John and Jennifer Garrett: Doing Good is Good Business

In this series, called “Doing Good is Good Business,” RecognizeGood asks Austin-area business and community leaders that exact question – why IS doing good is simply good business? In this video, we hear from John and Jennifer Garrett of Community Impact Newspaper.

John: “CI’s culture is our values – it’s Jennifer’s, and it’s the leadership’s values. That’s what creates the culture. It’s not like, ‘We have sparkling water that you can have for free, and we have a ping pong table,’ and all that stuff. That doesn’t create culture. What creates culture is values and who you are. And, so I think what’s really neat about that is that if you’re trying to teach folks about how to get these values going to create that kind of culture, they are so related.”

Jennifer: “I think we also just talked about it a lot. I mean, just every day. That’s what we run decisions through and ask, ‘How is this meeting these values?’

We just talk about it a lot, to keep it in front of everybody.”

John: “Who doesn’t want to be a part of a company that has a strong mission and is clear about what it is? And who doesn’t want to be a part of a company that says ‘Values are important to us.’ As we take care of you as an employee, and then as our product is produced, it’s got to be high quality. I mean, all of that stuff works really well to not only keep everybody on the same page, hold us accountable to what we say we’re going to do, but also they make our employees feel better about the company they work for. That was the point of it! It isn’t to [hold up] a standard that you have to achieve to get this – the point of it is that everybody can learn from anybody.

So when somebody does something above and beyond, we all can learn from them. So the point of it is really more about reinforcing those values and recognizing people for accomplishing them. If you’re consistent, and you use recognition, it’ll work really well.