Creating a Standout Culture with Keylan’s Assistance
This post originally appeared on the Willory blog. It is reposted here with permission.
By Angie Williams, Willory HR Operations Manager
From day one Willory has focused on “doing right” by our team members. If you look at Willory’s values you’ll notice a very important one, “Inspire professional growth.” It’s not first or last, but it’s equally as important as the others. When we updated our values 18 months ago we knew values were obviously important to have documented. Additionally, because we live by our values, we wanted to ensure growth and development played an important role in our culture.
While my background has been more focused on general human resources, by working with the Willory team on their own professional development, I’ve been able to expand my expertise on the subject.
What sets our training and development process apart from many is collaboration. As a team, we work together to establish each team member’s individualized goals. The group working on these goals typically includes myself, John, the respective team member, and their supervisor. These goals are a mixture of job-specific metrics, company contributions, professional development, and personal goals.
Each month team members meet with their supervisor to review their goals and to discuss their career trajectory, areas of success, and any areas that may need improvement. This monthly meeting allows an open and consistent communication to be established. While this has always been a focus of our culture, this style of meetings truly came from listening to the ideas and feelings of our team members.
Over the last few months a large focus of our team trainings has been on working with Kevin Hudson, principal at Keylan Management Group. In working with Kevin our team at-large is better at conducting crucial conversations, understanding varying perspectives, and are better at understanding how our clients’ needs align with our services. In addition to our team trainings, Kevin has been instrumental in helping me develop our first-ever management training program. This program not only helps to build the skills instrumental for successful managers, but allows each department to share their vision and understanding of Willory.
By looking inward and developing the employees we have we have been able to avoid a talent shortage many other organizations are facing.
