Here at Kerr, we pride ourselves on understanding the value of a great workplace culture, with complementary culture consultancy as a well-established part of our workspace solutions offer.
Having grown at pace over the last few years, increased our team size significantly, and with ambitious plans in place, we knew it was time to reflect on our own company culture. Specifically, how we could be intentional about bottling up what was so special here at Kerr, in order to maintain those values and behaviours as we scale and grow.
It was time to revisit our brand purpose and employee value proposition (EVP), along with the company values that have helped form the business we’ve grown to be and aspire to become.
A great culture starts with your people
We know great company values need to be authentic and human-centric, so creating them in collaboration with our team was key to ensuring they would be meaningful to both our colleagues and customers. We knew that our leaders would have a strong view on what attracts and retains talent within the business, but we were also keen that a cross-section of the wider team, taking into account roles, tenure, age and experience, also be involved.
Working alongside our brand and marketing partners, Purplefish, we set to work taking time to conduct 121 interviews with each senior leadership team member, along with key colleague influencers. We knew from our strong retention record that we offered something appealing but were keen to articulate what made the wider team proud to work here, why we offered a differentiated colleague experience and what engages and motivates our team to do their best work.
Key themes identified through this stage of the research included:
- High quality customer experiences
- Feels like a family
- Experts at our craft
- Extreme ownership
- Entrepreneurial spirit
- Always learning
Having identified these themes through our interview stage, we wanted to test these with the wider team. Bringing a diverse mix of team members together, we delivered an interactive workshop to explore how the themes resonated. The activities helped us understand which were most important at various stages of a colleagues’ journey at Kerr, picking up plenty of tips on how we can continue to enhance the experience we offer our people, along the way.
Quicks wins to enhance the experience we offer our people
By asking the team what they would change, as well as what made them proud, we quickly learnt that there were easy changes we could make to our team’s experience that would further enhance life at Kerr.
Face-to-face team time: it became apparent that whilst the team value hybrid working, they also recognised the value, and missed, time spent face-to-face.
Solution: We now have dedicated team days in the office each week with the opportunity for each team to come together. We also have diarised quarterly whole team days to bring the full company together, along with a growing calendar of social opportunities to get together.
Introducing the Kerr promises and EVP
Our in-depth research provided us with a wealth of insights to develop into refreshed values and a company EVP. We wanted to ensure our values were unique and felt profoundly Kerr so giving them a creative treatment and ensuring they were closely tied to our mission to our customers, as well as our colleagues, was critical.
Our chosen messaging resonated across our leadership and wider team, feeling like it brought our colleague and customer experience together.
Brand purpose and EVP
We transform working lives.
Our brand purpose and EVP provides us with a mission for our people and our customers alike. It’s our guiding North Star informing all we do, beyond office fit-out, beyond profits, beyond the day-to-day.
How we do business: The Kerr Promises
Launching with a bang
We knew we had one chance to launch our new promises in an impactful way for the team. Our colleague launch event took place across a full afternoon when we closed the business in order to give everyone space to focus on the event and activities taking place.
Everyone was provided with a reboarding guide to takeaway which introduced the new brand purpose and promises.
Throughout the afternoon the full team got involved with a range of group activities, created to familiarise the team with the promises and how to use them. As a team we explored:
- What the promises mean to us
- How we’d use the promises in various scenarios
- How the promises were already coming out to play within the business
The highlight of the day was crowning the team Kerr promises hero, a unanimous choice across the business!
Keeping the Kerr promises alive
Our promises mean so much more to us than words on a page, it’s critical to us that they are seen and felt by both our colleagues and our customers.
In order to embed the promises, we’re focusing on various colleague and customer touch points where they’re likely to be seen and felt. We’re using the promises to help us make business decisions, and we’ve refocused our recruitment communications so that candidates can familiarise themselves with our culture and behavioural expectations as soon as they see our recruitment adverts.
It’s an ongoing process and one that we’ll embed across our entire colleague and customer experience over time.
Interested in how we can create spaces to reflect organisational cultural values, contact us here to arrange an informal chat.