Building a sense of belonging, both on and off the dancefloor

Building a sense of belonging, both on and off the dancefloor

We at Metacore want to build a company that is made to last, and our culture is absolutely essential for succeeding in that. Our culture is shown in the ways we aspire to be together as Metacoreans, how we work together to achieve our goals, and what kind of workplace we want to be for our people. Everyone at Metacore is responsible for upholding our culture, and we believe it must develop with us to ensure we thrive in our fast-paced environment.

That’s why our company-wide offsite in June this year was all about building trust, strengthening our psychological safety, and, well, having a ton of fun, enjoying each others’ company and having a laugh together. To perform well when things speed up, you need to be able to slow down together when needed.

While fun is essential, what is built through those idle, kooky moments and thrilling experiences is even more important: a sense of belonging that deeply unifies us, uplifts our culture, and trickles down to our everyday life at work. Ideally, it makes it easier to communicate and work together through good times as well as the challenging ones. For us this work boils down to doing things the right way defined in our Culture Agreement, while also keeping our aspirations and everyday lives in line with gatherings such as the offsite.

Culture is what you do even when nobody’s watching

Culture never exists in a vacuum but actively serves and supports the business. The larger Metacore gets, the harder and more complex it becomes to navigate our shared culture and define what it means not just to some, but to all of us.

Sure, some things in life can be neatly packaged in three pointers (looking at you, Finnish President Alexander Stubb), but navigating company culture isn’t one of them. The latest edition of our Culture Agreement is our best attempt to capture what we mean when we speak of our culture as a whole.

None of this is an easy task. Culture is what you do when nobody is watching – it’s doing things the right way, even when it is the harder way. It’s, of course, always partly aspirational; it sets the standards and ways of working and ideally inspires us to try to live up to them every day. But it becomes a pragmatic reality through these daily aspirations.

Another crucial thing is to constantly keep our culture in check. Culture is also built by agreeing on it and writing things down. Do the things we do in our daily lives match our aspirations written in the Culture Agreement? If the two start to diverge, bringing them back together will be a difficult task.

Culture is hard and constant, but rewarding work. It is a real investment to come together and work on our culture, but it’s one of the most valuable actions for Metacore’s future. Our recent offsite gave us a chance to share our thoughts about the fabric of our shared culture and take the opportunity to cross-pollinate ideas, helping us turn our aspirations into reality and make them a part of our day-to-day life together. That’s why our offsite focused on working on our culture, both on and off the dancefloor. Here is what we learned.

We’re there for each other, and our offsite showed what that looks like

The Metacore way is to think we before me; it is to cheer each other on when we try out new, even bold things, and always want to give back to our peers. At our offsite that was visible throughout the day.

• All day we were teamed up with new friends and colleagues to foster new connections. When you laugh and rally together to overcome an obstacle, it’s all the more easier to come together at the office too.
• While the weather wasn’t exactly pure bliss, that didn’t stop teams from joining forces to face the challenges our Metacore Quest threw at us. From church rowing to abseiling, nothing could stop us. Not even the crazy rain.
• Metacoreans danced the night away from dusk till dawn to the sweet tunes provided by our own Metacore DJ’s. Another night we got to witness some true rock star moments in the karaoke, which were met with thunderous applause.

The energy that was felt through the offsite was palpable and has been lingering around ever since. These kinds of moments create a free, open, and accepting space; a space where we dare to be ourselves every day of the week.

Culture is shaped when we take time to connect and share ideas

Amidst all the adventure and adrenaline, our offsite was also a chance for us to sit down and share our wildest thoughts.

The Culture Agreement came to life in workshops where teams were tasked to work on our culture. With people from different teams, Metacoreans learned what, for example, aiming high or holding each other accountable while supporting each other mean in practice for people who are working on something different from them – and how we still share the same values and ways of working.

This enhances a broader understanding of our company, as well as what it truly means to be a Metacorean. While that work is never finished, it is the best kind of work. The offsite sparked many new ideas about how to make sure we walk the talk with our culture. Stay tuned for more!