There’s no “I” in team, or in culture

This is a partial article from a previous EPIC publication.

Something that has always been important to the founders of EPIC Creative is our culture. When a company consists of only a handful of employees, culture is easier to maintain. Typically you hire people you know and who have similar interests and goals. You start out as a family. You see and work directly with your coworkers. But as you grow, hiring becomes job postings and interviewing potential new hires that you have never met. You start developing departments instead of each person doing multiple tasks, and you expand into larger facilities. All of this makes it a challenge to maintain the family culture.

As EPIC has gone through growth spurts, maintaining culture has always been at the top of the priority list. Just like the services we offer, how we maintain the “Work Hard, Have Fun” culture has evolved as we grow.

In the past year, we have developed a team approach to maintaining our culture, and so the Employee Experience Team was born within our staff. The team’s goals are to start the EPIC Experience from the moment a resume is received, continue it through the onboarding process, and maintain the culture to keep employees for a long, long time.

Maintaining culture doesn’t stop after the first day. The team has developed several touch points throughout the year with all employees, new and old. One step of the process ensures training needs are met with several training events, including one-on-ones, Lunch & Learns, seminars, and online classes. It is also important to make sure employees have timely performance reviews and follow-up meetings to see how the employee and their supervisor are progressing on achieving goals set for the year. We continue the tradition of companywide GEST meetings—GEST stands for “Get EPIC’s Shit Together,” but it’s better described as “Got EPIC’s Shit Together.” During them, we share financial goals and progress towards those goals, share our successes, and talk about areas we are working on to improve. And GEST meetings always end with a team activity that centers on the “Have Fun” half of our motto.

It would be difficult to maintain a healthy organization relying only on our Employee Experience Team members; therefore, we draw on the entire EPIC family to keep our culture healthy and our employees happy.