How Paystone Engages Its Community

For many of us, a side-effect of the pandemic has been the realisation that simply having a job doesn't necessarily increase our sense of fulfillment or belonging.

It's become increasingly important for employees to see the impact of their work and feel a sense of community in the workplace.

Paystone recognises the importance of enabling employees to feel part of a community and we actively try to create a culture that provides job satisfaction, retention, and overall well-being.

We view community-building both internally, amongst company staff, and externally through our network of customers and partners. We've created strategies to nurture both types of communities to improve our company culture and employee job satisfaction.

Connecting with our internal community

Interacting with colleagues beyond job-related topics or seeing what a colleague's job entails through shadowing is one way we build our community internally. Another good example is having a virtual coffee chat with a new team member.

Engaging with our external community

We are actively involved in driving positive results for clients and customers by encouraging Paystone staff to contribute towards their growth. For example, Paystone employees can leave online reviews for our clients' businesses they've visited or become customers.

Our community, with you in it

Let's look at how Paystone defines community and how we support it through our workplace culture.

A workplace community is defined by employees knowing they work within a community of people with a common purpose. For Paystone, that purpose primarily focuses on our mission of helping small businesses grow.

For us, the community isn't just our internal workforce. It's also about the clients and businesses we support. By connecting the two, we can help our employees see their impact on our clients and strengthen the sense of purpose that ties our internal community together.

Since many Paystone employees are not customer-facing, they only sometimes get to connect at the client or customer level. We encourage everyone to engage with our clients since they are the reason we do our work.

Four ways we engage with our external community

1. Shadow a call

Listening to and hearing from our current or prospective customers is a great place to start!

To encourage this, our sales and support teams have created a signup board that allows our employees to shadow a call and enables our staff to understand our clients' needs and the factors that impact or motivate them.

An essential component of having a mission-driven workforce is helping employees understand the customers since this is who their work impacts.

2. Refer a potential customer 

There is no bigger advocate for your business than your employees. For Paystone, having our employees rave about our products and services to their friends and family is a true testament to our workplace culture and our success in supporting our clients.

That's why Paystone ramped up an internal referral program to support our employees' customer referrals. This initiative supports our employees in talking to their families, friends, and potential customers about Paystone products with a simple talk template highlighting and explaining all of our products, which has helped our staff confidently speak about our product offerings.

3. Buy and review

The best way to echo our mission of helping small businesses grow is to provide an opportunity for our clients to win our business.

With over 200 employees within our internal community, we recognize the impact we can make by supporting our clients. By creating this initiative, we help support these businesses and create another bridge between our internal and external communities.

If our employees are in the market for a product or service or are looking to try a new food place, they can check out a list of businesses we service on our internal community board.

Tying our company's purpose to community initiatives allows us to bring it full circle by encouraging our staff to leave a review if they choose to purchase or use a service from one of our clients.

4. Share content

A great way to spread the word organically and create further engagement with our community is to provide employees with excellent content they can share with their personal social media channels in support of their colleagues and the company.

To do this, Paystone created an "all community" Slack channel where we post exciting content, including company news, awesome blogs by our employees, and press releases (check out how Paystone made it on the list with Team True North).

From here, Paystone employees can choose to share this content with their own networks.

Motivating employees to engage with the community

Creating awesome initiatives is fun, but getting them off the ground by rallying participation is the key to success. So to help our people along, we've created a fun challenge between departments to see which team can get the highest engagement score. I mean, who doesn't love healthy competition?

We challenge our teams to participate in any of the four community engagement activities and share their involvement in the "all community" Slack channel. So whether it was a review they left for a client or business, the content they shared on social media, or a call they shadowed - there are many ways to join in the challenge.

The competition brings on a surge of activity and continued participation by all our departments. As a result, we've seen an increase in employee engagement month over month, with some teams leaving over 115 business reviews!

Every month, we internally publish our community engagement statistics to keep our employees informed on their progress and to continue promoting participation.

Giving back to the greater community

Creating an internal community is the starting point for growing and fostering the community beyond our staff. We also want to create opportunities for our team to participate in giving back to the communities that we're a part of. 

At Paystone, we selected Geenees, an incredible not-for-profit platform that allows people to grant and fulfill wishes directly to various causes as a way to give back.

Our employees have been able to join a gifting committee to pick a cause to support and make wishes come true. Through our work with Geenees, we have been able to grant over 85 wishes to various charities in need.

For International Women's Day, we wanted to do something impactful internally and externally, so we partnered with a company called Talent, which focuses on supporting 1,000 women this year (2022) to find or build higher-value paid work.

Internally, Paystone allowed those who identify as female to join the 6-month Propeller Program. Externally, Paystone funded ten women who couldn't afford the program to go through it, helping them develop skills and networks to gain higher-value paid work.

Join our community

Successfully building a sense of community helps people gain belonging and purpose in their work lives. Moreover, the benefits of promoting a sense of community apply to more than employees. Good leaders recognise they, too, need a network of people to support and deliver their vision, creating a culture of knowledge sharing and a community spirit.

If you are interested in joining our community at Paystone, check out our career page.