Maintaining Company Culture from A Distance

This writing thing is my side hustle.

We are a small business, and like every other responsible citizen and employer, we created distance by having our teams work offsite, immediately. We are fortunate to be able to run a business that can be mobile in a day and still serve our clients with great work. As business owners, our employees and their families are our first priority. Our next biggest is our clients and giving them advice, design solutions and support during such tumultuous times.

What advice can anyone give knowing this is the first time all of us are experiencing a pandemic and potential global recession?

We go to our roots, what makes us who we are and why we do what we do. We’ve weathered two previous recessions (2001 and 2008), didn’t think we’d face a third, but hey let’s go for a trifecta. Capsule was designed to be a safe place — time, space or drug capsule — where clients can go and find a new perspective on their brand. This takes on new meaning in our current climate.

Here’s some of the things we’ve done to keep creativity and culture flowing:

• Let it out, get the anger, frustration and worry out without hurting those close to you. If this means finding a place to scream or a place to cry; find it. We had a partner’s dog that needed to be put down due to cancer today, the notes everyone shared with him would bring tears to the eyes of a grinch.
• Precise communication is a lost art, practice it with rigor and keep your teams informed. Get back to the basics, if you only meet on finances monthly, meet weekly. If you only communicate with clients weekly, move to daily. Be precise with your words, now is not a time to be coy.
• We — as a society — are way out of our comfort zone now, this new normal needs to be balanced with new patterns. Start forming those now, we have coffee, tea and breakfast with our team, via Zoom. New patterns can be comforting.
• Creativity is a group exercise, it requires the heat of human interaction to be truly great. So, while we can’t be in the same room together, we can simulate that until it happens again in the near future.

Hopefully you’ve paid it forward and built trust in your brand and yourself. This is when that bank account of trust is needed the most. If you haven’t you’ll need to work a lot harder to earn it now.

We are here for our community and will do everything in our power to help those most impacted by this pandemic.

Stay safe out there.

Originally published in Twin Cities Business Magazine.