Improving Company Culture with Lizzie Benton - Founder of Liberty Mind

In this episode, Brad and Smile are joined by Lizzie Benton, founder of Liberty Mind, company culture coach, and podcast host. Lizzie helps organizations to improve their company culture and build their most valuable asset by making work great for people. Listen in to find out the importance of company culture for your employees, how you can improve your company culture, and what mistakes leaders can make when trying to create a great working environment. 

Guest-at-a-Glance

💡 Name: Lizzie Benton

💡 What she does: Founder of Liberty Mind and company culture coach

💡 Company: Liberty Mind

💡 Noteworthy: Lizzie is also the host of Make It Thrive: The Company Culture Podcast

💡 Where to find Lizzie: LinkedIn | Twitter

This episode of The Front Desk was brought to you by The Little Green Button - The original on-screen panic button software designed to keep staff safe. Reassurance that a helping hand is just a click away.

Transcript

Brad: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Front Desk. I'm Brad. This episode is brought to you by the Little Green. The original onscreen panic button software designed to keep staff safe. Today I'm joined by my colleague, Smile. And our guest is Lizzy Benton, Company culture coach and podcast host at Liberty Mind.

Brad: Lizzy, thanks ever so much for joining us today. 

Lizzie: Thank you so much for having me. 

Smile: Hi, Lizzy. It's great to have you on the podcast today. So just to kick things off, it would be great if you could give us an audience, just some background on yourself. More about your role at Liberty Mind, your podcast and what you working on at the minute.

Lizzie: Yeah, absolutely. So I'm a company culture coach, so I go into organizations to improve their company culture and I basically make work great for people. I work with, generally small businesses. I'm really passionate about small businesses and Start-ups because that's where all the exciting stuff really happens.

Lizzie: And then my podcast Make it Thrive, the Company Culture podcast is all about interviewing experts, organizations who are doing really innovative and interesting things around company culture. 

Brad: Oh that's super. Is it, that sounds really exciting. I bet you get to meet some really great people as you travel around and have these conversations.

Brad: I guess we fall into that category ourselves. We're a small company. We've grown. about three up to 15 employees within sort of 12 months or so. We found actually our biggest challenge isn't, Yeah. When we're hiring, when we're recruiting is trying to find the right people that fit that culture.

Brad: That culture that we're trying to build up people are our most important asset as a business. The question that's attached to that, Yeah. Where should company start? When we are evaluating or forming the basis of this company culture. Yeah. What do we look at, like in the first instance?

Lizzie: Yeah, so I always advise people to look at their values first, more than anything, and really try to understand exactly how those values are determined in the actions and behaviours that people do every single day. So really thinking about, okay what looks good in our company culture and what do we try to avoid?

Lizzie: And that's really simple, the dos and don'ts of the company culture that may have started really organically. It was things that you started out as a team doing. When you were just a handful of people, but as you've grown, it's really good to actually put some language and context around those things that people really understand what's expected of them.

Smile: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense of solidifying it, writing it down, getting it hashed out in quite a concrete way so people have something to refer to. They have a framework that everyone can align themselves with. Does that usually work quite well? 

Lizzie: Yes, absolutely. So it's really putting some language behind those values.

Lizzie: So what does good look like when it comes to, for example, accountability? Do you accept your mistakes or do you try and blame others? It's really simple things like that, and putting that down into language that people understand and making them realize that's what accountability looks like is a lot easier.

Lizzie: Saying the word accountability because values can be really subjective. And in particular a really good one is creativity. To some people, creativity might be art or music or actually using your creative skills, but creativity can also be problem solving. So as a company, what does that actually look like?

Brad: I guess it's really tough, right? With words that accountability. Words like culture, creativity. Yeah. How do we put those words into into policy? Because a lot of them are, subjective, creativity might mean different things to different people. And I guess, yeah how do we go about actually enforcing that, not enforcing is probably the wrong word, but recognizing that creativity for me might be different to Smile might be different to you.

