People

If you’ve worked with us for a while, you’ll know that our organisational culture is incredibly important to us at Fountain. I co-host a podcast about culture (www.cultureawesome.co.uk) and for the past few years a large part of my job has been building, protecting and evolving the things that make Fountain work so well.

This investment in culture is driven by my belief that in a service business it’s vital to support people to do their work to the very best of their ability. It not only makes us a great place to work, it means we’re better at what we do.

In the loss of our physical environment and face to face interactions, one dimension of this culture is vastly changed. Luckily, I believe our culture is embedded in so many aspects of our work that we can overcome distance.

As we head into this phase, there are several areas of focus for me personally:

Reassurance

We’re in unknown waters with this pandemic, and every single person will be rollercoastering their way through it - from worries about family members to worries about the economy.

While communicating big changes, like remote working, we’re keeping focus on the things we can keep the same - our weekly kick-off meetings carry on, just over video, everything will be kept as ‘normal’ as possible.

Flexibility

Everyone’s circumstances are different, and some will need more flexibility than others.

For example, for parents worried that remote working will be almost impossible if schools and nurseries close, I’ve been letting them know that we’ll be flexible with them, and asked if they can start thinking creatively with us to find solutions.

We’re in unchartered territory, so I’m being explicit with them that we’ll enter it with trust and a desire to find a solution.

The Social Aspect

We have several team members who came to work at Fountain after being unhappy in freelance careers - they want the team around them. We can’t do much about that, but we can do small things to try to keep people connected beyond the video conferences about clients.

Every day we’ll have a “water-cooler hangout” moment, where everyone jumps on Google Hangouts with the people they normally sit beside. No agenda, just catching up.

And we have a few other small initiatives planned - but I won’t spoil the surprise of them for our team members by writing about them here!

Self-care

Stress levels may be high at times, and while we won’t be able to run our weekly yoga classes or let off steam at Fountain FC, at our weekly 5-aside, we’re putting together a self-care program that people can opt into - with at-home yoga videos, reading materials and well-being initiatives. Once their up and running, we'll be sharing them on here too.