Our Culture Story:
Culture is important. The set of shared values and beliefs that we hold shapes our unique character as a company and defines how we interact with our clients, our partners and each other.
When Fleetwood became part of the Brand Value Builders (BVB) portfolio, we committed to cultivating our culture on purpose. We were excited to explore the common values that united us with our sister company, High Country, and our partners in China and around the world.
Below is our evolving set of Values and Guiding Principles and the story of how we created them...
Defining our Culture:
Who We Are and Who We Want to Be
Our cultural journey began with two fundamental questions:
- Who are we?
- Who do we want to be?
Our goal was to discover and define our unique cultural system that honored the individuality of each of our organizations, but created consistency across them. We also wanted to ensure that our culture was real and reflected in our actions, not just words posted on a wall.
Kicking Off Culture Week
The first step was to ask for feedback from everyone across the organizations - to discover our individual beliefs and what was important to each of us.
To do this, we created a simple exercise with green and red Post-It notes to identify the positive (green) and negative (red) aspects of our current culture, and our aspirations. In each organization, we hung 4 large poster boards for employees to post their comments labeled:
- Keep It - what do we love about our culture?
- Get It - what do we love about other cultures that we don’t have?
- Stop It - what are we least proud of in our culture?
- Keep it OUT - who should we avoid becoming?
We designated an entire week to focus on this exercise, and even extended it longer because of all the feedback we received!
Post-Its to Principles
After wrapping up Culture Week, we had hundreds of Post-It notes. Now we had to figure out how to translate them into our core values and principles.
With a committee of enthusiastic volunteers, we grouped similar concepts on each board, then examined the overall themes across the boards. In the end, we landed on 4 Core Values that serve as the foundation of our culture: Excellence, Ethos, Experience and Energy.
But the Values alone weren’t enough. We also wanted to develop actionable statements to reflect the kinds of behaviors we strive to exhibit on a daily basis. So we boiled down our hundreds of Post-It notes into 12 Guiding Principles, 3 for each Value:
Excellence
- Relentlessly pursue product and service of unparalleled quality.
- Be positive solution seekers.
- Keep it simple.
Ethos
- Live by the Platinum Rule.
- Be respectful and professional.
- Be there for each other.
Experience
- Exemplify an exceptional brand.
- Empower each other through leadership.
- Trust and be trustworthy.
Energy
- Promote Life in our livelihood.
- Create opportunities for laughter and fun.
- Celebrate our uniqueness.