Brad: Yeah. Yeah. Within a workplace, obviously, that we all have. Goals we have targets, we have things we need to do. How we get there might be a little bit different person to person, but just trying to keep creativity in some kind of metric, it's a challenge. 

Lizzie: Yeah, it absolutely is. And that's why really identifying those values and then training your team and embedding them across your company culture is really important.

Lizzie: So even. Simple things like rewarding and recognizing people when they're living those values. Often in many company cultures, we reward people when they've just, hit the bottom line or made loads of sales targets, but actually also encouraging those values being lived and even peer to peer recognition.

Lizzie: When you've seen a team member really, embracing accountability and recognizing them and rewarding that. Continues to enforce those values from a, from an organizational perspective. 

Smile: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Praising those softer skills and making sure people are reinforcing those positive values to keep driving the culture throughout the company.

Smile: So I guess following on from that, Do you think that responsibility falls mainly with the leadership team? Because I think often you see in, especially in start-up companies, you'll have a leadership team and they're the ones that form the culture, but then they're not very good at embedding it or communicating it effectively to the wider business.

Smile: Is that something you see a lot? And if so, is there any specific steps companies can take to directly combat that? Miscommunication. How can they like disseminate that culture effectively?

Lizzie: Yeah, that's a great question as well. So I always really encourage people to try and co collaborate on their values and their culture.

Lizzie: So while by all means, many organizations do try to do the top down approach, it can come across as quite inauthentic sometimes, and especially if we imagine that the leaders of a company. Often have one perspective of the business, and whereas the team have lots of different perspectives, they have engagements with clients or customers, so they see a different part of the business.

Lizzie: So the reason co-collaboration and co-creation of the culture and the values is important is because it makes it more diverse. More inclusive and also more authentic because there's nothing worse than a director or a leader coming up with really inauthentic values or what I call aspirational values, where they really like the sound of those values, but it's not really true to form.

Lizzie: So I always really try to encourage co-creation as much as possible when it comes to building the culture. So getting all of your team involved in sessions on what the values should be, how people should show up, getting everybody on board. Because the more you get people on board, the more they're gonna continue on the journey with you.

Lizzie: Of course, a lot of companies don't do that because maybe they've not got the time or maybe they've got a very small team and maybe. Starting up. So it purely is only the directors and a few people operationally managing the business. So getting those then, disseminated and spread throughout the culture is then all about onboarding and recruiting on those values as much as possible.

Lizzie: And sharing the story as well about where these come from. Sometimes they can be very, a bit too directive or prescriptive and people actually go against that. It's like you're being told what to do, but actually if they understand the reasoning behind them, if you can share a story about why this value is really important.

Lizzie: Then it just enables people to understand where that values come from and why it's important to everyone's behaviours and actions within the business. 

Brad: That's super Lizzie I couldn't disagree with anything that, that you've just really mentioned that I think, yeah. In recent years, certainly since I've been working, I think that culture within the workplace is more important than ever.

Brad: It's spoken about more and more. I think employers, the leadership team recognize the importance of having good culture. Yeah. It's infectious, right? It lifts everyone's mood. Everyone knows what they're working towards in this kind of safe working environment. I think even with Covid as, Yeah, wellbeing came into the picture.

Brad: People working at home, stuck at home. Yeah. The wellbeing of your staff and employees really rose to the forefront and rightly and I guess the sort of the questionnaire is, the covid, the changing trends. That we've seen with culture in the workplace, with wellbeing in the workplace are you seeing employers give more priority to this than ever or have you seen it stay fairly 

Brad: stagnant?

Lizzie: Oh, that is a really great question, Brad. I think over the past year has taught us so much. So with everything that happened with Covid wellbeing did really come to the forefront. People were very concerned about employees mental health, about anxiety, about grief. That was also present over the past year.

Lizzie: There have been a lot of emotions going around and employers have been really open-minded about adding more wellbeing into the environment so that I have seen a massive increase in people offering mental health counselling with people, offering more flexible working to support those who are struggling, groups to support people to make sure they're not feeling isolated.

