We’re thrilled The Culture Club is an Energise Partner for Unleash Your Inner Rebel! Here, Nikki Burslam, Founder and Culture Specialist, and Kirsty Phillips, Head of Community & Marketing, share their tips on how to shift company culture and what they’re most looking forward to at Inner Rebel.
1. Tell us about The Culture Club – what do you do?
We’re a team of company culture specialists with one mission – to make better days for
people at work. We partner with clients to shape, shift and celebrate their company culture through better employee engagement, experience and communication.
Our typical projects look at culture mapping, change programmes, leadership development, colleague events, employee experience design and ongoing communication and engagement campaigns.
2. Who are your clients?
We work with a real range of clients, from small businesses operating solely in the UK, to large corporations with over 100,000 employees across the globe. Whether our clients need a one-off boost or large-scale change, we partner with them to bring about more brilliance in their people.
At the moment, we’re proud to be partnering with:
● GSK
● ViiV
● Amcor
● Opto Health
● GWR
● ASOS
● Vanquis Banking Group
● Travelport
● Diageo
3. What is company culture? And what does good look like?
We spend most of our time thinking about the magic answer to this question… and actually think it’s pretty hard to come up with a snappy definition. We believe culture is everything in an organisation. By that, we mean it’s hard to think of anything within an organisation that doesn’t symbolise or influence its culture. In fact, the words culture and organisation are probably interchangeable when it comes to thinking about how to design the org/culture you need to thrive. People say culture eats strategy for breakfast, but we believe they should go out on a date. Culture is strategy’s perfect match and they should be fully aligned to create an environment that gets the best out of everyone.
4. How can you involve people in shifting culture?
Great question. You can only shift culture by involving people! Some useful ways of doing this are:
● Co-creating: What better way to involve people than inviting them into the design
process? We’re all part of the move towards more hybrid and flexible work so now is
a great time to re-design what that looks like from a culture point of view.
● Experiments: Empower teams to shift culture at a team level by helping them to
think like scientists and create controlled experiments. Their learnings can be used to
scale change.
● Champions and influencers: Use colleague networks to role model and shape
culture at a peer-to-peer level. This is particularly effective in global organisations
where there will be a brilliant melting pot of local and global cultures.
● Shadow boards: A shadow board is made up of non-executive employees (usually
more junior within the organisation and representative of every function). They work
alongside the executive board on strategic initiatives to champion the colleague voice
and bridge the divide between executives and employees.
5. We’re thrilled you’re an event partner! What are you most looking forward to at this year’s Inner Rebel event?
One of the big pulls for us to sponsor Inner Rebel was that it’s designed to challenge people to think and do things differently. As well as hearing from the brilliant speakers, we’re really excited to meet people from the comms community to find out about what they’re doing to break the status quo. There’s never a one-size-fits-all approach to company culture, so we’re always eager to understand what’s working (or not!) for practitioners in the industry.
