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O P I N I O N
Developing company culture
Five ways to develop company culture and how taking these steps can improve your firm’s work environment and your business.
O AC Services Inc. has really focused on company culture over the past five years, winning multiple accolades including ranking among Seattle Business Magazine ’s 10 Best Companies to Work For, as well as Puget Sound Business Journal ’s list of Wash- ington’s Best Workplaces for five years. So, what makes a company culture work? How can this help a business to succeed?
Callum Roxborough
Here are five ways to develop company culture and how this can not only help improve the work envi- ronment, but also help improve your business: 1)Communication. Strong communication is essen- tial to success. Companies that have open dialogue among all members of their workforce can ensure that problems are solved faster, errors are avoided, and an open-door culture can exist. This, in turn, translates to AEC jobsites where time is money, and any conflict or issue can derail even the most well- planned of schedules. What has been evident is that communication must be targeted for it to be effec- tive both internally and with clients. OAC has taken the opportunity to proactively cre- ate interactions throughout the company using the technology we have available. This is doubly effec- tive, simply because OAC staff are utilizing much of the same technology to interact with clients.
They are directly translating what they practice in our company culture to improve and provide added value to our client services. One such example of OAC’s growth in communica- tion was in our recent datathon competition earlier this summer. This was inspired by tech companies’ hackathons, where teams of programmers compete to create innovative solutions or prototypes. The competition encouraged communication between different teams and groups of employees to work together to come up with a pitch using a subset of available data. The five teams then developed their ideas over several weeks, shaping the data into a usable plan that would benefit the company. These types of events and challenges create open dialogue between groups and allows for creative solutions to be developed, and even work through challenges that come with developing something new.
See CALLUM ROXBOROUGH, page 10
THE ZWEIG LETTER NOVEMBER 29, 2021, ISSUE 1418
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