This week Fond and our core values were recognized as a winner of the 2017 Bay Area Best Places To Work. This is an annual awards program presented by the San Francisco Business Times.
Select employers from the Bay Area were named winners of the awards program and honored for having created exceptional workplaces that their employees value highly. What do this year’s winners have in common? It seems a happy, engaged workforce with great perks/benefits, a solid foundational understanding of key motivators in the workplace, and resultant positive office cultures. Collectively, the businesses recognized employ 51,419 people in the Bay Area. That’s a lot of joyful employees!
Award applicants were evaluated and ranked across 5 categories according to the number of staff members located in the Bay Area. The ranking found companies in the region whose employees rate them as the highest on such values as fun, collaborative culture, solid compensation and benefits offerings, and other amenities as well as management practices.
We are honored to have been included in this roundup amongst some truly exceptional local organizations, including many of our customers and partners, all thanks to our brilliant team and the award-winning culture we have collectively created here at Fond.
But being recognized as a Best Place to Work is no easy task. It’s a labor of love to create places where people love to work, and the healthy office cultures that result from that ongoing effort.
At Fond, we exist to help organizations across categories strengthen company culture through an ongoing commitment to employee happiness, so we’re no stranger to the impact that these programs can have.
Three Core Values
We live by three core values that we reinforce in everything we do, from new hire onboarding to our quarterly all-hands to our ongoing peer-to-peer rewards and recognition program and beyond:
- Build Trust Like a Family
- Own the Results
- Be Delightfully Quirky
Here are a few ways we embody these key motivators on a day-to-day basis that are simple, straightforward and powerful in keeping employees engaged year-round:
1. Welcome joyful moments across the employee experience
It’s important to not only make this a priority at hire and during onboarding but throughout the employment journey. In happy moments, as well as in challenging ones. At Fond, we encourage fun and joyful experiences in several different ways. One is by hosting a new employee game show and talent show to get to know our new team members and incorporate them into our unique culture from the day they start. We also celebrate individual workplace anniversaries as a team, with a different form of recognition or reward at each milestone. We encourage all team members to bring levity and joy to situations where stress may be high or doing something to brighten the mood in their own unique way.
2. Empower decision-making throughout our organization
All Fond team members are encouraged to take part in providing input on ways to improve our product, culture, and organizational practices. We deploy quarterly employee surveys where actionable feedback is discussed in an open forum along with the steps being taken to address any concerns. This isn’t just a top-down effort, but an effort from everyone in all directions! We truly believe that we are all leaders here, not just the executive staff.
3. Understand the power of “I don’t know” and bend toward a learning culture
By encouraging the admission of mistakes and weaknesses without judgment, we’re able to live our value of “building trust like a family.” Our CEO, Taro Fukuyama, sets the tone by being vulnerable, transparent, and always open to feedback. This allows us, as a team, to spend less time trying to cover up mistakes and instead, meet them head on and learn from them.
We truly believe that in order to create award-winning cultures you need to address culture in a way that everyone in the organization can see and feel. That starts with putting impactful and ongoing employee engagement programs in place, centered around your company’s key motivators. Programs that everyone can be a part of and contribute to in a meaningful way. This could be through rewards, recognition, perks, premium benefits, or a combination of all of the above.
