Operationalizing Culture: What Makes Martin Different?

By: Jack Westerkamp, Co-Founder and Head of Growth of Breaking and Entering Media

I spent two days immersing myself at The Martin Agency. The paradox of talking about culture is that culture itself is not about what you say, but how you feel. So, to write an entire blog about culture makes zero sense. However, I persist.

We as a society have come full circle on discussing culture. At first, you could get away with just talking about how you have a great, diverse community of people, and you do happy hours, and sometimes lunch gets catered in. However, coming out of Covid, none of that is as relevant it seems. The fact is that a lot of people don’t want to be at a happy hour with their coworkers, and they couldn’t care less about someone’s cute puppy in a Slack Channel dutifully named “Corporate Puppers”.

So now, the corporate speak of the day is poking holes in other companies talking about their “culture” and then saying “we don’t just talk about culture, we really mean it”.

With that said, there still remains a large group of people that are searching for that feeling of community in the workplace. They feel fulfilled knowing that they will be hanging out with their coworkers after hours, or that they can chit chat about weekend plans around someone’s desk.

For me, having a strong culture means accepting both kinds of people while setting a strong expectation for participation in the company culture. A company should make it abundantly clear what kind of company they are and what their culture is from what they put out into the world so that they can attract the kind of people that fit into their culture.

The Martin Agency is a shining success story in showing people who they are, and setting expectations for culture. They host community events, are active on their social media, highlight their employees, and they even brought in a couple young guns in the media industry to showcase the entire agency. As an outsider, this means that if you work at Martin, you are choosing to actively participate in culture-building. And this means they attract talent that, you guessed it, actively participate in culture-building.

There is no amount of corporate events, forced happy hours, and catered lunches that will get your employees to enjoy each other and actually enjoy their work environment. You need employees at every level to participate and want to create opportunities for culture-building.

We talked with Adrienne Cleveland, who is the Chief Operating and Culture Officer. She talked about how they are “operationalizing” culture at Martin. I think this is pretty much a more concise, better-said version of my previous ramblings. To me, operationalizing something means that it happens as part of standard daily procedures. You should not even have to think about it. It is routine. And that is how it felt for me, being at The Martin Agency for two full days.

When you operationalize culture, you find that things just sorta… happen. Like Mix @ Martin. This is an initiative where Martin employees decided they wanted to bring in local artists to perform at The Martin Agency office. Nobody told them to do it, and on the flipside, when they brought the idea to leadership, there was immediate support. The whole company is behind them, and it just feels natural. Think about if this idea came from the top, and then leadership said “hey, we have this idea. We’re too busy, so you all put it together.” That sounds awful. I would be pissed to have to work on it. But since culture is operationalized at Martin, it means that employees feel empowered to collaborate with each other and come up with fun ideas that involve the intersection of Martin’s culture and the community’s culture.

So how did we get here? How did Martin foster this culture? At Martin, it sounds like there is an emphasis on highlighting the individual and trying to understand their perspective, for the purposes of supporting each individual. Once you have enough insight into each person’s situation, you can start to really create opportunities and foundations for deeper relationships between leadership and more junior staff. Then, all of a sudden, junior employees feel comfortable at work and they open up to leadership and each other, showing a deeper personality. And even after that, it becomes a situation where the community can express themselves with unwavering support from leadership.

Then one day, you wake up, and you have a musician doing a concert at your office because of the drive and passion of your colleagues.

THAT is culture, and that is why it actually matters.

Travel & Accommodations provided by the Martin Agency.