Culture Champions: How Shipwell Is Staying Connected In This New Remote World
As the year goes on, there are many questions on everyone's minds, from CEOs and People and Culture Leadership to Sales and Product teams: How do we keep morale high? How can we keep the team engaged and connected to collaborate and maintain productivity? These concerns were found at both companies fighting for stability and those flourishing.
This summer, we checked in with Austin company Shipwell, who are continued partners with Catalyst Games as they have participated 5 years in a row. Shipwell’s core behaviors include: Grow Roses, Fast Paced Excellence, Seek Learning, Be a Shipping Hero, Build the Future & Never Settle. We were happy to sit down with their People Operations Generalist, Madison Little, and have a chat for the first installment of our Culture Champions blog series.
How would you describe Shipwell’s culture?
Shipwell’s culture is shaped by our core behaviors (listed above), our diverse team, and our customers. We want to make sure our employees feel empowered, safe, and armed with the tools they need to be successful. Therefore, we feel open communication and collaboration are essential. Our environment is fast paced to meet our customer’s needs and continue to build out our platform to meet the needs of new customers. We not only work as a team to make sure things get done, but we are a friendly team so we like to play as a team and have fun together as well!
2. What’s been the biggest struggle Shipwell has encountered in maintaining your vibrant culture while remote?
The biggest challenge Shipwell has faced in maintaining their culture is having to adjust from being such a social, face-to-face culture to fully remote and altered social gatherings. The transition to working from home has opened up the opportunity for everyone to spend more time with their families (furry friends included) and share them with co-workers via Zoom calls. Pet Party zoom calls are our favorite! We have found fun ways to engage with one another through technology, whether it be virtual games, virtual challenges, or virtual happy hours.
The overall flexibility in our work days have altered as well. Some employees have found they enjoy working or going for a walk during lunch. We find it very important to instill parameters around work days to prevent burn out and maintain mental health. Although our events, games, interviews, and meetings are no longer face to face, we have been creative in other ways to ensure everyone still feels connected. We had to re-think and re-organize the way we perform onboarding and our training. This involved implementing more videos, online training resources, increased manager-direct report interactions, and more. It also posed a great time to promote team members to take on training classes and courses outside of Shipwell. We found an increased need to hold Zoom meetings and gatherings to discuss what is going on in our world and community around us. All of these things were an adjustment, but helped us to maintain the interactive culture we have at Shipwell.
3. What’s been the strategy you’ve most effectively implemented to keep employees connected and engaged?
A lot of our strategies stemmed from some of the challenges we came across. We knew that team members would be missing social gatherings, events that we held, and even “watercooler talk”. So we immediately began working on creating virtual events, happy hours, competitions, book clubs and trivia sessions. This helped to keep a sense of “normalcy” in an ever changing time. We also sent out an engagement survey to get insight into how individuals were feeling about their productivity, the transition to working from home and the potential of returning to the office. In addition, we felt it was important to ask what their needs were to improve their remote working situation. We then took these answers and then sought out solutions. Overall, our team has been resilient during this time and we have been able to remain connected through the adversity.
4. Any takeaways/solutions from this time that you will intentionally carry over to a post-pandemic world?
A number of learnings have been made during this pandemic and quick transition to working from home. Some significant outcomes & changes we will carry forward are:
We have become a remote forward company. This means we are now open to having employees be 100% remote anywhere in the US. Some employees will want to work 100% in our offices when they open back up and others will be somewhere in between spending time at an office and remotely. We have learned our team can execute and create a world class platform from anywhere where they have access to the internet! This will also allow us to now find talent where talent lives verses being limited to the metros where our offices are.
An increase of trust has inherently happened while working remotely. When you are not able to physically see someone in the office you need to trust a lot more. Trust that they will reach out if they need help, trust that they will be as productive, and trust that folks can create their own work schedules. Obviously good communication goes hand and hand with trust, but with that trust comes great rewards!
Getting creative with training and development outlets now that we are not in the office.
Continuing to focus on and bring awareness of the importance of mental health. Working and living in the same space can affect people differently. Understanding that space restrictions and social restrictions affect people differently and that having an abundance of “world” stressors right now affect how people show up to work. The more resources we can provide to our managers and employees on how to identify and handle mental health & wellbeing the better for us all.