How an overhauling of company culture led to speaking on behalf of The White House and a private audience with the Pope
In the rush of the everyday, workplace culture can often be overlooked. Deloitte’s 2017 Global Human Capital Trends report found that 71% of organizations aspire to having an ‘inclusive culture – however, decidedly less have realized this dream.
With workplace culture intrinsically linked to rendition, recruitment and morale, it’s little wonder that the C-Suite are sitting up and taking note.
John Stix, co-founder of Fibernetics, told us how he revolutionized his internal culture, which led to an overhauling of HR and people management systems. After becoming detached and disillusioned with the path his career had taken. Stix took it upon himself to re-align Fibernetics’ brand values and cement a new company-wide mantra.
“We came up with a new mantra of ‘I’m in’,” he told HRD Canada. “This was born from the fact that we’d grown so much and so rapidly that we needed a way of representing our entrepreneurial roots – ones which allow employees to really get behind each other’s ideas. This led to us launching our new company purpose; to deliver happiness and connections everyday by being awesome.”
From here, Stix explained, HR-related issues within the company dropped dramatically.
“We do our best to do our best,” he said. “Internally that means if a team mate or colleague is struggling with an issue, have the empathy to reach out and help. We launched this new system at Culture 1.0 – and I couldn’t have imagined what happened after that. People were crying and hugging – there was a huge amount of care built up in that room.”
“That manifested into massive change across the organization. HR concerns dropped by 85% in just four months. We had no conflict resolution in over five months because employees were curing themselves. We invested heavily in what happiness meant for us, transforming our offices with a new gym and personal trainers, and we hired an naturopathic doctor to conduct physical, mental and emotional tests on our staff.”
The radical overhaul and the rewards it reaped didn’t go unnoticed. Soon Stix was speaking on behalf of The Whitehouse on workplace culture – and received one very special invitation to attend a private audience with Pope Francis.
“Two months ago, I was sitting in Rome with 150 leaders from around the globe to share with Pope Francis innovative solutions and recommendations that tackle the global problem of online exploitation and abuse of children – all because of workplace culture. My business partner had the idea of going to everyone in our ecosystem and asking if they had any entrepreneurial dreams they think would make a viable business. From this, we launched KidsWifi which aims to protect children on the internet. That lead to an invite for a private audience with the Pope.”
The drive to change his workplace culture was born from Stix’s personal mantra; to live an inward life.
“I believe that we’ve been taught to live an outward life,” he added. “We’ve been taught to go very fast from a young age. Wake up, go to school, hurry home, rush to soccer practice. Everything is about going very fast – and as we age not only does that accelerate, stress becomes attached. No one teaches us that life could be an inward journey – which led me to start writing my book, Living Inward. It’s about what happened to my business and me through this – and how everything was transformed through this sense of looking inward.”
“If you can look inside and find out what truly matters and then align your outward actions, you get on a path to reaching your full potential.”
To hear more on how Stix successfully transformed his company culture, and went on to inspire hundreds of other business leaders to do the same, register to see him speak at our upcoming HR Leaders Summit, in Vancouver on 17 April.