Culture building, one typo at a time
Emma Storch is our cultural MVP
by Kira O’Brien, our New York Director and Chief Human Resource Officer
Last week I took the entire Emma’s Torch NY staff out to a Brooklyn Cyclones baseball game as a token of appreciation. We got matching hats, ate hot dogs, and predominantly ignored the game in favor of playing with our co-workers’ son and hearing his excitement about kindergarten.
I had a special surprise in store- I had reached out to the stadium to arrange to have a message go up on the jumbotron and was bouncing in my seat with excitement (I’m terrible with keeping secrets). When the announcements started scrolling I eagerly had everyone look at the scoreboard to see Emma’s Torch name in lights. Everyone was excitedly staring at the names scrolling past when we saw:
Emma Storch. Emma. Freaking. Storch.
When we all caught our breath after the hysterics, I realized all of my plans and schemes could never have come close to the impact of a typo. It was perfect.
Its moments like these that live on in organizational culture. It’s the one-off gaffe, it’s the comments that turn into taglines, it’s the unspoken habits that build a shared language and connection that creates organizational culture. It’s the nuances that make that shared space not just a collection of employees, but a community.
Poised to expand and bring on more staff- I’ve been desperate to bottle the culture we’ve painstakingly cultivated (and with 100% staff retention for the last year I knew we were onto something). I didn’t want to prescribe the culture of the new team, but at least give them a guiding orientation to how we interact with one another.
This is the difference in onboarding someone, where you tell them the skills and technically parts of the role, and inducting them, or ensuring that they know how to effectively plug-in to the organizations culture. One of my favorite questions I use in interviews or encourage interns to observe: what is the culture of lunch at your office?
As a culinary program and cafe, we have Family Meal; a large meal made by the chefs where they experiment with using what is on hand to make big hearty stews, pastas or salads that keep the staff full for the rest of the shift. Everyone is welcomed to make a plate and either sit together or apart, and everyone’s dietary needs are accounted for. It’s a microcosm of who we are.
Technically not family meal, but the best damn egg sandwich made by our chefs!
I’ve worked at organizations where lunch means a stampede to the door where people spend as much time away from the office as possible, or they eat silently at their desks, or there’s a boisterous lunch room where everyone pulls up chairs and shares meals. Each are indicative of a different type of culture, each is a statement.
Digging into this, I realized a part of the struggle organizations face in making the culture-they-talk-about the culture-they-have is that we tend to assume culture has to be this unspoken part of the ether. As if by naming it, it will somehow disappear.
What if the opposite is true? What if organizational culture needs to be illuminated and elevated so it can be effectively stewarded by every single team member. What if there was never a staff member that didn’t get an inside joke? Or know who hated eggs? Or that the expectation is to pick up papers you see on the floor? What if we made the implicit explicit? We collectively went through every interaction and tried to bottle up what we felt were the core ingredients. It started with “Hello,”.
I overheard a staff member say to a colleague “oh I thought you were upset with me because you came by and didn’t say hello”. This seemingly inconsequential exchange was the catalyst for our “All Staff Job Description”, a 2-page document that encapsulates our organizational culture in deeply explicit ways. Each value is made concrete through examples of how we practice and steward this every day. For example:
We are resolutely solutions focused; we do not have a ‘meeting after the meeting’ or talk behind each other’s backs. If there is an issue, it is our responsibility to confront it in a productive way.
We say good morning! We learn about each other’s lives! We know how each other takes their coffee or if they’re allergic to sesame or if they hate eggs! We seek to have the personal relationships with one another that makes this community joyous and resilient.
We care for our spaces; if something is on the ground we pick it up, if there is an error in a document we fix it, if there’s trash in the office we take it out. Nothing is beneath us or ‘not our job’
Some organizational culture comes naturally; it comes from the typos, the impromptu conversations, the lightbulb moments and the methodical practice. But if we are not intentional about making that culture explicit, if we don’t bottle it up and make it accessible for everyone- then it will erode over time. If it’s not explicit, we cannot hold each other accountable to it. What’s worse, every new person we hire will feel like it’s the first day of school and they don’t know who to sit with at lunch.
Eventually the correct message scrolled across the jumbotron, and our Executive Culinary Director leapt up in his hot dog hat and lead the whole section in “three cheers for Emma’s Torch,”. It was pretty magical to be honest. And it was possible because each and every member of our team has done the work of stewarding this beautiful, loving, goofy, dynamic, impactful little community we’ve built.
