What do magicians, bouncy castles, kegs and pickleball have in common? The answer, at some American companies, is an expense code known as the “culture budget”.
“This is a huge moment for culture budgets,” says Meghan Merriman, a marketing manager and a “culture committee” member at the accounting firm GrowthForce.
Culture is a nebulous term that emerged around the 1980s to describe all the hard-to-measure parts of corporate life: how connected employees feel to their work, how much they like their colleagues, how much they believe the company represents their values. The thinking is that those soft metrics, not only stock values or corporate benefits, help determine whether people will stay in their jobs.
And after two-plus years in which remote work has become more common practice and lots of workers haven’t been able to see their peers in person as much, quit rates have soared, and companies are putting more money toward that amorphous sense of connectedness. A survey released in October by the Conference Board found that 30 per cent of employees (both remote and in person) reported lower levels of engagement in their workplaces than they did six months before.
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At Merriman’s company the culture committee will receive stipends starting next year. The committee decided that, along with conventional perks, like office snacks, it will focus on professional development. (Culture-focused work has tended to land on women, but Merriman says her group is fairly even in terms of gender.)
“When people think of culture budget, they think pizza parties,” Merriman says (in what is perhaps an overestimation of awareness of the term). “We took it one step further.”
Encore, one of the world’s largest event-production businesses, surveyed nearly 1,000 event planners in the United States this autumn and found that 60 per cent intended to increase their budgets in 2023, including for corporate revelry.
One of its clients, Kerrie Shakespeare, is the chief purpose officer at the home improvement company O2E Brands, in Vancouver, in western Canada – a position that involves building company culture. This year she decided to rethink her company’s holiday celebrations: the festivities were held over several days instead of just one. Some of those days were dedicated to professional development. And the company also had a traditional holiday party, with a DJ playing top-40 hits and a playlist featuring the “Queen of Christmas,” she says. After all, what’s culture without Mariah Carey?
Of course, many workers and managers realise that a culture budget is possible only after more fundamental spending is accounted for. “This is kind of just the cherry on top of the big things,” Merriman says. Like “making sure everyone was paid adequately.” – This article originally appeared in The New York Times
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