Lizzie: There's definitely been a very reactive approach to Covid, but I would call it reactive because we should have really been doing these things way before covid. And what I'm really conscious of is as we go into, further into the future from the lessons of Covid, is actually to think about how the culture is also supporting wellbeing as well and the day to day operations of the business.

Lizzie: We had Mental Health week earlier in the year and there was a lot of companies shouting about what they were doing around mental health and the things they were offering teams, but it's also within very minute nuances of the company culture. So for example, if someone is struggling and needs a mental health day, have you got the right environment where someone can be vulnerable and say, Do you know what, I'm really struggling today and I think I need to take a mental health day tomorrow.

Lizzie: But then if a manager turns around and says, Oh yeah, that's okay, but you are gonna get this work finished, aren't you? It's those kind of communications that can really let down the wellbeing side of things because you can have the best packages in the world, the best mental health counselling.

Lizzie: You can have some amazing benefits and packages. But if your team, if the very managers or supervisors who are supporting those team members aren't trained and haven't got the human skills to support them, it can all feel very inauthentic. And you're saying one thing and doing something very different.

Brad: It really rings true with a lot of what we experience with the product that, that we associated with, like an onscreen panic alarm system. It's like having a fire alarm. It's like having some policy in place to protect people. I know a lot of businesses have these policies in place. They have preventative measures, They have, mental health policies, bits and pieces.

Brad: I think the problem is, People don't know how to use it. Like the staff aren't trained. This is your panic alarm, this is your fire drill, this is your mental health policy. It's great having these policies in place and it feels sometimes like a tick box exercise. Say, Yes, we've got that policy, yes we've ticked that box.

Brad: But actually when it comes down to it in those situations, let's say I'm. Yeah I need some space. I need a mental health day. I don't know how that's going to reflect on me. I dunno how my team leader's gonna take that news. I don't know if my workload's going to increase the following week and I guess it all adds to that.

Brad: Yeah. Stress and probably the reasons why I needed that day in the first place. What would you do to help, encourage. People to be aware of what their workplaces are offering yet, Is it just drills? Is it just talking about it? Or is there more that we can be doing?

Lizzie: Yeah, I think there's so much more we can be doing.

Lizzie: I'd definitely say we need to train people and make sure they're always aware of what's available to them, because as we say, even from the simplest process of onboarding, it's often not clear to people where they can go when certain situations occur. But I think one of the biggest things we all need to work on as humans, not just at work, but also in our lives, is actually being vulnerable from a leadership perspective and saying, Actually this is what's going on with me and a leader taking a mental health day and leading by example of, I have to do this.

Lizzie: I would really hope that everyone else is going to do this too. I'm a really big fan of the TV series, Ted Lasso. I don't know if anybody's watching at the moment, but I highly recommend it. But, That is a fantastic example of vulnerable leadership in action of leaders and encouraging team members to really say it like it is about what they're struggling with.

Lizzie: Rather than having this bravado or macho, or even performing as a manager, we often come into the workplace and feel like we have to wear a mask and act a certain way and take away our humanity and be professional. Actually, it really doesn't help when we're trying to connect with each other and be empathetic about our situation.

Lizzie: So I think it's a daily practice about showing up in a really authentic, vulnerable way. 

Smile: I think that's such a great insight, Lucy. I think you are totally right at the base of it. It comes down to as well being human and getting comfortable with showing that humanity in a traditionally very professional and very formal environment and changing the.

Smile: status quo on that. And yeah, it comes back down to what you said about, co-collaboration and the leadership team leading by example. Yeah, if I'm vulnerable and if I'm comfortable talking about my own mental health, then what I need then my team will be as well. Hopefully they'll follow suit.

