How Company Values Can Help Your Employees Work Smarter and More Efficiently Your team is just as important as your customers.
By Madison Semarjian •
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In a race to offer the best customer experience, companies oftentimes overlook their employee experience. RevUnit, a digital strategy and product studio, aims to help companies leverage technology so their employees can work better. But according to cofounder Michael Paladino, the most important aspect of the employee experience is strong values.
Do you think companies focus more on customers and less on employees?
Most companies haven't focused on their employees as an audience. These enterprises are creating great consumer technology but not doing that for their employees. There's a lot of research about how tooling and technology can increase or decrease employee productivity and engagement. More than one-third of employees think their job is harder than it should be because of outdated processes and lack of technology. At RevUnit, we drive engagement, productivity, learning and communication for the employee workforce for a lot of these enterprises. That became our rallying cry: How do we help these enterprises work better?
Related: Find Out Who Made the 2019 E360 List
Besides technology, how can companies help their employees work better? Free coffee? Working from home?
You hear startups talking about free beer and all the different perks. But for us, it's important that our team is brought into our values and the purpose that we are going after. When you think of our bigger vision, we want to model those practices with our own company and share those learnings to the world and continue to build tech that enables the workplace of the future. We hope to shape the modern workplace to shape work better for everyone. We try to model being human. Work doesn't need to be a drag.
We are evangelizing employee experiences to companies, so we have to practice that within our own organization as well. We focus on the ways of working and how our team works together. Our employees provide feedback on the tooling and technology we provide our team. We try to provide best in class technology to our teams. At RevUnit there is a huge focus on the purpose of our work, and to work better. That's a huge anchor for us in our values.
What does that look like internally for RevUnit?
Twice a year, we get the entire company together in one location for two or three days to share work, collaborate and just have a good time together at our All Hands meetings. We have a team that is distributed across multiple offices and a number that work remotely, so it's vital to get face-to-face time to build personal relationships with our co-workers. As part of All Hands, we also give out value awards. A values award is given for each value to an employee that embodied that value over the last few months. And those employees are selected by the previous winner of that award. We also have quarterly Town Hall meetings where we ensure that leadership is communicating company goals and progress towards those goals. We also use these as reminders of RevUnit's purpose. This also serves as a valuable time for every individual in the company to raise concerns if they see inconsistencies in our values and purpose according to what they see on a daily basis. This level of transparency and open communication can be tough at times, but the rewards of a workforce that feels heard and tied to the purpose of the company is well worth it.
How do you instill those values within the company?
We continue to reinforce the values on a regular basis. We have to connect on the individual level. The first week here, new people sit down to have a conversation with us. We articulate those values, engage in storytelling around those values and articulate our purpose. We have one of those political coins that has our values on one side and our purpose on the other. We ask every employee here to be stewards of those values. If you type in one of the values in Slack, a GIF embodying the value pops up. Everything comes back to animated gifs! I joke about that ... to have company values come to life on that platform, how our team talks to each other, that's really important.
