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At Redmond, you'll hear us talk about culture. A lot.
This can be confusing at first, because "culture" has become quite the buzzword in corporate settings over the past few years. In a company context, “culture” can mean anything from benefits to company values to "we have a pool table in the break room."
But culture is so much more than perks. Culture is the overall mindset of a group as a whole.
It’s the collective feelings, beliefs, and relationships within any group of people, whether it's a family, country, or business. It’s the quality and nature of our relationships, our work, and our conversations.
Cultures evolve naturally, but at Redmond, we purposefully nurture our culture so that it grows into an environment that allows each associate to show up as the best version of themselves and make their greatest contribution.
A thriving culture supports our mission to elevate the human experience because culture and mindset determine how we operate in the world, how we show up at work in our relationships, how we feel about ourselves, how we contribute, everything!
This means happier associates, customers, partners, and, as an added bonus, a successful company.
Essentially, culture is:
- How we operate
- What we believe
- What we tolerate
- What we are and aren’t intentional about
- What we choose to pursue (and NOT to pursue)
- What we do, talk about, believe, think, and how we think.
All in all, it’s how we do things.
We find it helpful to think of a company as a car. Profits and good financials are the gas that moves the car forward (and the gas is definitely necessary for the whole process), but the point of having a car isn’t to put gas in it. You drive a car to go somewhere.
The fulfillment of our people and our mission, is that somewhere. And our culture is the road we take to get there.
How We Prioritize Culture
While culture is infused in everything we do, we have a few main vehicles for sharing culture concepts that associates can use in their everyday lives and work.
These include monthly culture meetings, company retreats, access to reading materials, training documents, videos, and a whole culture team that works with associates and team leads to help them discover the best ways to implement helpful concepts into their lives and work. (Yes, we believe in culture so much that we’ve dedicated an entire department to studying and implementing it!)
How can you take part in this culture?
If you’re a Redmond associate, you’ve probably been to some culture meetings and discussions where we learn and talk about various personal development concepts. You might also have culture meetings with your team or in smaller group settings.
If you want to take this a step further so you can really implement these topics into your life, here are some extra tips (these work whether you’re a Redmond associate or not!)
- Read this blog! (Nice work, by the way!)
- Follow our Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or TikTok.
- Virtual culture meetings (coming soon!)
- Read great books and watch helpful videos.
A lot of our culture ideas and paradigms come from books and videos we find floating around in the world.
Here are a few of our go-to's:
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
- The 3rd Alternative by Stephen R. Covey
- The Anatomy of Peace by The Arbinger Institute
- Leadership and Self-Deception by The Arbinger Institute
- Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
- Now Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham
- The People Code by Dr. Taylor Hartman
- he Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman
Videos:
- Celebrate What’s Right With The World
- Change Your Lens, Change Your Life
- The Chinese Farmer
- Our Vision: Elevate the Human Experience
Enjoy the Journey
Like life, this kind of learning and growth is ever-changing and rarely straightforward. But that’s part of the fun!
A few things you should know about culture and the principles and practices we learn about:
We never arrive.
Our goal is to elevate the human experience, not perfect it. Perfect doesn’t exist. Perfect is unattainable, but it’s still worth striving for (though never worth beating ourselves up over).
Our culture isn’t perfect. We’re going for the next right answer and continuous improvement, not perfection.
Sometimes principles and practices might be contradictory.
This is just part of life and the nuanced nature of reality and being human. It’s about learning to do what makes sense in the circumstances and developing judgment, not memorizing hard and fast rules that apply to every situation.
It takes a bit of practice to hold multiple, seemingly contradictory ideas in your mind at once, but we find this is a great skill to develop!
We’re in this together.
The culture team does not determine the culture. We all create the culture. The culture team just finds ideas that we think are helpful and shares them with you so that we can discuss them and benefit from each other’s insights and perspectives. We’re learning and growing right along with you!
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