What is the best thing about your job?
A fairly common question, asked by relatives, friends, new employees during an interview process. The answer, well my answer, is not normally based on the actual delivery of the job but more around the culture.
When you break the concept of work down, no matter who you are or what you’re doing, I can almost guarantee nobody likes the concept. You spend the majority of your life, typically working at least 8 hours per day, 5 out of 7 days per week. Within this you commute, you work hard, you may interact with people who may not be the characters you’d typically choose to spend time with and then you cram the rest of your life into the time you aren’t working.
Crazy when you break it down isn’t it! But we live in a world where we have to work to earn money to enjoy the ‘rest of our life’ segment.
So, for me, essentially culture is the difference between making work bearable, enjoyable, giving some meaning to all those hours, or not!
For both me and for Roots as a business (and part of the wider Air Marketing) culture is key.
Culture is the feeling that you get when you walk into the office, the relationships you build within the team and the support offered from those relationships. We want people to enjoy coming into work, into a thriving, high-performance, motivated environment. Having experienced workplaces where culture was never considered, where environments were tense and going into work was anything but enjoyable – I don’t want Team Roots to experience that. Of course, that doesn’t mean we eat cake, finish early or slack off daily, but what it does mean is that we have established some core aspects of our culture which our team can rely on including:
- Quarterly and yearly performance-based treat outings
- Idea brewing sessions – allowing everyone to be heard and new ideas to be brought to the table
- Friday end of day catch up meetings over a little tipple
- Monthly one-to-ones, no matter how long someone has been part of the business
- Monthly try something new Tuesdays as a team outside of work
- And much more…
You see our service is delivered by our team, so to get the most out of our team culture is key which in turn delivers even better results for our clients. It’s win-win with a happy, motivated team and happy clients.
In my eyes, it should never be just a job – you are investing precious time into this job which you can never get back – make it mean something.
Opinion piece by Verity Wootton, Associate Director
