Based on a recent Forbes article, almost 50% of jobs are remote or hybrid - more than double the pre-pandemic rate. Leaders agree that culture is still one of a business’s most important competitive advantages. However, with fewer teams working in-person, an organization’s approach to building culture, determining who is truly living a company’s values and visibly rewarding those who contribute, must change!
Structured is a 60-person fully remote marketing agency that has grown steadily since its founding 2018, and, until recently, without many formal people processes in place. As Structured considered how to sustain this growth, they recognized that retaining and growing their talent and being more intentional about building their culture (even as a fully remote agency) was a critical lever. Andrea Evans was hired as the Head (& Heart) of People to do just that.
Out of the gate, Andrea knew she wanted to find more ways to create formal and informal connections across this remote-only business. In one LinkedIn post she shared the weekly rituals she’d created to give people reasons to build relationships in the absence of “water cooler conversations”.
In addition to the 37,000+ people who responded to this on LinkedIn (clearly a question on many people’s minds!), a number of Structured employees added comments expressing their appreciation and noting that these rituals “were bringing their teams closer together,” “connecting them with people they didn’t usually talk to,” and overall building stronger connective tissue across the business.
With a framework for rituals in place, Andrea then tackled instituting a more formal process for giving and getting feedback.
When Andrea joined, Structured had a strong set of Company Values already in place. These Values set the expectations for where Structured employees should focus their energy and how they should behave with each other and their clients.
However, Structured did not have consistent processes in place to reinforce these Values, or to measure how well employees were actually living these Values, and tie recognition, promotions and bonuses to this. Andrea knew that without this closed loop system, even the best Values would have little impact on creating the high-performing, feedback culture they envisioned. To address this need, Andrea implemented Incompass Labs’ platform to encourage more feedback, to inform development plans, and to provide Andrea and the CEO with a “whole company view” of performance.
Andrea chose Incompass for four primary reasons:
Building on these processes for giving and getting feedback, Andrea recognized that culture building starts and ends with accountability and visibly rewarding the people who are truly living a company’s Values. Doing this well is only possible when you have good data and, in a remote-work setting where “observable behaviors” are harder to observe, finding new ways to capture this data becomes even more important. This is harder than it may seem…
On average, companies spend 40% of their annual budget on payroll and related expenses. Remarkably, in a time when analytics are pervasive across businesses, the data that HR teams have optimize this significant investment are still primarily qualitative and/or subjective.
Related, while many employees have goals for the “what” they must accomplish, very few companies set (or measure!) goals for the “how” they expect employees to work (i.e. are employees living the company’s Values?). And, even where there are goals, they are often subjectively measured and reported based on a manager’s own agenda.
Andrea recognized that without better data and more rigor around how Structured would set & measure “what” AND “how” goals, their ability to assess and optimize spending on talent would be limited. Andrea knew their culture, their employee engagement, and, ultimately, business success relied on holding people accountable and having the data to make the right talent- related decisions, so it was critical to address this limitation.
This is another reason Andrea chose to implement Incompass. Incompass not only delivers personalized “report cards” and recommendations to each employee, it also provides instant organizational calibration helping leaders more objectively assess and optimize their talent investment.
With the Incompass platform now in place, Structured plans to run quarterly cycles getting 360 feedback on how well employees are living the company’s Values. In 2025, Structured will also be using Incompass’ goals platform to quantitatively track employees’ performance on that measure as well. Structured plans to use this data in a variety of ways to reinforce the expectations for performance, to continue to build accountability, and to align spending accordingly. Examples of this include:
As Jake Schmidt, CEO said, “I am thrilled that we now have data that show who is living our values and can confidently tie bonuses and other rewards to this performance. I believe this will be a critical building block for our future success.”
Building culture, connections, and accountability has never been more important for a company’s success. With many employees rejecting return-to-office mandates, companies are struggling to reconcile the need to build culture and accountability with remote workforces. But, as Andrea is demonstrating, it is possible and there are several keys to success:
