Five Ways to Create a Bedrock of Culture

I consider myself a “culture champion” because I believe in its importance to a healthy, successful business. So anytime someone talks about workplace culture and shares some thought leadership that gets me excited, I want to share it, too. I recently heard five great ways how an MSP can create a “bedrock of culture” (love that term!) and each one is absolutely doable and affordable.

These five concepts came from Pratik Roychoudhury, the President & CEO, Teamlogic IT of Newtown, PA, during a “Sunny Silver Linings” podcast. Pratik’s 12-year-old franchise has been ranked Number 1 for the past six years and, get this, in 2021, Teamlogic did not lose a single team member out of its 40 employees! He credits the company culture for that amazing stat.

According to Pratik, the bedrock of his company culture begins with its core values and mission statement. Those concept of those core values follows the acronym D-E-E-P-I. It stands for:

D = Driven

E = Empathy

E = Extended Family

P = Personal Accountability

I = Integrity of Work

His mission statement is: Make fans of clients, make fans of vendors, and make fans of each other.

“It is the confluence of these two things that I would say creates our bedrock of culture,” Pratik said.

I was so stunned by Teamlogic’s retention rate for 2021 that I listened to his successful recipe for retaining talent. As he said, “MSPs have a lot of work, but they don’t have enough people to honor their commitments that these new agreements are requiring. So talent is a real struggle for this channel.”

The best way to combat that, of course, is by retaining your existing talent.

“Retaining talent is much more difficult today than attracting new talent,” Pratik said. “Most people leave organizations not because of money, but because of their lack of engagement, not having a good boss, not building good internal relationships, and a lack of a strong community. Without the community, people always feel like they’re not connected to the core of the business.”

Here are the five ways he lists for effectively engaging and retaining talent:

• Doctrine of engagement: The Teamlogic management team makes sure that every employee is engaged by doing many things together, like reading a book together every Friday as a company. Also, Pratik insists that every call must be a video call so that he can see their faces. The way they react to something.
• Employee feedback: Teamlogic asks its employees for feedback on key issues that they’re facing as a management team. They ask for their input and then go back and tell them what we’ve done with that input.
• “Open book” transparency. Pratik shares with his employees the company’s financial information, his thoughts, and his struggles. “I’m an absolute open book so that they know that whatever we’re facing, we’re being absolutely transparent. They start to feel like they’re a part of us. They realize that the management team is not superhuman; they have challenges and problems, too – but together we’re going to work through it.”
• Investing in their growth: “We launched a career planning process that includes LinkedIn Learning, which is a very formal training process of really scaling them up, making sure that we invest in their growth. One of the things we do when we hire someone is we say, ‘Now, you have entrusted us with your growth, so we have to do the right thing for you.’”
• Being empathetic: People have issues both at work and at home, which could be something with their children, aging parents, etc. How we as a company react to that really creates our culture.

Start putting these five ingredients in your culture and hopefully you’ll find yourself retaining your talent like Pratik has done. Click here to listen to the entire podcast.