. So setting up some kind of feedback loop. You can do this in the tiniest of clients. So we'll have clients say, I've never done an engagement survey because I'm only eight people. Well, I would suggest take a skip levels then or something else. You don't have to do an engagement survey where if you're only eight people, of course, you're going to know who said what. But you can do something to have a feedback loop. There is ways to set up a feedback loop in in uh, even the smallest of orgs. And so set up some type of feedback loop, engagement survey, pulse survey. The pulse survey could just be like you know, I enjoy working here or I would refer friends to work here. Just one question usually is what you have in a pulse survey. But some kind of feedback loop where you as the leader, as the HR person, CEO, whatever you are, that you know that the culture you think exists actually exists. Because the core value is the modeling the behavior. All of those things doesn't matter if, again, you're working on the wrong problem because you think this is where you sit and actually all of the employees are saying no, it's over here. So you need the data of a feedback loop. Um, so think about those core values for sure. Think about how you model that. But then also get some feedback from your employees to know where you are today and to know how big the gap is. So if you have a core value for um, honest communication or not honest, but open well, it should be honest. Open communication is more what I'm talking about. Um, and your employees are saying no, there's no open communication here. You know that the gap from where you are to where you want to go is big. But if you have the same core value and you say employees um, are saying yeah, we're we have pretty good communication. That feels very open. I don't feel like things are withheld. I feel like I have all the information I need to do my job, then you know that that gap is a little bit smaller and that you are already modeling that behavior. So you just want to continue. So that's why the core values are great. Modeling behaviors you got to have that. But you also want that feedback loop to know, okay, if this is what we're saying, we want the experience to be what are employees actually experiencing and what is that gap and now how do we bridge it. So three steps there for you to um, go today if you wanted to and start to think about how do I either curate and drive from the get-go or how do I turn around a culture and an employee experience that maybe isn't what I ever intended it to be. I hope that was helpful for you. I know that we could talk about this topic for hours. We could I could go on and on. I could dig into each one of these things a lot more. But I also know that if you are managing human resources in a small environment, you are already doing a lot. And so I love to just give you the nuts and bolts and then a few quick actionable steps that don't feel too overwhelming, aren't crazy time-consuming, and that you can maybe start on today or tomorrow or next week when you come up for air. Um, just so you can get the ball moving. This is a topic we will talk about a lot. There will be future episodes where we dial in on this and and take a section of it. Piece by piece. But today really my intention was just to give you a very kind of high-level, why does this matter? Why should we be focusing on it in a small org? And then what are some really easy quick things that I can do amongst all the other stuff I have to do to get this moving in the right direction? I hope to see you on a future episode. Thanks for watching.