Buckingham’s unique company culture flourishes despite dispersed workforce
Buckingham Strategic Wealth (Buckingham) is a growing organization of advisors, financial specialists, and thought leaders—part of the largest advising group in the world. They have over 250 employees, working from 19 offices across the US. They came first in the Extraordinary Organization of the Year category in Jostle Awards 2016 due to their internal workplace culture and engagement achievements with the use of the Jostle® platform. They’re currently achieving 96% employee engagement rates.
“When you have offices spread across the country, a thriving culture quickly becomes difficult to manifest.”
Molly Zerjal
Content Marketing Specialist
The challenge
Buckingham was looking for a way to maintain a thriving company culture despite the distance between their multiple locations across North America. Their unique and people-focused culture is of utmost importance to them: “Buckingham has always generated a culture of dedicated work matched with lightness and play. We’re an approachable, fun sect in an industry that often feels dreary and elitist,” said Molly Zerjal, Content Marketing Specialist at Buckingham. The problem was they didn’t have a way to maintain and foster this culture across their locations.
They started looking for an intranet shortly after opening several new locations and going through a period of growth: “The Jostle intranet entered our world at a perfect time. Several new locations and a hiring boom made it feel like we went from a boutique firm to a corporate powerhouse overnight. We were scrambling, looking for a way to make several parts a whole, and an intranet seemed like a solution,” said Molly.
The solution
Buckingham found and launched the Jostle platform in February 2015 and the positive impact has been extraordinary. They’ve successfully connected their people across locations, given a voice to all employees, and their culture is thriving.
All employees—from leadership to new hires—are making good use of the Jostle intranet’s many features. People are recognizing each other in real-time with Shout-Outs (a short, personalizable thank-you message that appears on the live-feed), staying abreast of company news with vibrant NEWS Articles, and have easy access to all administrative documents via LIBRARY.
“The Jostle intranet has become our virtual coffee shop on the corner where we all gather to catch up. It’s where we get to know one another beyond the signature blocks, where personalities emerge, and camaraderie strengthens.”
Molly Zerjal
Content Marketing Specialist
Buckingham NEWS
How is Buckingham using the Jostle intranet?
Here are just some of the ways that Buckingham is using the features of the Jostle intranet to create a stronger sense of community in their organization:
Celebrating personal milestones
Buckingham is using NEWS Articles to celebrate their employees’ personal and professional achievements. Not only are they openly recognizing these achievements, they’re creating a stronger sense of community by sharing it with the entire company. “Success outside the walls of Buckingham is as important and as celebrated as within,” shared Molly.
NEWS Article celebrating employee achievement
Recognizing, rewarding, and poking fun
“Laughter is an unofficial pillar of our firm,” shared Molly. This is reflected in Buckingham’s use of Shout-Outs—not only are they using them to congratulate each other for good work and contributions, they’re also using them to bring a sense of lightness and play to the platform. “We love our Shouts-Outs,” Molly said, “whether it’s praise for a colleague, trash-talking sports, or sharing personal pics, there’s a constant stream of activity and updates.”
Activity Update that celebrates the achievements of colleagues
Spotlighting teams
Buckingham uses their Jostle NEWS view to publish various series of articles, including one which spotlights different Buckingham locations, which they call “BuckCribs”. They gather information, photos, and even videos from one location and showcase it via the Jostle intranet. This gives everyone a better understanding of what day-to-day life is like in that office and other parts of the country, which is serving to bring teams closer together. People are even booking flights to visit other offices and explore the surrounding areas! “With offices all over the country, the Jostle intranet is an important resource. On here, distance is no obstacle,” said Molly.
BuckCribs on Buckingham’s Jostle intranet
The results
Buckingham is doing astonishing things with the Jostle platform. With a sustained, focused effort, and a dedicated Intranet Community Team, they’ve moved away from communicating via email to connecting and collaborating with the Jostle intranet.
In doing this, Buckingham has not only improved their communication and ability to recognize one another, they’ve brought their unique culture to life and their people closer together. “The personality of our firm and our associates is very present on our Jostle intranet. The best word to describe it: energy. Our intranet is a constant stream of updates, achievements and fun. It’s an embodiment of our business, our culture, and ourselves,” shared Molly.
“Without the Jostle platform, we would not be the company we are today. We would be a firm with several locations and a lot of people who don’t know each other.”
Molly Zerjal
Content Marketing Specialist
About Jostle Corporation
Jostle’s People Engagement® platform is helping organizations around the world become extraordinary. It creates connected and vibrant workplaces by connecting employees, enabling communication, and driving workplace culture. We make it easy for companies to engage their employees. This allows our customers to achieve employee participation rates of over 85% — that’s over 5X industry norms. For more information contact info@jostle.me or visit us online at www.jostle.me.