The three pillars of workplace culture part 3 - passion
By Catherine Duncan, COO Matthews Steer.
This week in my series on the three pillars of workplace culture I’m focusing on the role passion for and pride in our business plays in engaging a positive, purposeful workforce.
Passion isn’t necessarily a word that automatically springs to mind when you’re talking accounting, but in an incredibly competitive labour market we believe it’s absolutely integral to us standing out from our competitors, and to the sustainability of our business.
There are many ways we look to build passion within our workforce:
- Empowering our team to set their own career direction, providing them with a tried-and-tested professional development structure, and encouraging them to tackle their advancement at their own pace.
- Giving our team access to the great leaders within our business, on a day-to-day basis. Great leadership is a great source of engagement. We work to ensure our leaders are the best they can possibly be because when people work closely with someone they respect, and who they can learn from, it resonates.
- Proactively focusing on diversity equality, and inclusion, because we understand the power of culturally-diverse role models in building a sense of belonging and creating a ‘sky’s the limit’ culture where people feel their potential is unlimited.
· Fostering a flexible workplace environment where people feel catered for and cared for during life’s ups and downs. We look to offer work-life balance and support through our employees’ entire life journeys. We want to be part of their journeys for the long term.
Studies that show that highly engaged workforces have much better commercial outcomes, and we believe that by focusing on employee engagement, through our purpose: ‘empowering our communities to live their potential’ helps us attract and retain quality employees at all levels in our business.
Where there’s engagement, passion and pride in our business follows, so our commitment is that every member of our team will progressively become a better version of themselves. After all, everyone involved with our business helps to build our story, to redefine us and to deepen the culture we carry into our future. As such every single person should feel recognised and celebrated, otherwise we as a team hasn’t done its job.
The results are evident in the results of our annual staff engagement survey, which is conducted by external agency, Fibre HR. Last year we recorded the best engagement results in the history of our business for the second year in a row. Overall employee engagement at Matthews Steer was up 3% on 2020 to 84%; significantly higher than industry standards. Biggest area of growth in engagement was in management and leadership, with our people also citing career progression opportunities, culture, variety of work/location and flexibility among the top reasons they love working at Matthews Steer.
A commitment to ensuring people feel valued isn’t necessarily a tangible selling point when recruiting; but there’s something in the expression: “come for the money, stay for the culture.” That’s why we commit on a daily basis to firing the passion and pride in our people that keeps them engaged with our business in the long-term.
If you’d like to work at a purposeful, productivity-driven, passion-fuelled accounting and advisory firm call our HR Manager Stephanie Azzopardi or click here to email Stephanie for more information about accounting job opportunities at Matthews Steer.
To register your interest for a future position at Matthews Steer, please visit our careers page.