Drive Company Culture with Values and Purpose

Every company has a culture, including those that never even think about it.  

Most companies, and many executives and business owners, spend a considerable amount of time trying to figure out how to engineer the type of culture they think people will find appealing.  Far too often, architects of company culture focus on the peas and not the steak!

Specifically, perks, benefits, and unique differentiators, while helping to refine culture, don’t necessarily define it.

We’ve been humbled to have our employees rate SelectOne among WNY’s Best Places to Work in our market year after year; but this isn’t achieved by luck, rather, it’s by design driven by our company values and purpose. 

Values – Our company has values, we hire to those values, and the most important part of the equation is following through on those values.  

•  When hiring, we seek certain attributes, aligned with our organizational values, in candidates when hiring any role internally.  
•  When onboarding, we do everything in our power to make sure we deliver an employment experience consistent with the values we articulated throughout the process. 

Our values aren’t words on a website or a wall, or buried in some empty mission statement people scoff at. Our values are embedded in our daily interactions as a team, and manifest in our service every day.

Purpose – More than anything else, and this is especially true of Millennials, team members become discouraged when they feel their work has no purpose.  

• Specifically, when a person can’t see how their hard work contributes to a greater vision, their time, energy, passion, and effort becomes meaningless, and their sense of purpose flies out the window.    
• We do everything possible to articulate a clear path through communicating to the team how they contribute to the journey and recognize their contributions in a genuine way.  
• This isn’t always perfect as paths are changing, contributions fluctuate, and recognition isn’t one-size-fits-all – but effort and consistency go a long way toward building culture.

The Perks – We’ve done our best to create a culture of flexibility and input.  It’s reasonable to think anyone would feel disconnected from their employer’s culture if work constantly intruded upon life, upsetting the ever-desirable work/life balance equation.  So, we’ve done things like…

• Eliminate our PTO policy - Putting any time away from work in the hands of our professionally responsible, hard working team members.
• Working from home - Employees have the ability to make their own work hours and have the freedom to work from home as necessary.
• Suggestivus (yes, a play on Festivus, made famous in Seinfeld) – An open forum for the team to collaborate and share opinions on certain topics.
• The Culture Committee – Comprised of one representative from each department to plan a monthly fun-day away from the office to discover solutions and enhance team performance.
• Community Outreach – Our role in Buffalo and WNY doesn’t end with the jobs we fill. So we participate in monthly volunteer opportunities at a variety of non-profits throughout Buffalo

We’re true to ourselves – we know who we are, and we’re proud to hire people who want to contribute their talent toward our shared company goals.  

Our team collectively engages in charting the course toward shared success, and does its best to communicate transparently so people feel connected to our mission.

These are the basics binding the SelectOne team together, driving a magnetic culture; and it can be just as simple for you.