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Don’t lose your culture (learn and develop)

C&H has now had all staff back at work for 1 month and it has been great to see everyone return. As a business we have been operating a flexible working policy for some time. This allows our team to work from home or the office, and it is working well. However, as a team I feel that we have lost some of our identity, some of what gave us that great ‘Chase & Holland’ culture. It has not been by design, it has just happened whilst the world around us has changed faster than at any point in our brands 14 years history. During this time we have focused more on adapting rather than our culture.

So that has got us like many thinking ‘how do we inject the culture back into the business?’ We are aiming to be completely ‘business as normal’ (the new normal) by September 1^st. The things we miss are being together in person and having lunch together, laughing, joking, planning and sharing successes together. Although we have transferred a lot of this into a remote environment, I don’t think you can completely replace that human in person interaction fully with technology solutions.

The real challenge is how do you keep everyone safe, engaged and wanting to be part of the business? We don’t want a detached culture or just to become another business.

We are lucky that our culture has been strong enough to still come through but we want to take this opportunity to make our culture better and make Chase & Holland the place to be in the setting of the new norm.

1. We have created a socially distanced hub which we will all be part of once per week. We have done everything we can to make sure it is safe.
2. All work and no play we know the saying. We have reintroduced our theme days (the first one is your worst lockdown outfit!).
3. Relook at all our equipment and although we are all able to do our job is it the best it can be? What do we need to do to improve it and make it fully integrated?
4. We are going to introduce electronic team celebrations live as they happen. With us not all seeing each other all the time it is easy not to celebrate success.
5. Provide our colleagues with a new training program on how to get the most out of the new normal.

Obviously, you can always look at doing more but for Chase & Holland the above 5 changes are the start of our journey of getting back to ‘normal’. I have to say I for one am very excited about this and would really appreciate the views of other people on what you are doing to keep the culture in your business strong.