At Waldron Private Wealth, we have four “culture pillars” that we pride ourselves on and use as guideposts to develop our intra-company mindset:
- We Are A Team
- We Are All Entrepreneurs
- Driven To Make A Difference
- Mission First
To help us follow those pillars, three years ago the firm formed a Culture Committee, with a main objective of ensuring we continue to find fun activities to do together as a company, thereby boosting morale and camaraderie. It also serves the purpose of helping to maintain our tight-knit boutique culture, even as we grow beyond 50 employees. This year, however, the Culture Committee members are faced with the very tall task of maintaining our culture and office morale while we all work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.
We are proud to see everyone embrace all four culture pillars as we find innovative ways to keep our company culture thriving while working remotely!
Since we began working remotely, however, our Culture Committee is doing a tremendous job of coming up with creative ways to keep everyone’s spirits high during these unprecedented times, using video meeting apps to keep coworkers in touch with each other and developing unique activities.
For example, we all look forward to creating a March Madness NCAA basketball bracket every March, but with the tournament canceled this year, the committee created a fun way to fill that void in our lives by creating the “Stock Market Madness” bracket. It is the same set up as the basketball bracket, but instead of picking what teams will win, we picked what stocks will outperform that day in head-to-head matchups. Personally, it is just as unpredictable as the basketball tournament!
Additionally, every Tuesday and Friday we have a “Best Stories Happy Hour,” during which we virtually get together to share our best stories on how we are helping our clients get through these difficult times, both financially and emotionally.
We are keeping alive popular traditions, too. Canceling our annual “Take Your Kids to Work Day” would seem like a reasonable option, considering we are not able to go into work ourselves — we would not accept that! Following our pillars, we are “Driven to Make a Difference” for these kids, so we sent each child a care package with coloring books, flower seeds to plant, a card for writing a thank you letter to our region’s first responders, and other various activities. The kids also had the chance to participate in virtual meetings throughout the day. The day concluded with a company-wide, kid-friendly, virtual workout, led by a member of our planning team.
Other notable activities that took place during our time in quarantine were:
- Game nights
- National Beer Day Jeopardy
- Contest to see who had the funniest/most creative video chat background
- Peloton challenge
- The virtual Pittsburgh Marathon
- “Pets of Waldron Day,” as everyone submitted pictures to introduce their pets
Winners of certain challenges had dinner sent to them and their family from their favorite family-owned restaurant, and perhaps most importantly, our CEO and president hold small group check-ins to see how everyone is doing.
We firmly believe that having a strong company culture is a key metric for success. We may be working a little harder and are getting a little more creative over the last few weeks, but working remotely is not going to stop us from having the best office culture and camaraderie possible!
