Maia Ervin, Chief Impact Officer, on Strategies for Building Corporate Culture and Community

Zillenials, a small cohort born between the early 1990s and the early 2000s, are very intentional with how they select employment opportunities. Long gone are the days where professionals are merely applying to roles for the sake of income; this demographic of professionals are seeking more. They are seeking income, culture and community! 

Not sold on how important corporate culture and community are to job seekers? Check out these stats provided by teamstage.io: 

1. 46% of job seekers said culture was one of the deciding factors in the application process.
2. 15% of job seekers declined a job due to the company’s culture. 
3. 94% of entrepreneurs and 88% of job seekers say that healthy work culture is vital for success.
4. 86% of job seekers avoid companies with a bad reputation.

If there is anyone who knows a thing or two about this, it is Maia Ervin! Maia Ervin currently serves as the Chief Impact Officer at JUV Consulting, a purpose-driven company dedicated to empowering diverse young people. At JUV, Maia oversees multicultural marketing, social impact, company culture, purpose-driven partnerships and campaigns, as well as HR consulting. She uses her experience as a Queer Black woman to develop marketing campaigns that tell the stories of those often ignored and to assist clients in fostering work policies and culture that promotes equity for all. Outside of work, Maia is a part-time Graduate Student at Fordham University pursuing her MBA in Marketing and Global Sustainability as well as hosting a podcast called Big Fish: Sink or Swim, a platform for and by Black Zillennials. Maia’s passion is to make space for diverse young people to be felt, seen, and heard, globally.

Brands want to reach communities. However, they want to take a shortcut and simply do it because they know that reaching that community will bring in more money. Granted, I know that, at the end of the day, we live in a capitalistic society. We are all trying to make more money for our organizations, but I do think it's important for us to have a genuine relationship with the communities who are supporting us as brands rather than a relationship that is strictly transactional. - Maia Ervin

Let’s talk about it…… Maia helps brands build culture and community both internally and externally in a way that's actually authentic and resonates with the communities that companies are aiming to reach/nurture. She mentions that it is important for businesses to realize that it costs less money to retain, grow and maintain relationships whether it is for employees or new customers. In this article, Maia addresses various approaches to building culture and community to create positive business outcomes. 

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Cultivating a Genuine Relationship With Customers

Maia mentions that too often brands try to lean into a transactional relationship that is one sided where their customer reaps less of the benefit. As a business, you must realize that similar to an intimate relationship, it takes two to tango, where in this case, both the business and customers need to mutually benefit from this relationship. It requires a ton of work but it is worth it for long-term success. A business must consider the following:

1) Spend time thinking about how you can continue to nurture and further grow the communities that you have already created and are a part of.

2) Determine what your brand stands for. Consumers want to know that when they indulge in a brand’s products, they are also contributing to something greater than themselves and that company. They want to know that they are contributing to a mission that aligns with their beliefs. As a company, it is your duty to figure out how you are going to show up in this world and make it a better place.

3) Understand the expenses at stake. Without exploring the items above, you will find yourself spending more money than necessary trying to acquire new customers. 

Leveraging Culture and Community for Internal Business Success

Maia walks us through a 3-step framework for building culture and community within your company. 

Step 1: Companies must understand their company's why! Your company culture should be indicative and based on the why behind the company’s existence. This is key to ensuring that employees feel connected to the organization and can truly understand what all of their work is contributing to. 

Example: Juv exists to empower young people. It is their mission and their entire team is able to recite it and relate to it. It’s an opportunity to keep the team connected and grounded in purpose. Maia highlights that no organization is beyond mistakes and error. However, it is great that no matter what happens, the team is always able to say that every decision made is based on their mission. 

Step 2: Companies need to understand the landscape of who makes up their community. There needs to be a clear understanding of the gender, ethnicity, and interests of those working with the company.

Example: Juv has an extremely diverse team. Most of the team is made of people of color and 30% identify as queer. Understanding this, makes it a lot easier for leadership to design internal initiatives that best cater to the needs of the employees. 

Step 3: Companies should frequently ask employees questions on how the organization can better serve them. For example, ask questions such as “What is it that you need from us?” and “ What is it that you want from us?”. Rather than wasting time trying to guess what it is that the team needs, just ask them. They will tell you. 

