The Road to a Workplace Culture Built on Trust

The Road to a Workplace Culture Built on Trust

During challenging times, a lot depends on trust and company culture. How we all live it can either break us or make us. The results of the 2020 survey of Finland’s ‘Great Place to Work’ were announced, and we were ranked to Top 10, climbing from the 29th position in just one year.

While we are certainly excited about our rating, this wasn’t something we purposefully set out to do. The ranking is, instead, the result of determined, focused efforts to nurture a workplace culture that brings out the best in everyone. HR Services are built-in automation for us that boosts performance and wellbeing by taking steps to improve company culture. Replacing HR routines with automation to leave time for development, and genuinely helping the organization is something we continuously enable for our customers through our cloud services.


So, how do we do it? What’s the secret to workplace satisfaction? Over a series of posts here in the Efecte blog, we will be sharing some insights into how we work as an organization to keep our employees engaged, involved, and satisfied – and how you can do the same.

 

The Dynamics of an IT Company Growth

Over the past three years, Efecte’s headcount has doubled. And while it is obviously very satisfying to watch our organization grow and develop, this also means that we face the challenge of creating a work environment that supports everyone, old team members as well as new. We want to make the most of each person’s abilities, regardless of whether they joined yesterday or if they’ve been with us since Efecte was a small start-up 20+ years ago. We encourage the same ‘One Efecte’ mindset in all employees, wherever they are in the world. A vital component of this is creating a robust, dependable workplace culture. Having adapted HR Service management within our daily routines has enabled us to shift our focus on the people, not practices.

No matter how great your employees are, a positive workplace culture doesn’t just happen automatically. It takes dedicated effort, good leadership, and daily commitment from everyone.

 

How Values Impact Workplace Culture

As an organization grows, you will inevitably introduce people with different views and experiences into the teams. Diversity can cause teams to start drifting off in different directions, leading to frustration and division. To prevent this, it’s essential to have a clear value identity that all employees share, and that forms the foundation of your workplace culture.


Our core values are:

Trust:

At Efecte, we keep our promises. We believe that trust needs to sit at the very center of everything we do. Our customers trust us to deliver the dependable solutions they need to be successful, and their success is our top priority. But this also requires us to empower each other within the business, trusting each other to take responsibility for the role we all play in our customers’ success stories.

We believe in soft values when it comes to human interaction. Caring, helping and being honest creates an atmosphere of trust.

 

Challenge:

We inspire our customers to think differently. We encourage each other to innovate, and we boldly challenge the global market leaders.
Within our teams, we make sure to allow for open and honest conversations where each employee can respectfully question decisions, and a broad scope of perspectives is considered. This allows everyone to feel involved in the process and ultimately results in better quality decisions.

Respect:

Respect drives good workplace culture. Here at Efecte, respect travels in all directions. We are proud of having a low hierarchy structure, which means that members of the leadership team make themselves accessible to everyone, and we aim to make all employees feel that their uniqueness is valued. But this respect also extends to the communities where we operate.

Make It Happen:

People often describe Efecte as a ‘company of doers’ and this is something we are very proud of. We encourage initiative and innovation, making sure that everyone has the power to create positive process changes and solution improvements. In turn, this attitude feeds into creating the kind of workplace we want. Everyone influences the workplace culture through their behavior, their words, and their energy.

 

The Productivity Factor

As much as we love our employees being happy in the workplace, there are also commercial reasons why culture is essential. A Gallup report states that highly engaged employees are 21% more profitable in the business. The difference is explained by the fact that they are less absent, more productive, stay longer in the organization, and work with more passion and energy – delivering better service to customers. It’s hard to imagine a better win-win situation!

 

Our Focus for the Future

Although we’d naturally love to remain one of the top 10 places to work, our main priority going forward will still be to focus on how our employees genuinely feel and think about Efecte as a company. We know that looking after our people and our culture is the best way to create a productive, happy, and satisfied team that is proud to represent everything we do: automate and digitalize processes and simplify the world of services, and that’s what makes the real difference.

 

If you want to learn more about our solution to improve employee experience, how the HR teams can reorganize and spend time on the areas that matter for people and companies, and lead with data, you can download our HR Service Management Factsheet!

 Niina Hovi

Written By -

VP Culture & People at Efecte

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