Make Your Company Culture Standout in the Life Sciences Industry Part 4: The Employee Experience

Authors: Sahana Nazeer and Lauren Perna

In the first three parts of this series we talked about the importance of culture, how to institute it, and how to brand it. The next step in this journey is to believe it and live it. In other words, the employee experience. This is a critical part of the journey because if the culture fades as a company grows, retention will suffer when the need is the greatest, i.e. preparing to go public, beginning clinical trials, going commercial.

An important part of the employee experience is onboarding. When an employee feels welcome during their first few days, they will feel good about their new employer. But it shouldn’t end there—proper training is also critical. An employee that feels as if they’ve been thrown into the fire is bound to become frustrated and resentful, leading to a quick turnover. Companies will save time and money in the long run if they provide ample support in the beginning. But the support shouldn’t end once an employee is fully trained. Regular check-in’s and feedback will help both the employee and the manager be effective.

Camaraderie and collaboration are also central to the employee experience. We explained earlier in this series that collaboration is one of nine key values on the Culture 500, MIT’s index for corporate culture. MIT has proven that the most successful companies make sure that everyone feels part of the team. Not every company needs to be a big, happy family but every company does need to be as inclusive as possible. For some companies this means regular Thirsty Thursdays and group 5Ks, but for others it might simply be company lunches and scheduled team meetings. No one likes to feel left out, and this is certainly true at work, where people spend as much as 50% of their total waking hours during any given working day.

We work with a lot of growing biotech companies, and another factor in the employee experience is senior leadership. In the first part of this series we said that senior leadership can make or break a good culture, and we see this firsthand. Senior leaders that are engaged and interested in their staff will see better retention rates than those that are disconnected and unavailable.

Sci.bio recruiting associate Allison Ellsworth looks back fondly on her time at Moderna because “everyone knew the origin story of the company since the founders were happy to share it.” She explains that factor really made working there a special experience and helped to build camaraderie and loyalty even among later hires.

Companies will also benefit from looping in the patient community. That could be participating in a fundraiser for a relevant disease foundation, encouraging employees to attend patient forums, or simply having a patient advocate come in to share their story. Life science employees work long, hard hours and risk getting burned out quickly. But if they feel connected to the mission and the vision, they will likely stick around.

The last part of this series focuses on the candidate experience because none of the previous information will matter if you don’t treat your candidates right.

Make Your Company Culture Standout in the Life Sciences Industry Part 3: Employer Branding

Authors: Lauren Perna and Sahana Nazeer

In the first part of this series, we said that if a company builds a good culture up front, they won’t be forced to give a hard sell to potential candidates later.  This doesn’t mean a remarkable corporate culture is a substitute for marketing and branding. A comprehensive employer branding strategy complements an engaging culture.

BioSpace’s Katie Roth describes employer branding as “ensuring your company or organization is represented in the best possible way to attract candidates. It’s about connecting with candidates to ensure appropriate cultural fit” in her October 2019 article entitled 7 Tips for Branding in the Life Sciences.

For startups in survival mode this feels like the last thing on the list; resources need to go towards the research. Yet, if a company skips the legwork up front to attract the right people, they risk wasting valuable time and money bringing on the wrong people.

“Employers who don’t invest in their reputations pay up to $4,723 more per employee hired, and half of candidates won’t even consider working for a company with a bad employer brand, no matter how high the salary offer.” – Employer Branding Essentials, LinkedIn

Even for companies with limited resources, there are still branding techniques that incur minimal costs and provide big value. For example, employees can be brand ambassadors by sharing the company story to their networks in-person and online. They can also make full use of their LinkedIn profiles. Another inexpensive way to kickstart a branding strategy is by maximizing the company and careers pages on the website and on LinkedIn. In TalentLyft’s May 2019 article How to Hire for Cultural Fit and retain 86% of Employee the folks at Zety encourage employers to “over-communicate” what their company stands for on these pages; it helps “screen the candidate pool” and attract the right candidates.

Two other inexpensive yet impactful ways to establish a good brand are enhancing job descriptions and utilizing social media. We cannot stress the importance of a good job description.  We often see clients send us job descriptions that require an unreasonable list of qualifications, yet the description offers no personality of the company. This tactic scares potential candidates away, especially those that don’t meet every requirement but could be a good overall fit. When consulting with a client, we help them carve out a job posting that does not describe a unicorn candidate but does paint a good picture of the company. We also help clients maximize their social media coverage through their platforms and ours.

Roth’s Biospace article makes an important point about creating a diversified recruitment strategy.  Rather than casting a wide net, utilize niche sites and be thoughtful about targeting your outreach so you attract the right people. Biospace and Sci.bio’s career page are great examples of niche sites to consider.

Once you have attracted the right candidates and created a team of employees that will represent your culture, the next step is making sure you live up to that culture. In the next part of this series, we’ll talk about the employee experience.