Smile: And I do think, it's also great that you mentioned. It's up to us to embed that at the very start, like not only hiring based on cultural values and compatibility, but also embedding that during the onboarding and during the training, just to make sure that we really are, Yeah, like I said, we can have these policies, we can have all these resources, but if we're not actually teaching people about them, we're not shouting about them actually living them, then it's a fruitless is exercise

Smile: we're still gonna be stuck in. In toxic cultures where people can't be honest so people aren't vulnerable where everyone's burnt out. Yeah. There's loads more we could be doing. Definitely. I think that sort of strategy should be Yeah. Seen a lot more across businesses and it's, we've, we're a small business and when you're starting up, when you're growing, that's the perfect times.

Smile: Trying to embed it, it's much easier rather than trying to overhaul a huge company, 

Lizzie: Absolutely. Yeah, definitely. 

Brad: I guess as part of the joy you must have in your role working with small businesses, you get to sew those seeds early. It makes me think, our last podcast episode we spoke with a chap called Andy who runs a, an organization called Man Gang.

Brad: You've probably seen all the horrendous stats about male suicide in the workplace, and he was talking about how much higher those percentages were in those male dominated industries or the construction industries, the military industries. Yeah, some really shocking stats out there. Surely it must just highlight to any leaders, anyone who looks after a business, anyone high up in a business, the importance of having that open dialogue.

Brad: Cause I think it's where that dialogue stops, which is where culture stops, which is where any kind of. Positive movement stops. Yeah. You must see that daily with your role. 

Lizzie: Absolutely. It's amazing how, it really is about communication, about how we are showing up and it does come down to our stuff that we are bringing into the workplace.

Lizzie: We seem to think that we drop everything at the door when we start work and we walk in and, we're just this kind of robotic professional person that is not reality. We actually bring. So much from our lives into work, and we also take our work into our lives. I'm sure we can all relate to having a bad day at work and then taking it home and maybe snapping at our partner and then apologizing because, Oh, actually I've had a really bad day and it's now affected my mood, and vice versa.

Lizzie: You might have a screaming toddler kicking and screaming as you take them to nursery that. Stressing you out, and then you walk into work and you feel stressed. And it takes a while to, to come down from that. So our emotions are just not switched on and off. They're something that are always with us, and it is around that communication and opening up those lines of communication, being confident in having those conversations.

Lizzie: And that is, our human skills. People often call them soft skills, but I think they're the hardest skills because it takes real courage and vulnerability to show up with those skills. Especially in the workplace when we maybe have expectations. So I think it's all a practice and as much as possible as we can keep trying to show up in the workplace with those conversations and communicate in that way, we'll have much more powerful company cultures and like you both said, Actually, if we can start that from the very conception of the business from when it's a start-up or a small business, the resilience of the business is so much higher.

Lizzie: Over the past year with Covid, I've had so many clients phoning me because of the disruption that Covid has caused to their culture, but they never worked on their culture beforehand. And I've got clients who have worked on their culture beforehand and are much more agile and resilient to what happened.

Lizzie: So it's a really good example of how something in the outside world can impact you internally. 

Brad: Something you just said, Lizzie, you said? Yeah. What we perceive to be soft skills. Actually they are. You like to call them a hard skills cause they are the hardest. I think you're right. And again, it touched on what Andy was saying in the previous episode about that vulnerability.

Brad: Yeah. It is really hard to show that vulnerability. Yeah. To show those soft skills. If communication's a great way to try and combat some of these issues. Yeah, you can, as a business, you can obviously initiate some kind of project to, to get people talking. I Really silly thing that we do here at Little Green Button we start our management meetings by scoring.

Brad: Yeah. Our personal wellbeing and the business, we score it out of 10. Very simple. It takes 30 seconds, but sometimes it just gives you a bit of insight to, Oh, do you know what my personals A three? Because like you said, the kids were screaming all night and I'm a bit stressed. It doesn't necessarily excuse.

Brad: Yeah. What's happening that day. At work, but it gives you some context behind it, which I think is really valuable, particularly in this small team. As we work quite tightly together, it's great to know where we're sitting at personally, where our wellbeing is and where we think the business is at. So that's one little initiative that we've started.

