You can find Renata’s audio interview with Chris Roberts at the end of this article.
Innovative customer experiences and sustained customer engagement are top priorities for many organisations. Whilst defining strategies, many organisations tend to overlook the critical contribution that employee engagement makes towards their goals.
I believe that for any business to be successful, the focus must be on people – both employees and customers. On the stairway to success, the first step is meaningful employee engagement. Employees must be empowered and feel a sense of belonging – only then, can they truly care about customers.
The philosophy behind blockchain
How can organisations build a meaningful work culture for employees? In today’s world, where blockchain is transforming the way we live and engage, we need to re-think the concept of what engagement means in the Web3 era.
To better understand this, we should look at the philosophy behind blockchain. Blockchain has trust, security, transparency, ownership and centralisation at its core. Where community development and co-creation are value drivers to contributing to a bigger purpose. This philosophy is fundamentally changing the way people behave and what they want from brands, including employers. The role of companies is changing from creators to facilitators.
Today, employees don’t want a culture to be defined for them. They want a platform that gives them ownership and facilitates culture instead of imposing it. A platform where employees can express themselves, whilst being part of a community and contributing to a bigger purpose.
Get Wonky: organisational mind shift
In 2020, Chris Roberts launched the initiative to enable staff to deal with the rapidly changing demands of the market whilst keeping in sync with Eltizam’s core values. Get Wonky, a company’s culture program didn’t just help Eltizam tide through the pandemic successfully, it became the cornerstone for Eltizam’s success while undergoing rapid expansion through acquisitions.
Get Wonky is the corporate culture programme of Eltizam. Their objective is to bring everyone together in one family to have happy, engaged and empowered employees.
“You can merge financials, employees, database, that’s easy… but to merge companies’ values; that’s a long-term aspect. It is something companies must continually develop”, says Roberts.
Get Wonky provides access to a community that adapts as his business rapidly acquires new companies, whilst staying true to Eltizam’s core values.
Here are some of the success factors of this initiative:
Listening to employees creates community
“Active listening is a vehicle to empathy, which allows new companies joining the family to share and maintain their core values, while blending in with Eltizam’s culture”, says Roberts. Organisations that want to embed their culture in their employees’ mindsets must listen to understand and use the learnings to continually improve.
Employee loyalty is earned
Loyalty is a precious commodity in the service industry – this is only achieved by a truly people-centric mindset. You can’t expect your team to be loyal to you if you are not loyal to them. “Loyalty is the single determining factor of why an employee wants to remain, you look after them, they look after you”, stresses Roberts.
When employees feel safe and that they are working for a bigger purpose, they’re ready to take risks and evolve. This fuels innovation, ownership, and a strong sense of belonging. Overall, this results in customer trust, a strong brand reputation and a nimble business that rapidly responds to market changes.
Upskilling your employees will empower them
Thanks to the Web3 uprising, we are living in one of the most transformational times in history. Businesses must be cognisant of the fact that the workforce of the future will be very different from todays in terms of skillsets and mindset.
“We don’t fire people for making bad decisions. We fire people because they don’t tell you they made a bad decision, and they hide it. If you make a mistake, you own it, you live it and you carry on because you will never make the same mistake twice”, says Roberts.
“Everything can be solved in more than one way – by embracing diversity and tolerance”, says Roberts. Such an approach allows the cultural framework to be scalable and desirable.
Training and upskilling employees are investments every organisation must make if they want to equip their employees for this changing market. Harvard Business Review demonstrates that companies ranking at the top of the ‘best places to work’ have outperformed their peers on stock returns by 2.3% to 3.8% per year.
By understanding the connection between culture and revenue, companies can achieve financial value as they create human value. When your employees feel more skilled in themselves, they can then feel empowered. This will result in employees with greater mindsets overall.
Final thoughts
Harvard Business Review research highlights that the “three things employees really want are career, community and cause”. Get Wonky covers those three aspects with safe growth, a strong community, and a sense of shared purpose.
It also demonstrates that cultural frameworks are scalable only when they are not rigid, but instead, a platform to evolve and connect. One that embraces diversity and change through trust, safety, transparency, ownership, and decentralisation. Therefore, I describe the Get Wonky initiative as “The Blockchain of Culture”.
The future of culture is here.
You can listen to the full interview with Chris Roberts right here:
