Kenton Brothers Kulture Club – Work Hard, Play Hard

By Gina Stuelke, CEO of Kenton Brothers

Building and maintaining a strong company culture can be challenging. One of the ways we’ve found to help strengthen our culture is to actively solicit employee feedback. When done right, these conversations foster a sense of inclusion and make your team members feel valued and heard. (It’s just like in a marriage, communication is crucial.)

When people feel included and listened to, it boosts morale, productivity, and overall job satisfaction. Why does this matter? We genuinely care about every team member and we want to make sure they know that. On the practical front, it leads to lower turnover rates and higher retention of our top talent. Employee feedback serves as a crucial source of insight for identifying areas of improvement, improving processes, and making changes to how we do things.

The Kulture Club

We created the Kulture Club to foster these conversations and to make sure we are taking time to have fun together outside of working hard together.

Our Kulture Club provides a safe environment for our associates to bring both ideas and issues to the forefront. There have been great suggestions on ways we can improve that we’ve implemented. Dealing with issues head on is efficient and productive. A strong team can have real conversations about real things, especially when it comes to harder conversations. So there have been some of those as well over the past couple of years.

Kulture Club includes representation from most of our departments. One of the contributions in 2023 was to establish a new holiday to recognize veteran associates who served by gifting them an additional day of paid time off, in appreciation for their service.

Company Events

Kulture Club is also great at creating and organizing our company events for team building. And yes, it can be a lot to organize and plan for, but it is so important to make sure these things happen on a regular basis. Some of the events and activities we do annually include the Kenton Brothers family picnic, holiday parties, National fun holiday recognitions, Blast from the Past Breakfast bar, Red Friday celebrations, potato bar for St. Patrick’s Day, Chili cook offs and more.

Brag Board

Another output from the Kulture Club is our Brag Board. This is a form of recognition for Kenton Brothers associates including birthdays, anniversaries, certifications, and fun and exciting tidbits. These images are displayed on monitors in our offices throughout the day.

We appreciate the insight and ideas that our Kulture Club associates bring to the table. We have seen significant, positive impacts to our culture in part due to the efforts of the Kulture Club. Do you have something similar set up in your company? We would love to hear in the comments any ideas you have about fun events or activities you’re doing to improve communication and teamwork!