Encouraging a Proactive Attitude in Company Culture

At TSP, our product is our people. We don’t write code, manufacture anything, or create a product that ships in a box—we serve clients, solve problems, and try to make life easier for the people we work with. When your business creates and sells a product, everything you do is focused on that product, but when your “product” is service, you have to stay focused on the people who are actually carrying that service out every day.

A product is simple. It is one thing and does one thing, and changes in the product are concrete. But people are complicated. Human beings have unique perspectives. We can make decisions and interact with environments and other people. Human beings can solve complex problems and offer innovative insights.

Company culture is the way a company feels to work with and the way people on the team generally treat one another. Culture is an essential component to every business, but at TSP, because people are our product, culture is paramount. The way we feel about what we do and how we interact literally affects the way we work with clients and one another, which is the heart of our business.

We don’t believe in pigeonholing people.
Many companies operate under strict systems where employees are expected to do specific jobs that uphold “the way things are done.” TSP doesn’t quite work like that. TSP is all about solutions, and in the service world, nothing makes you more cutting edge than being able to see creative ways out of a problem. That’s why we encourage proactive thinking that gets the job done better, faster, and with fewer roadblocks and headaches.

You have to trust your employees.
So many companies don’t truly trust their employees. They want people to do what they’re supposed to and remain in narrow roles. But running a business this way keeps opportunities at bay. We want to be open to new opportunities that can only be seen by the people working onsite with clients. It’s a leader’s job to set the overall vision of a business, but leaders can’t do every job within a company, so we want to be open to every employee’s perspective. Great companies trust employees to think of new ways to make things better.

You have to listen.
TSP trusts our engineers to see great opportunities, and when they bring up an idea for an improvement, we pay attention. If you don’t give people a chance to speak and really listen to what they say, people will stop innovating.

“Proactive” doesn’t necessarily mean “rogue.”
Fostering a work environment that encourages independent thinking doesn’t mean you’re creating a workplace where anything goes and people do whatever they want. So many companies fear independent thinking because they assume employees will go too far off the map and they just want things done a certain way—their way. But independent thinking doesn’t equal thinking that derails processes. When you empower people to come up with creative solutions, the team is stronger, and systems develop naturally. There is almost always a better way to do something, and extra perspectives will help you find it.