Example: By asking these same questions, Juv gained clarity that their employees love professional development as well as financial tips. Based on that feedback, Juv invited a professional to come in and host a workshop on filing taxes as well as better understanding how 401K’s work. As strange as it sounds, Juv also had a spiritual person that “read” their employees based on their astrology signs. Why? Because that was something that their entire team was interested in.

Juv’s approach to providing their employees with what they need should serve as inspiration. It is important to note that every company's employees do not require the same type of help. A generation of Boomer professionals most likely would not be interested in Astrology and that’s okay. This is why you ask. 

Overall, as a corporation, you need to determine what your community finds beneficial and lean into that.

Building Culture and Community Amongst Full Time Employees (FTE) vs. Contractors 

It is important to note that Juv has 30 full-time employees (FTE) as well as 200+ contractors. The approach to building culture and community amongst each group looks quite different. 

Contractors

Juv’s contractors are predominantly students and individuals ranging from 14-28 years old, all working with the company, remotely. Juv understands that this demographic of Gen Z contractors have a lot going on in terms of school, work, hobbies, and more. For that reason, Juv aims to be conscious of the amount of time they require from these contractors and intentional when it comes to building culture and community. To combat useless waste of time with zoom fatigue, Juv actually uses a platform that allows them to onboard your community and engage them through random coffee dates while also supplying their team of contractorswith questions to answer during these coffee dates. On top of that, Juv makes contractors feel more involved by ensuring that these contractors have regular updates about what's going on at the company and an opportunity to write feedback about how they want to see things at the company change. 

Full Time Employees (FTE)

With majority of Juv’s full time employees being based in NYC (remote), there is a lot more flexibility in programming and initiatives for building culture and community. After consulting with their employees, Juv realized that their team wants to enjoy each other’s company in a non-working manner. They simply want to experience lunch, dinner and activities with each other. One of Maia’s favorite quotes from their Juv CEO Zihad Ahmed is “My favorite thing about work is when I see two people (employees) become best friends.” 

Juv also hosts a call every Friday where the team performs fun activities including brainstorming about random clients that they wish they had, going through the hottest trend reports, listening to the hottest guitar audios of the month and more. It is all about making the team feel excited and seen. 

While the approach to engaging with both groups are slightly different, the commonality is ensuring that you are determining the right platforms and structuring opportunities for conversation that bring people closer to one another. Employees highly appreciate this effort and it makes them feel more in tune with the brand. 

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Tools and Software for Establishing Better Corporate Culture

Notion: Juv uses Notion for internal team and external client project work. They use this tool for all things meetings: taking notes as well as assigning/tracking tasks.

Lattice: Juv most recently used Lattice before transitioning their HR responsibilities to a consulting firm. Lattice is used for employee performance. It helps you track all of your employee’s 1:1’s with direct reports. You can also perform professional development tasks on Lattice, including outlining leveling frameworks to show employees what their upward mobility will look like. 

Clockify: If you are doing contracted work, Clockify is very helpful for contractors who are clocking in their hours. It allows both the company and contractor to see how many hours they worked and can also calculate what their payment will look like based off of their hours completed. 

Google Suite: Juv uses Google Suite for document storage and calendar. 

Zoom: Zoom is used for typical video calls.

Workplace: Workplace is a communication system built by Meta, and looks almost exactly like Facebook. It is used to communicate with your employees, similar to Slack.

Sign Now: This platform is used for signing and sending out documents.

DoorDash: DoorDash’s corporate plan can be used to allow employees to order lunch from a company stipend. This plan is free in terms of additional fees or platform fees, etc. The only amount that companies have to pay for is the stipend amount awarded to employees. This is especially useful if you want your employees to spend more time in the office where you can structure this incentive around employee orders only being delivered to the office.

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With several years of experience in this lane, Maia is a walking database of all things culture and community. While there is much more to learn from here, Maia has laid the groundwork for how companies can begin to rethink their culture and community strategy. 

Final words of motivation form Maia for those trying to “figure it all out”:

I fundamentally believe in the universe aligning. I also believe that things will always work out. I feel like if you did not get that opportunity you wanted, there's a reason that you did not get it. Whether it's because you weren't ready, whether it's because the universe was saving you from a shitty ass boss that you maybe didn't know was shitty, or from a company culture that you didn't know was toxic or whatever the case may be. There is always a reason why things didn't work out.