Building Better Culture in 2022: A CEO’s Insight

Recently, Weber Shandwick India was awarded for Best Culture in South Asia in Campaign’s Agency of the Year Awards in the Silver Category. As global conversations around workplace culture grow more urgent, Weber Shandwick India CEO Valerie Pinto shares her 4 key approaches for building an effective, rewarding, and healthy culture for employees.

1. Our people come first– Our priority is ensuring our people are happy, healthy, engaged, and rewarded. Apart from offering free access to ‘Headspace’, an application that provides mental health tips and meditation sessions, we have also launched our ‘Employee Assistance Program’, which provides our staff access to counselors who can help address and resolve personal and professional concerns. We encourage our people to take some time off every month to take a break from their monotonous routine and this self-time can be utilized for personal endeavors or to participate in relevant training programs. Juice YOLO is an exciting program that is run across the globe and allows our employees to break out from the regular work arrangements because…YOLO (You Only Live Once)! The pandemic has been tough on everyone, and our teams hustled and burnt the midnight oil to continue delivering for our clients. Now it’s time for them to relax, unwind, and do things for themselves. Our monthly town halls are a great way for breaking down hierarchical barriers and connecting with one another. We further offer mental health leaves, because we firmly believe that it is as much of a priority as physical health.

2. Learning and Skill Building of employees-Building a case culture: We work on building our employees, so they can thrive and through them – we shine. We facilitate a multitude of collaborative learning sessions to build on individualistic skills. Our global e-learning platforms act as shared resource bases for one and all to grow as professionals. We are strong believers in building a diversifying mindsets task force, where the objective is to open a world of possibilities and new experiences for everyone. Intermingling and learning from one another, to grow together is what we aim to achieve. We emphasize on building a case culture internally, so everyone can learn from one’s experience and work collaboratively. Our heart lies in courageous conversations, talking about things that are out of our comfort zones and executing them. Moving beyond the average.

3. Leading with purpose, empathy, and equity: We believe what the leadership of an organization does trickle down to its employees as well. Therefore purpose, empathy, and equity-driven leadership are key to building an organization-wide culture that fosters and upholds the same values. Weber Shandwick India aspires to build an inclusive and equal organization. Equity is one of our core values. We are very proud to say that in terms of a gender ratio in our workforce, the number of women in our organization outweighs the number of men with women contributing to 60% of our workforce. We are most proud of the women to men ratio amongst our leadership roles, which is 50%. We continue to endeavor to build a more inclusive organization daily.

4. Striving to be creative and innovative in our thinking:To be able to deliver exceptional integrated services, our teams must be inspired, engaged, and motivated to continuously break the glass ceiling. When it comes to determining guidelines to achieving this vision, few behaviors lead the way. We expect our employees, present and potential, to exemplify these behaviors within and outside the Weber Shandwick India offices:

• Curiosity – We believe that truly innovative people are curious about everything
• Be Collegial – We believe in accomplishing greater heights together
• Go beyond – Necessity is rarely the mother of invention, attitude is!
• Be passionate – We believe that passion recalibrates the mind, doubles the effort, heightens the senses, and keeps people awake at night. Passion creates fertile ground for the best ideas.
• Fight for being innovative and different

The culture of an organization has always been important but has taken center stage with the onset of the pandemic. It’s about creating a work environment where people feel like their well-being matters, where they feel included, safe, productive, and motivated. A culture that has its foundation in open and honest communication, helps people achieve their potential.

We foster an environment of consistent learning, finding new ways of doing things, risk-taking, and making mistakes, if need be, if they can be fixed it’s alright!

Above all, we try relentlessly that our people have fun doing what they do. We believe that if you enjoy your work, then you deliver passionately. Our campaigns, our clients, and our work are a testament to the passion our employees put in daily, into their work.