We’re very intentional about our culture at Holmes Murphy, and we work hard to maintain it. In my opinion, we have nothing if we don’t have a culture that supports our employees and enhances their engagement.
Several years ago, we decided to take that engagement to the next level by developing seven aspirations. These aspirations are a key part of our culture. They’re our hope-filled goals that set the standard for who and what we want to be. They shape how we look at decisions that impact our clients and employees. Our aspirations are:
- Celebrate
- Count on Me
- Courageous Influence
- Health Matters
- Leave Good Footprints
- Share Abundantly
- Unity over Uniformity
You can probably guess what each of these mean, but they’re very important to how we operate at Holmes Murphy.
I mentioned in a previous blog that we have a very coveted leadership development program here at Holmes Murphy. This year, we had 16 employees take part in it. These employees are on their way to becoming owners/shareholders in the company. Over the past several months, this group of leaders mastered the Holmes Murphy Leadership Difference and gained experience that will impact them both personally and professionally. To finish up the program, they were divided into three teams and asked to develop and work on a capstone project. All projects were tremendous…and one focused specifically on our aspirations. The team dove deep into our employees’ understanding of our aspirations, what they are, which of our aspirations do employees believe are most important for our clients’ experience, which are most important for our employees’ experience, etc.
The results were very intriguing.
One item in particular that stuck out to me is that I believe our employees nailed it when their responses indicated “Count on Me” and “Leave Good Footprints” are the most important of our aspirations for delivering a great experience to our clients. When we talk with our employees about how our clients are our No. 1 priority, we mean it. We don’t want to just talk the talk…we must walk the walk.
And when it comes to our employee experience, “Count on Me” and “Share Abundantly” were the two highest-rated aspirations. That says a lot. Our employees want to be able to count on one another and share knowledge, ideas, and work ethic with each other.
When it came down to it, the team who initiated this survey came up with a lot of great ideas to integrate our aspirations even deeper into our culture. They came up with ideas such as tying our aspirations to employee performance reviews and employee awards, to name a couple. But, they even went so far as to pull our clients into our aspirations. They’re currently working on an idea to develop a conference where we would recognize clients based on one of our aspirations they may be living out. More to come on that in the future!
We hope you feel we’re living out our aspirations daily as we interact with you…in person, on the phone, through email, via our social media channels, etc. And it appears, through this project, things are only going to get better!
