You can tell a lot from a company’s culture. Perhaps most important, you can expect to find talented, happy, productive people at a company with a healthy culture.
At Martin Waymire, we have highly talented, productive people who tell us — and do a good job acting like — they are happy. We don’t think they are faking, and here’s why: we take culture seriously.
A company’s culture is made up of many things: its core values and mission or passion, work environment, employment policies, a mutual respect among colleagues, managers who listen and do what they say they are going to do. A company’s culture is its personality and character.
The Martin Waymire Culture
Martin Waymire’s four core values are:
- Teamwork,
- Excellence,
- Win with balance, and
- Continue to learn and grow.
We hire, reward and even fire based on those four values. If you don’t do excellent work, if you don’t believe the team’s success is your success, if you don’t want to play as hard as you work, and if you don’t want to continue to improve and learn new skills, you likely will not be working here. And you can’t just meet three of the four: you must hit the mark on all four. You also must truly believe in our core mission, which we officially adopted three years ago: Martin Waymire works with clients striving to make Michigan a better place.
Whenever we interview a job candidate, he or she invariably tells they’ve heard about our culture. I’m not making that up. We hear it all the time. They’ve heard we treat our team members with respect and consideration, and that we insist on our people balancing work, family and play time. They tell us they know about our many state, regional and national awards for PR excellence, and they want to work with clients seeking to make Michigan better. And they love that our work place is dog-friendly, as at least one MW hound roams the office pretty much every day. We take great pride in hearing these comments. But a company can always improve, right?
Improving Our Company Culture
This year we implemented three new policies aimed at improving our company culture. First, starting this summer, we will close at noon on Fridays in June through August. Obviously, we will still be easily reachable if a client needs us in a pinch. Second, going forward, all team members who are on extended medical or personal leave (to have a baby, because of an illness, or whatever) will receive their full salaries and benefits with no reductions while on approved leave. In the past, like so many companies, we reduced salaries to team members while they were on extended leave. Finally, going forward we will help pay the cost of a gym or fitness club membership or other approved health improvement activity for all team members.
We made the changes because we truly care about creating a workplace culture that attracts great people who share our values and mission. Chances are when you have great people, you’re going to have great clients too. So far, so good.