Brad: We started it with a bang and it's, It is just a bit of fun. But what, I guess what we're concerned about is these initiatives, these communication initiatives, cultural initiatives, start with a bang, but they can fizzle out over. Yeah. How do we get staff to live by those cultures values? How do we get to embed that as a permanent feature rather than something that might fizzle out?

Smile: Yeah. Over the long term, yeah. 

Lizzie: Yeah. No, that's a great question and I must commentate you guys for that because I'm a big advocate of what I call the check in at the beginning of the meeting, and I always recommend people to do a check in, whether it's getting everyone in the room to say something they're grateful for.

Lizzie: Or asking what people need to let go of so they can be present today. It really is a fantastic container for trust building. So I really commend you guys on starting that. So very impressive and something I'd recommend every team should be doing. But when it comes to long term culture, I would say culture is a journey.

Lizzie: It's what I always say, it's always adapting, growing, changing, and I think it's really important to always have that in mind with all of your teams. So consistently having check-ins around your culture about, okay, what is working for us right now? What's showing up? What's not showing up? Often we have a lot of meetings in businesses.

Lizzie: That focus on the day to day running of the business, clients, customers, operations, things that you are doing in the business, but also having meetings around how you are being, how you're being, how you're being in the company, how the company is doing as a culture perspective is really important.

Lizzie: And this enables everybody to have a say in what they feel is working or isn't working. And it's much more, adaptive than, sometimes people think. Kick off with a big culture piece, a big culture change, and they maybe spend six months on it to a year on it and then it falls really flat because there's no run up, there's nothing else that comes afterwards.

Lizzie: And it can leave a lot of scepticism in teams as well, cuz they can think, Oh wow, that was really good fun for six months and now we're all back to normal. So what you don't wanna do is create that. What you really wanna do is have this. System conversation and dialogue. And I really do say dialogue because while a lot of people keep using these employee surveys and feedback surveys, which are great, they're great for what I say taking the temperature of the organization, it's great for taking the temperature, but do you really know what the issue is?

Lizzie: The deep down problem that's causing the temperature to change. So having this open dialogue around the culture consistently is great because you can nip things in the bud that, ensure that they're. Stumble in the road rather than a gaping crack when something happens. And these gaping cracks that appear in culture, these toxic black holes that happen, they just become bigger problems when something outside of the organization happens.

Lizzie: So it can be incredibly disruptive. To not only people, but also the business. So I would say having those regular check-ins and seeing it as a journey, and also celebrating your culture regularly as well. And I always say that your culture should be threaded, Your values should be threaded throughout everything you do.

Lizzie: It should be in your wellbeing strategy. It should be in how you operate as a business. It should be how you recognize and reward people. It should be. Absolutely everything, how you lead. So everything should be ingrained. And looking at all of those areas just really enables you to make sure that you are walking the talk at the end of the day.

Smile: Yeah, that's a fantastic point. On the one hand, yeah, you can make these big sweeping statements. You can have all these, great initiatives, but if you're not doing the daily practice, if you're not doing the small actions as well, then you are gonna fall flat. And like you said, people will become sceptical and.

Smile: Probably detract from your culture rather than adding to it or changing it like you intended. Completely. And I think, also, you raised a good point about how that can lead to toxicity and Yeah. Culture gaps for sure. I've actually experienced it myself in my last role.

Smile: They had, they had all the handbooks, they had all their culture written down, but they did not walk the talk, as you say. And it's very much like I said before as well, you've made so many great points. But our emotions and our work life are inherently tied together. We're not robots.

Smile: We will always bring a little of each. We'll bring our work home and we'll bring our home life into work and nobody should be expected to try and turn their emotions off like it's a tap. My old manager be paraded me for not being able to compartmentalize better and not being able to just put on a, a mask at work and just get through the day.

Smile: I had a lot going on and. There was no regular check-ins, there was no support. There was just an attitude of you need to crack on, get on with it. I don't really care what's going on with you. And obviously I end up leaving that role because that just has a huge impact on you. And lots of other people felt the same way.

