This week, we are proud to announce that the Boston Business Journal has named us one of the 2020 Best Places to Work in Boston. After being voted in the top 100 Best Startup Employers in America by Forbes we decided to take some time to document how personal experience helps us build a culture we love.
Company culture is like a garden. Like a garden, a culture will naturally grow whether you tend to it or not. If you’re not tending to culture, it will be overcome with weeds – weeds that suck valuable nutrients from your soil and stifle the growth of important parts of your business.
Like a garden, culture requires perpetual maintenance and tending to take deep root and flourish into something spectacular. Our commitment to nurturing and improving our culture puts a focal point on creating a Personal Experience for our employees.
Personal Experience is at the Core of Everything We Do
Our mission at Alyce is to help everyone create personal bonds with everyone they do business with.
In a world where employees are harder to engage than ever before, Alyce gets closer to our employees by putting Personal Experience (PX) at the core of everything we do.
Personal Experience is the approach to creating and strengthening personal bonds by transforming one-to-many interactions into one-to-one moments and it’s the key to driving our sustainable business growth. While we help our customers deliver Personal Experience to their prospects and customers, we also use this approach to recruiting, developing, and retaining the members of our team.
Personal experience means putting the person at the center of everything you do.
When you put the person – not the job title or roles and responsibilities – ahead of everything, you foster a culture that allows employees to bring their whole selves to work. In doing this, you create a flywheel of sustained growth by Building Rapport with candidates, Earning Trust with new employees, and Driving Loyalty to retain and develop employees throughout their entire employee lifecycle. That loyalty and commitment are the keys to helping us attract new talent whose skills help us grow and scale our business.
Personal Experience, Culture, and the Three Rs
Delivering Personal Experience in a company culture doesn’t happen overnight.
It requires a commitment from every employee who joins our team. It also requires a commitment from the organization to ensure it becomes part of our DNA. Every decision we make is put through a specific lens to ensure that we are keeping our people at the forefront of what we do. For us, that lens is defined by the 3Rs:
Relatable: Build bonds through the #5to9. Take the time to ask, listen, and learn about someone’s interests and passions. Allow each other to bring our whole selves into the workplace. The #5to9 passions are the bridges that bring your team together. It fosters collaboration and alignment.
Relevant: Focus on timing to build trust and earn rapport. Learn where someone is in their employee journey and strive to deliver value aimed at helping each other grow. Each person’s needs are different and it’s important to ensure that each individual is being taken into consideration. What is relevant for you, may not be for me.
Respectful: Being Respectful is about how we connect with one another. Always lead with empathy and adhere to the “Golden Rule:” Treat others the way you want to be treated. We have, and we will, make mistakes. When your intentions begin and end in a respectful place, you are earning that trust that is necessary to grow.
How the #5to9 is our Secret to Success
We each are pulled in multiple directions. These days the lines between home and work more blurred than they ever have been.
At Alyce, we believe that the things we do outside of the workplace from 5:00 pm – 9:00 am ( what we call the #5to9 ) is the source of energy for what is possible from 9:00 am – 5:00 pm.
The #5to9 is where life really happens.
It’s where we can get lost in our hobbies, our passions, and interests. It’s where we become our most authentic selves. When you can focus on being your most authentic self and know that your company supports your personal endeavors, you can’t help but want to foster that environment for others.
Ensuring there is space and support for that #5to9 is so incredibly important.
When we celebrate and empower each other to recharge in our #5to9s, we can come back to the 9-to-5 with inspiration, creativity, and drive. That never-ending cycle is the key to building a culture that attracts and retains exceptional talent around the globe.
Feedback is the Breakfast of Champions
As we continue to build a business we are proud of and a culture we love, we encourage our employees to be as open and honest with their feedback as possible. Without these insights, we’d risk falling privy to our biggest fear – stagnation.
We hope you find these insights useful. If you want to chat about delivering PX to your employees or provide feedback on ways we can improve at Alyce, please drop us a line.
