Webinar Recap: Why Your Brand Values Should Lead Your Workplace Strategies

Tie your brand into your culture

At GoPro, they’re aligning their brand values: living your best life, practicing self-care, and being your authentic self - with their workplace strategy.

GoPro employees are empowered to embrace flexibility, maintain a work-life balance, and make the most of their lives and careers at the same time. The company has around 1,000 employees who are globally distributed, eight offices in key locations (with hybrid schedules), and employees have the option to work remotely:

“We have a hybrid environment. Yes, we're fully distributed. Yes, we have employees that are mostly remote all the time, but we maintain some office infrastructure in a small hybrid capacity because some people just want to get out of their house. And knowing who, what, when, where, and why people need to be in the office and how we can show up for them has been really critical.”

Beyond the location policies of where people work, the brand extends into how they work day to day. GoPro encourages employees to take a midday adventure, record it with a GoPro and share the video with coworkers. As a result, employees are happier, more loyal, and motivated to do their best work, wherever they are.

Optimize for trust and accountability

True flexibility requires companies to value output over hours spent working. This shift requires a culture of trust and accountability.

For Lauren and her teams, it translates to tracking and visibility: building systems that make it easy to track your output, communicate what you’re getting done, and when and how you’re doing it:

“What's really important in a distributed model is for employees to have clear expectations of what's needed from them as well as accountability. To nail down the employee experience, think about what we need from them and how to communicate it well, so they can be as successful as possible no matter where they're working.”

Combine people and places for the best experience

Places are still an indispensable part of how employees experience their workplace, but the way companies envision and manage them has changed. For GoPro – and many of the companies Jade and Epoch work with – combining the people and places functions makes for an integrated, intentional employee experience.

“I run people and places and in my opinion, it should always be under one roof. A lot of people think employee experience sits with the people team. But we've been really intentional about having the workplace team embedded in social engagement, gamification, social events, and things that we were doing in office.”

Keep an eye on employee data

Tim, Lauren, and Jade all agreed on some of the most important metrics to track to gauge the success of your strategy, like NPS scores, engagement scores, and the sense of pride employees feel around working for the company.

To get a complete picture, try introducing new, more granular metrics, like measuring the degree of connections made during a company event, and, most importantly, make gathering feedback a habit. Here are three examples of engagement survey questions:

• Are you proud to be an employee at X?
• Have you made a new connection at this event?
• Do you feel like this event was designed for you?

Design programs to be remote-first

Today’s workplaces are a mix of remote, hybrid, and in-office teams, and many companies are still figuring out what is going to work for them and how to define it. What our speakers have seen is that designing equitable workplace strategies and engagement programs starts with thinking about the remote experience first, especially if you have a mix of employee locations.

Think of your engagement programs, company events, and even ERGs: if you design them to include remote team members effectively, make them feel seen and heard, and provide equal value to them as their in-office peers, you’re likely to succeed in leveling the playing field for everyone.

Make connections meaningful, not mandated

Whether your teams are in-office, hybrid, or remote (or a mix of all three), reigniting in-person connections, collaboration, and culture should be easy.

And with Gable, it is. You can access flexible office spaces, make the most of your company HQ, and create team events, all in one platform. Book a demo with our team to find out how you can combine the magic of real-life encounters with the benefits of flexible work.