Make Your Company Culture Standout in the Life Sciences Industry Part 2: Instituting Culture

Authors: Sahana Nazeer and Lauren Perna

In the first part, we talked about what culture is and how MIT has managed to quantify it through an interactive tool called the Culture 500. Now that we understand it, we need to know how a company institutes a vibrant culture. It all starts with, ironically, hiring. The first 20 to 50 employees serve as the poster image for future team-members; therefore, they should have strong leadership skills and the ability to adapt as the company scales.  The initial team should also be a diverse group with complementary skill sets. Culture is bound to suffer if every on staff thinks the same way.  The hiring team should assess what strengths are already present and target people with skills that will offer a good balance.

This may mean requiring that initial hires undergo a more involved interview process, i.e. behavioral-based questions with a range of employees, especially senior leadership. If a company invests in the first 20 people coming through the door, then they will not have to sell the company to the next 20 people who choose to follow them.

Paula Cloghessy, chief human resources officer at Translate Bio, echoes this sentiment. She was one of those “next 20 people” who did not need a hard sell to join the company. Cloghessy came onboard when there between 30 and 40 employees; she joined because of CEO Ron Renaud’s people first mentality. “In a biotech you are constantly in survival mode, but Ron saw the importance of building people and bringing them together early on.” Renaud’s “people first” focus is still a vital part of the company’s culture and is made evident through their branding initiatives–something we’ll talk about in the next part.

So, what about those companies who have a reputation for a toxic company culture? Is there any hope? Certainly. There are many resources online offering advice on how to turn a toxic culture around without firing the whole staff, although that is one way to go about it. Some common tactics: implementing a culture team, analyzing employee demographics, and surveying current and former employees. An important takeaway is that culture starts from the top, so if the Board or Senior Leadership team are part of the problem then that’s where to start.

Whether a company is establishing a new culture or revamping an existing one, they should make sure that the culture aligns with company goals. Once a company has established (or re-established) a good corporate culture, what’s next? Promoting it, believing it, and showing it. In the next part, we’ll talk about promoting it.

Make Your Company Culture Standout in the Life Sciences Industry Part 1: Understanding Culture

Authors: Sahana Nazeer and Lauren Perna

In the super competitive world of life science employment, culture ranks top of the list of reasons people decide to join a company. While a nice paycheck and great benefits are important, the type of work and the people at a company are the top priority for most employees. According to Biospace’s 2019 Ideal Employer Report “interesting and meaningful work” is the #1 quality in an ideal employer.  In a survey of 2,700 life science professionals, 74% of respondents said team dynamics was important.

The trend is not unique to the life sciences industry. Glassdoor conducted a Mission and Culture Survey last year across four countries (including the U.S.), and the main takeaways from the survey all highlight the cruciality of company culture.

• • Over 77% of adults take into consideration a company’s culture and 79% weigh a company’s mission and purpose prior to applying.
  • A little over 50% of adults stated that company culture is more important than salary in terms of job satisfaction.
  • 73% of adults will not even apply to a company unless its values align with their own.
  • In order of greatest to least importance for employee satisfaction, adults listed culture and values, senior leadership, career opportunities, business outlook, work-life balance, and compensation and benefits.

Culture matters so much now that the fine people at MIT Sloan created a Culture 500 Index–an interactive tool that measures how major companies rank across nine different values that they have identified as being a critical part of corporate culture. The data is based on a sample of companies on Glassdoor, representing 33 industries with an average of 18 companies per industry. Each of the companies in the sample had at least 2,000 reviews. The Culture 500 is a benchmark for company culture, celebrating success and encouraging improvement.

According to MIT’s introductory report on the Culture 500: “A healthy company culture can turbocharge corporate performance.”

In fact, the report states that there is research showing “a good corporate culture is correlated to higher profitability and returns to shareholders.”

So, what makes a good culture? According to the Culture 500, the nine values to consider include: agility, collaboration, customer, diversity, execution, innovation, integrity, performance, and respect. The biotech and pharma industry did the best in the customer category, which makes sense given most people join this industry to help others. The industry also did well in the integrity and respect categories, while some categories were a mixed bag like innovation and diversity. Agility was the industry’s weakest category, meaning biopharmas do not “move quickly and effectively to changes in the marketplace and seize new opportunities,” which makes sense given the amount of resources and time it takes to make a drug.

Larger companies may seem like the clear front-runner in the culture department, since they have the financial resources to create a positive culture or improve a not-so-great one. But size is both the advantage and their disadvantage.  In a large, well-established company, it can be really hard to combat a bad culture and the ramifications can be detrimental (i.e. Wells Fargo).

That’s where the startups have an advantage.  They can create an appealing work environment from the ground up, and in the hot life sciences job market that’s important. As we’ve stated before, smaller companies need to sell their culture and mission because they cannot compete with the larger biopharmas in the salary and benefits department.

MIT’s Culture 500 is a great tool to help companies who are starting out and for companies who wish to improve. Companies can also delve deeper into Culture 500’s data source—Glassdoor. With over 49 million reviews on the site, there’s bound to be some helpful nuggets of information from companies not used on the Index.

Now that we understand culture a little better, we can talk about how to go about executing a good culture. In our second part of this five-part series, we tackle the execution of culture.