How to Build an Authentic Culture from the Bottom-Up, with SnackNation's Joey Joyce

Building an authentic, employee-led company culture is what most of aspire to. It can be the key to making your org a magnet for talent. Retention and engagement suddenly become a breeze.

The problem - it’s a lot easier said than done.

As always, we’re here to help. This week we’ve got Joey Joyce on the podcast to share the secret to creating a culture inspired by your values, but built by your employees.

Joey is a senior team member at SnackNation, and the president of SnackNation’s Culture Committee. His insights provide a framework for launching a Culture Committee at your organization.

That’s what we dig into in this interview - tactics for launching, scaling, and maintaining an employee-led culture committee at your company.

Here are Joey’s tips for launching a successful culture committee at your organization:

1. Select a Representative from each department. Every department has its own needs, challenges, and subculture. Your committee should give everyone a seat at the table, and work towards a culture that works for all.
2. Write a Mission Statement. Your committee should have a specific, culture-related purpose in sight. It might be to improve communication, make the office healthier, or to just make the day more enjoyable. Our Mission Statement was to live the company’s values, spread joy and optimism with events that the team would enjoy, and break down departmental silos and increase collaboration.
3. Chart a Roadmap. Once you nail your mission, work backwards to create measurable goals and a path to achieve them.
4. Capture and Incorporate Feedback. Some initiatives you’ll knock out of the park, others will require some adjustment before you get them right. You won’t know what works unless you ask your team. Field surveys… or better yet, just talk to people!
5. When times are tough, AMF (Always Move Forward). One of the biggest challenges with a Culture Committee is that it’s basically extra work for everyone involved. Each member has her primary job responsibilities, which always come first. In any given week you might have an engineer struggling to ship a product on time or a salesperson feeling the pressure to hit her goal. The key, according to Joey, is to find the right balance and always move cultural initiatives forward. If only two people can meet for ten minutes, meet for ten minutes. Just AMF.
6. Break out into subcommittees. Scale your committee as your company grows by creating specialized subcommittees.
7. Practice Radical Responsibility. Ultimately, your Culture Committee will only work if members hold themselves accountable.