Smile: So I do completely agree that it's, very important to. To walk the talk and to make those very conscious daily efforts to check in with people to do the little things because it does really add up at the end of the day. I don't, And yeah, and you won't see the long term results if you don't make the effort completely.

Brad: I think that's really true actually, about walking the talk. Yeah. That's I think I touched it earlier. A lot of these companies have these policies in place. Great. They've ticked the box, We've got it. But actually you've got to. You got to walk the talk, you've got to enforce it. Yeah. It's something that we've tried to do here.

Brad: Something I think we do here. Yeah. Yeah. That culture that we have it is really infectious. You'll see it everywhere, not just in the business internally. We see it externally, don't you? With our messaging to, to, to our customers when we're trying to sell the product, the way we sell the product.

Brad: Yeah. That culture that we have internally it points outwards as well. It's how we want to portray the business. Our system is there to. To deescalate, it's there to help in these situations, in these panic situations. Yeah. It's a nice product to work with. We deal with nice people. It enables us to spread that message externally as well as internally.

Brad: I think it's important that we celebrate it. We try to celebrate it, and we always try to improve it. Yeah. What would you suggest l and obviously I appreciate, we're not here to. To get your services as such. But yeah, for a company like us, 15 people we think we've got a great culture. We wanna keep improving that culture.

Brad: Yeah. What will be some real quick, easy wins for companies, people out there listening for them to embed in their business? 

Lizzie: Yeah, no, that is a great question. And I think it just starts with practices. What practices can you start embedding that just make people consistently aware of the culture and living it.

Lizzie: You're already doing a great job with the check-ins at meetings. I think that's a really powerful trust builder and container builder. I also think it's great just to have the, quarterly. Catch up with everybody about the culture, what's really working for people what's not working for people.

Lizzie: Like I mentioned, having that really good conversation just fosters some ideas and getting people's consistent feedback on those areas. So I use a framework of the nine core elements of company culture. It's free, it's accessible on my website. And if you look at each of those areas, I often say to companies, use those nine areas.

Lizzie: And ask yourself the question, where are you on the scale of we've got this totally sorted, or we could really do with some improvement and just go through, get your team to do it as well when it comes to the area, for example, like wellbeing leadership, and it just helps give you a bit of a sense check of where things are because.

Lizzie: I'm a big believer that it's always progress, not perfection. There is no such thing as a perfect company culture just as there is no such thing as a perfect human being. So it's always about progress. What could we do better? Asking that question regularly with your team makes them know that you are taking coach seriously, but also gives them the opportunity.

Lizzie: To share ideas, to be part of the culture creation. So there are just a few ways I would really recommend that are really easy to implement. They don't have to be big, long meetings. They can just be something fun to that where you all come together really good team building exercise, but something that just keeps that culture at the forefront of everybody's mind.

Smile: That's super useful. Thank you. There's some really great, Tangible. Tips there that we can take away for ourselves and our listeners can take away as well. Couldn't agree more with everything you said there and I know I'll definitely be going to check out those nine steps on your website. I don't know about you, Brad, but sounds super useful.

Smile: Just for our listeners, where should they go to that? A bit more about you and Liberty mind and what you are doing. Do you have any contact details you wanna leave just for our listeners? 

Lizzie: Yeah, absolutely. You can find me at libertymind.co.uk. There's plenty of eBooks and guides on there as well. So if you are at the start of your company culture journey and you just need a little bit of a helping hand, a navigation system, then there are lots of eBooks and guides and yeah, my podcast Make It Thrive. The Company Culture Podcast is available on Spotify, Google Podcast, Apple Podcast, anywhere where you get your podcasting fix from. So you can also hear some conversations there as well. 

Brad: Lizzy. That's great. Yeah. We've really enjoyed looking on the website. There's loads of great information on there. Yes. Things that we've tried to embed as we are growing. Thanks so much again. Yeah. We really appreciate you spending some time with us today. It was great having you on the Front Desk. 

Smile: Yeah. Thank you so much, Izzy. It's been amazing. 

Lizzie: Ah, thank you so much for having me.