Scores of articles are written about the importance of culture, how it relates to productivity, employee retention, and innovation. There are organic ways to gradually build a culture through your hiring process. But it’s very hard to maintain a positive workplace when crisis hits. Extra stress can fray relationships, and environments people used to actually enjoy working in can become toxic very quickly when a round of layoffs are predicted.
Minnesota is known for being nice, and the entire Midwest is deservedly famous for its work ethic. But people are people everywhere you go, and even the flyover states can kick up their share of workplace drama. So when Minnesota’s budding real estate tycoon, Kris Lindahl, founded Kris Lindahl Real Estate back in 2018, he was dedicated to maintaining an overwhelmingly positive workplace culture in his growing brokerage.
In just a short time, his team had already bonded over annual corporate outings and events, and Lindahl already had good habits in place, rewarding generosity and teamwork just as much as he rewarded sales goals. In some ways, his agents were already used to working semi-independently. But his office in Blaine, Minnesota, still was a focal point for impromptu chats, collaborative workspace, and the rest of his support staff. In fact, the team was already differentiating themselves in how well they worked collaboratively. It showed, and clients noticed.
But when the pandemic hit, he worried it would wipe away everything he’d worked so hard to create. Real estate was lucky enough to still be able to operate as an essential business. But Lindahl wondered if he’d lose that special magic, which was undoubtedly one of the reasons his brokerage grew from a few agents in 2018 to a team of over a hundred agents in 2020, surpassing $1 billion in sales later that same year. He decided it wasn’t enough to just keep rewarding the behavior he was seeking, and instead made a bold move–to hire someone whose sole responsibility would be around maintaining those connections and defending that hard-won collaborative culture that made his team so successful.
The new chief culture and community officer, Cesar Castillejos, started his unique job by doing a lot of listening, especially at first. And when he heard agents and salaried employees talking about the terrible amounts of stress they were having to manage, both at work and at home, he decided to offer Mindfulness Mondays via Zoom, where one hour of the workday was devoted to meditation and mental health exercises, led by an expert coach.
Just knowing that the company cared, and cared enough to put resources behind their team’s mental health during a stressful time, meant a lot to current employees. Lindahl explains, “Even some people who didn’t even do the classes were just so grateful that it was offered.” For new agents being brought into the company, it was an eye-opening experience, and communicated the values of the company more than any new hire orientation session ever could.
It’s often hard to quantify these things, but recently, Lindahl’s agents were reporting to him that low inventory conditions were making competitors’ agents lose their temper often… in front of clients. “It hasn’t been a problem for our team at all, and I definitely would know,” Lindahl reports. “But what is happening is our team is chatting about ways they can further support each other so that it never does.”
With every vaccine dose, there’s hope, and there are also setbacks. It’s very difficult to know when any of us will be back in an office environment again, or how many will even want to return. There are definitely new normals, and we’ve found that as a nation, most companies can operate at normal capacity with most of its workforce offsite. Routines were disrupted and it was stressful, and reentry (whenever that happens) will bring more disruptions.
Having someone in your company dedicated to maintaining your culture might sound like an extravagance. On the other hand, if a toxic culture is costing you your best people and affecting your bottom line, it might be time to give it some thought. If you’ve been in corporate America long enough, you’ve probably seen people hired for far sillier reasons.
