Building team culture is so important.

‘Culture’ is often hard to pin down and define in words—but it’s easy to feel and experience. We express culture in our communication, collaboration, and leadership interactions, as well as through a plethora of intangible things, too—it’s hard to pin down. Expert creative recruiter and culture-fit specialist, Keva Dine, founder of The Keva Dine Agency, collaborated with us on a 3-part offsite workshop to build team culture.

We recently interviewed Keva for 10/10. She also writes about culture-fit on her newsletter, Intel, regularly.

Let’s dive in.

Part 1: Align

1. Give the team post-its and markers and ask them to write down words that represent the best of your team culture—these can be aspirational or actual. There’s no limit to the number you can put down.
2. After 5-10 minutes, display all the answers. Now give them 2-3 minutes to remove half of their post-its, refining to what’s most important.
3. Do the same again but now to just 3. The 3 most important elements of your team culture. Write these on larger sections of paper.

Critical note: These should be cultural elements that are unique and specific to your company. Avoid things that are ‘pay-to-play’ like ‘TRUSTWORTHY’. While trust is a battery that must be maintained, if you can’t assume team members are trustworthy, other work needs to be done.

Part 2: Define

1. Cluster any old post-its under the 3 main categories, eliminating anything that can’t be bucketed into the top 3—culture is also about focus, and what you leave out is important too.
2. Define any missing actions or descriptions that would help clarify or codify what the 3 pillars mean to YOUR company specifically.
3. Take 10 minutes to draft a definition of each pillar. ‘We do this by….’ ‘We are not or do not….’ statements are good prompts.

Part 3: Action

1. Take proactive steps to agree on 2 levels of actions for maintaining and building these team culture attributes—recognizing that it requires daily attention.
2. Set aside 5-10 minutes for immediate and low-lift actions.
3. Allocate another 5-10 minutes for identifying long-term, high-impact actions.

If you’re interested in organizing an offsite workshop for building team culture, give us a shout. If you have creative recruiting needs look no further than Keva, she’s the best in the biz.