Many entities promote themselves in an ideal light when it comes to their working environment, boasting paper policies that support their claims. But what does having a healthy company culture actually look and feel like?

This is what our Director of Partnerships Fran Moisa wanted to address during JCI Malta’s first edition of ‘Train Your Brain Online’ in 2021 on February 25th during a discussion with Jonathan Dalli, the CEO and co-founder of marketing agency The Concept Stadium. 

Having worked for several years in the marketing field, Jonathan admits that his sphere does lend itself more towards helping business leaders foster a healthy and united culture within their company. But even if one’s particular industry is extremely corporate, or their team is relatively large, there are always things one can do to improve their company culture. And one of the things that Jonathan believes makes a huge difference, is the ability to soul search; “Identifying what’s the most important things are for your company to thrive, and for your people to thrive alongside it, is key in establishing a long-standing company culture”. 

This soul searching can eventually be followed by the company actually communicating its story openly and transparently, both internally and externally, as opposed to merely claiming that the company has enjoyed solely uphill successes and has never made any mistakes that it was able to learn from and improve on over time. “Anyone can claim to have a great company culture,” Jonathan says, “but if your people are not your roaming ambassadors, then you haven’t really reached that level of greatness yet”. 

Another imperative way every company can achieve a solid culture according to Jonathan, is an openness to change and be challenged, which has obviously become extremely relevant in recent times in the midst of COVID-19 and its global repercussions on all industries. “Being agile and scalable is essential,” Jonathan continues, “because that’s how you can ensure that your company and its culture remain relevant and impactful at all times, especially when your team and clients need it the most, especially as we’ve seen and experienced since 2020”. 

It goes without saying that the pandemic has impacted company culture in a plethora of ways, positively and negatively. Jonathan points out that he has always been a fan of focused meetings that get straight to their nucleus and which iron out a way forward by the end. But before the pandemic, this was rarely being practised, whereas the dependency on virtual calls in the past year has essentially forced many of us to keep meetings more concise and focused on finding a solution for whatever is being discussed. 

Both Fran and Jonathan highlighted a number of other company and team values that have acquired more prominence in the business world since COVID-19 hit, and which will hopefully be here to stay:

1. Mutual respect – we’ve become more receptive towards each other, potentially valuing each other’s time and efforts more, through needing to rely mostly on virtual communication
2. Empathy – being compassionate to others is no longer something we can take for granted, as there is power is putting yourself in the position of your colleagues or team members in order to handle any situation in the best way possible
3. Openness – reaching out and admitting when you’re struggling or are in need of help is so important in combatting fear of failure, hence accepting that you can’t always do everything in silo
4. Work-life balance – work and life should be separate but still complementary, because balance comes from real flexibility 

Stay tuned to our events calendar for updates on upcoming Train Your Brain sessions throughout 2021!