In our Creative Cultures series, Contributor Crystal Henrickson spends a day inside companies to learn how hiring, onboarding and company culture play a role in employee happiness. From startups to design firms and all in-between, we’re pulling back the curtain on what it’s like to work in inventive and productive environments.
Headquartered in Gastown, Vancouver, 7Geese is a performance management and goal-setting solution that helps companies achieve sustainable results. Every Wednesday, the 7Geese team gathers for a lunch and learn presented by employees on a topic of their choosing. On the day of my visit, a new addition to the business development team shares learnings from a book he received during his onboarding.
The value of culture
“These lunches promote the value of being a learning organization and striving for ongoing development,” says Kendra Moroz, Director of Customer Engagement. “We share a few laughs with some of the presentations, and as you dig below the surface you can see the assumption about culture: continuous learning is necessary for employees and the organization to remain competitive in a constantly changing business environment.”
An intimate team that makes time to celebrate all occasions,
from the minute to the monumental.
To design a company culture for whole humans versus job titles and hierarchies, 7Geese leverages continuous feedback and learning in its pursuit to promote happy teams. They’ve recognized that energy and kindness are important elements of their DNA. “The power of kindness reminds us that words create reactions,” notes Kendra. Using supportive language not only identify blind spots, but celebrates where employees are excelling everyday, and helps companies discover the potential and power of their teams.
Leveraging trust
7Geese builds employee trust and supports ongoing learning by growing team knowledge from the onset. “As a new hire, you’re instantly placing trust of your professional career in the hands of individuals you may barely know,” says Kendra. To facilitate connection early, they have implemented a new magazine-style employee handbook. Questions like “What does culture mean to you?” and “When you’re not at 7Geese you can be found…” tap into the personality and the creative brains behind each individual and a collective knowledge that creates the foundational social fabric. “Trust is a feeling, not an instruction,” continues Kendra, adding that having a personalized onboarding process puts this centre stage.
To facilitate connection, a new magazine-style employee handbook taps into the personality and creative brains of each individual and a collective knowledge that creates the foundational social fabric.
7Geese places huge emphasis on feedback, after discovering it as a common pain point encountered by their customers. Relying on its own tool to track the team’s OKR (Objectives and Key Results) has really shaped it into a coaching organization, enabled self-awareness amongst employees and build up strengths. Goal-setting with continuous feedback, coaching, and peer recognition improves performance across an organization and by using outcomes instead of tasks as drivers, they encourage accountability at every level.
“Feedback is often associated with the unsaid intentions of telling people ‘you need to change,’” Kendra explains. “Everything we ask, the words we use, they all carry weight.” Intentional feedback embraces honesty about imperfections while adjusting to what the person receiving the feedback needs – not asking them to fit one’s own definition of improvement.
It’s said that over 100,000 hours of an employee’s life is spent dedicating their heart and soul to business success. That’s a lot of hours. But for the team at 7Geese and the organizations they support, it’s time well spent.
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