The framework for a caring culture

By Amanda Shults, President, RiskSOURCE Clark-Theders

Our work culture is something we take very seriously at RiskSOURCE, and we’re proud of how it has evolved over the years. We’re a family business with a tight-knit and growing business family. Years ago, we took pen to paper and worked on designing the type of culture we wanted for ourselves. 

Every business can benefit from a carefully designed culture plan. Small and mid-market businesses will especially reap the reward when they’re intentional about company culture.

At RiskSOURCE, we wanted a work culture that nurtures our team. We created RiskSOURCE Cares, an overall culture plan that places emphasis on the health, well-being, and quality of life of our team members.  This plan has a framework of six areas for which we provide resources to help empower one another to promote and model positive attitudes and behaviors.

The six areas include: Personal Growth, Physical & Spiritual Health, Community, Environment, Financial, and Social. Below is an outline for what each area represents, along with some examples of how we support them.

1. Personal Growth: We aim to create opportunities for personal and professional growth so our team can fulfill our highest potential. This includes professional development, participation in the Goering Center’s LDI program, and understanding how we as a company can support each team member’s personal goals.
2. Physical & Spiritual Health: It is our goal to provide educational resources and opportunities to our team, encouraging a lifelong commitment to physical and spiritual wellness. We offer health incentives, focus on a character trait each month, and we can’t wait to get back to pre-covid on-site massages!
3. Community: RiskSOURCE embraces every opportunity for our team to make a difference in the lives of others. We created a Cares committee to give back to the community, offer thirty paid hours to volunteer, and take on quarterly service projects.
4. Environment: In an effort to preserve our environment and resources, we enable our team to actively contribute. We bring green initiatives into the workplace with composting, recycling, and energy-efficient measures.
5. Financial: We equip our team with various resources to help them plan and realize their personal and family goals. We offer quite a bit in this department, including a Christmas savings club, financial seminars, identity theft coverage, and profit sharing.
6. Social: We focus on the opportunity to encourage our team to make a difference in the lives of one another. Together, we celebrate the big moments and the small, recognizing those colleagues that go above and beyond, and sharing our time together with outings and annual events.

Like many of you, with the team working remotely during the pandemic, we worked harder on our culture to make sure we remained engaged. It wasn’t always easy, but the challenge made us get creative and up our culture game! Having the Cares plan already in place, and a framework that we were familiar with, provided our leadership team with guidance during a time of uncertainty. 

If you don’t have a concrete plan for your work culture on paper, we hope that our approach will give you some ideas to jump-start your own. Step one is to have the team identify what the main goal for the culture should be. Then, build out your areas of focus and identify some initiatives that you can put in place to help support your culture.

We all strive to be the best version of ourselves. It’s important that we find support in the place where we spend the most time – the workplace. We love to talk culture, so if you’re looking to share ideas, give us a call.

For more information, contact Amanda Shults at ashults@risksource.com.

RiskSOURCE Clark-Theders is a Goering Center sponsor, and the Goering Center is sharing this content as part of its monthly newsletter, which features member and sponsor articles.