Why Culture Remains Important, Even in a Remote Environment

Workplace culture has always been an important part of GoHealth, ever since Brandon Cruz and I founded the company in 2001. Two of our company values are to “Provide an open, honest & constructive workplace,” and to “Promote a fun work environment,” which our team lives out every day. Our focus on culture has even won GoHealth a variety of best places to work awards for several consecutive years.

GoHealth’s in-office culture has always been positive and buzzing with collaboration. Walking around the corporate office in Chicago, it was rare to see a team sitting at a table looking only at their computers. More often, I saw people gathered in conference rooms around white boards, hashing out ideas on how to solve the next problem. I heard lots of chatter and saw smiles and high-fives all around—I even heard from more than a few people that working at GoHealth didn’t feel like work. And that fun, winning atmosphere carried into our sales centers—both across the block in Chicago and across the country in Lindon, Utah, and Charlotte, North Carolina—with folks excited to get on the phones every day, make sales, and help Americans find the right insurance coverage for them. 

Then, the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

Maintaining this culture was one of our top priorities in the transition to working remotely. It took us merely five days of working remotely to return to our in-office production levels, and we knew then that we had a platform to continue being successful. Once we knew that working remotely would work, our mindset shifted to enhancing the employees’ remote work experience. We wondered, “How can we all stay connected, engaged, challenged and excited to show up every day?” Then we got to work figuring it out.

Here’s how we maintain our fun, winning culture while working remotely:

1. We talk a lot. We prioritized keeping Team GoHealth informed and connected, and being transparent with everyone about what the executive team was doing. To ensure the whole company heard the same voice and message, we instituted weekly, companywide emails from Brandon and myself to share the latest announcements, encouraging messages, and any future plans. We also host regular, virtual town halls and fireside chats so smaller teams or the whole company can hear from our executive team and see our faces from time-to-time. Executives will also surprise smaller team meetings by logging in to their morning huddles to say hi, offer encouragement, and thank them for all their hard work.
2. We send swag. Once the lockdowns started to feel like the Groundhog Day movie—where each day feels alike—we started looking for fun ways to break up the monotony and send employees tokens of our appreciation. That’s where swag came in. We mailed out everything from company-branded hats and t-shirts to s’mores kits for the next virtual fireside chat. During our busy AEP season, we even mailed toys to the young children of some of our agents so they felt appreciated while their parents worked long hours. With everyone’s families somehow impacted by the pandemic and the nightly news being so negative, we feel like any positive contribution we could make to someone’s day was valuable.
3. We order a lot of take out. During past AEPs, when we’ve been in the office, we provided our agents with breakfast, lunch, and dinner that they could grab easily and return to the phones—a perk they really appreciated during those tough weeks. That was difficult to replicate with employees spread out across the country and large gatherings prohibited. Instead, we gave managers a budget to provide food delivery gift cards, order pizzas, send bottles of wine or find other ways to help their teams stay connected and well fed.
4. We celebrate wins big and small. GoHealth has always celebrated our wins, going back to when we had a staff of five and we’d all go out for pizza and drinks to celebrate a new contract. It remains important that people feel appreciated and see that their work is meaningful. That’s why we have partnered with Awardco to help us reward employees for a job well done. Managers can award their team members points to spend on various items in Awardco, from a new office chair to Apple AirPods. We also recognize employees in our monthly sales center newsletters, highlighting their successes and helping the company get to know each of them better.

This fun, winning culture isn’t just key to a positive employee experience—it’s also key to innovation and problem-solving. Rather than having our teams siloed off and afraid to try new things, GoHealth is an open workplace, and employees feel empowered to ask questions of anyone in the company and take intelligent risks. This approach has been critical to our success so far and will remain so as the company continues to grow.

No one knows what the future holds, but culture will always remain an important part of GoHealth. What are you doing to maintain your company’s culture? Let me know in the comments.