Corporate Culture - The Best Organizational Glue

It's hard to believe that the time has come for my final learning share about the fifth functional area of Human Resources that I explored: corporate culture. Although this is often the industry term for this area of HR, redpepper really dislikes the word "corporate" due to the unique nature (culture!) of the agency, so you will often find me interchangeably using the term "corporate culture" with phrases like "organizational culture" or just "culture."

I have long been passionate about corporate culture, or rather the idea of it, but had never gotten hands-on project exposure to it before. Because of this, I was incredibly excited to dip my toes into what organizational culture at a culture-first company like redpepper could look like, to finally confirm (or deny) that this was an area I wanted to focus my career on in the future. To truly learn about corporate culture, I chose to take over the planning for the weekly all-hands Alignment meeting that redpepper hosts, as well as create an "rpDNA" presentation that summarizes exactly what the company's culture is.

"Wonderland" - The open space where redpepper's weekly Alignment meeting takes place.

Center to redpepper's culture is their Alignment meeting, which occurs every Monday at 4:15 PM. During this meeting, every employee at redpepper stops what they're doing to come together, share redpepper and personal wins for the week, and teach each other about topics that they're interested in (through a Ted Talk style presentation called a "Redbit"). This meeting is a perfect highlight of what redpepper believes in, and every meeting ends with the emcee for the day yelling "Hustle And" and employees responding "Grow!" - redpepper's slogan. To fully immerse myself in this one hour a week that is incredibly core to redpepper's identity, I took on the administrative work for the meeting; every week I create the schedule for the meeting, send 1, 2, and 3-week out presentation day reminders to employees, and print and distribute the agenda. Though much of this is behind-the-scenes work, doing these tasks from day one of my internship has given me a good glance into how redpepper disseminates their culture, and ultimately helped me to decide that I wanted to build a culture-focused presentation during my internship.


For my HOD internship project, as well as my main project during my time at redpepper, I focused on creating a presentation, titled "rpDNA," that pulled together all culture-relevant resources that were core to redpepper's identity. Although this process is fully described in my Final Project and Report, I was able to use this task to immerse myself in not only redpepper's culture, but the culture and best practices of other culture-champion companies, as well. Through this research, I was filled with ideas such as using the word "our" on every company-facing document to provide ownership, as well as weaving a storyline through a culture presentation to personify the culture (Tettra, n.d.). Ultimately, this project left me feeling inspired and amazed by how unique each company's organizational culture can be, and what a powerful effect it can have on employee engagement and satisfaction.

redpepper's 5 Core Values that serve as the foundation for rpDNA and the company's organizational culture.

I am so thankful that I got to immerse myself in redpepper and its culture this semester, and after this experience creating rpDNA (which is currently completed from the content side and in the design phase with redpepper graphic designers!), I can confidently say that I want corporate culture to be a large part of my future career. I am fascinated by the effect that a company's story and values can have on not only the people but also the bottom-line, and feel as though I can make the greatest impact in the HR industry by working within this functional area!

References

Tettra. (n.d.) Culture codes. Retrieved from https://tettra.co/culture-codes/