A Cup of Community: Business leaders look to establish culture in workplaces

Asked to list the goals motivating their company’s corporate responsibility, nearly 9 out of 10 respondents in Springfield Business Journal’s 2026 Economic Growth Series survey – 88% – cited the aim of building company culture.

That was the top choice, followed closely by the goal of improving employee retention, selected by 85.5%.

Together, the responses reinforce a theme of this year’s survey, which is that employee recruiting and retention are causing some heartburn for business leaders. A separate question asked about respondents’ hiring plans for the year, with 43% planning to increase the number of employees in the Springfield metro area and 37% planning to recruit new employees to replace ones who are departing.

Employee wages and benefits were also revealed by the survey to be the main factor driving up the cost of doing business, with half of respondents saying they are having the greatest impact. Coming in a distant second as the top pick of 27% of respondents was the cost of goods and materials.

It’s no real stretch to conclude that area business leaders believe employees are hard to find and important to hold onto. Wages and benefits are only part of the calculus when it comes to finding and keeping workers – and that may be why many are turning their attention to culture – whatever that is.

Marlene Chism, of Marlene Chism Consulting, said the definition is not always clear.

“We can use a word inside a company, and yet each person may have a different definition for what culture means,” she said. “The first thing a company must do is to define culture for themselves. It doesn’t work to use someone else’s definition because there are so many.”

Chism said some companies may define culture as simply “the way we do things around here.” Others may refine this definition to mean “a set of beliefs that govern behavior.”

Others may install a foosball table and consider the culture problem solved.

Chism quoted Dr. Edgar Schein, an author and expert on workplace culture, with this definition: “Culture is what a group learns as its way of surviving and both getting along internally and solving its problems externally.”

Chism’s own belief about culture is that business leaders must define it so everyone agrees about its meaning. Internally, companies have their own practices, beliefs, behaviors and values, but the external environment always influences the internal one, she said.

“Truly it’s not about foosball tables and external perks,” she said. “People want to grow. They want autonomy. They want to be heard. These opportunities come from the values of the organization, not from some magic culture fix.”

Better lives
A foosball table may contribute to culture at one organization. For another, maybe it’s a high-end espresso machine.

Sara Choate, chief people officer and managing director of human capital solutions at KPM CPAs & Advisors, agreed with Chism: Culture means different things to different people.

“Is it an espresso machine? For some people, maybe it is,” she said. “Sometimes, that can be a very small part of the answer, but I like to peel back the layers of the onion.”

Choate said a coffee machine is not going to keep someone in a place of work, and it’s certainly not going to keep them engaged.

More important, Choate said, are qualities that don’t gleam in a corner of the breakroom. These include things like employees understanding what their future might look like with the company, or opportunities to give back to the community, or even just feeling valued while at work.

“Frankly, if you’re building a business that you want to sustain for many years to come, you need people who enjoy being with each other,” she said. “That means way more than just coffee machines.”

But for KPM, sometimes it still means ice cream, with a truck scheduled to be parked in the company lot the day after Choate’s interview for this story.

“It’s not about ice cream. It’s about giving people not only permission but encouragement to go and spend their time enjoying themselves and enjoying the relationships they’re building and the company of each other,” she said. “Those are the things that really build culture.”

There’s no shame in Drake Hughes’ game when the president and partner with Keep Supply says the company’s new office has a foosball table. It also has arcade games, snacks and free lunches.

Employees enjoy the extras, Hughes said, but they aren’t what give people excitement about coming to work every day.

“We believe Keep can be an impactful platform that makes lives better,” he said. “We focus on teams and families. How can we make lives better for them? What does that mean, and what does it look like for our customers and manufacturing partners?”

Gratitude
An unexpected link came up in separate interviews with both Choate at KPM and Hughes at Keep Supply: gratitude.

Choate said for the last three or four months, the focus at her company has been on gratitude. As part of an initiative called KPM Connects, team members from various departments meet in small groups to get to know one another better. Recently, the groups watched a webinar on the topic of gratitude, and everyone received a gratitude journal from the company. They were encouraged to spend 10 minutes of their workday focusing on what they felt grateful for, Choate said.

“It’s not forced,” she said. “We told them, ‘If this isn’t your cup of tea, pass it on to somebody in your life who would appreciate it.’”

For Choate, the effort is about giving people the tools they need to be the best version of themselves, and for some, cultivating gratitude is just the thing.

Hughes said Keep Supply uses a tool on the Slack team communication platform called HeyTaco. It’s a peer-to-peer recognition tool that lets people send up to five virtual tacos per day. The tacos are brief thank-you messages sent in public chat channels.

He added that the person who gives the most tacos is awarded with a gift … of tacos, typically, like a gift card from Tinga Tacos, which is a short walk from the newly opened Keep Supply headquarters on the downtown square.

“It’s people assuming the best about each other and recognizing teammates for doing good things,” Hughes said. “A healthy, positive environment is created.”

Manifesting culture
Establishing a strong company culture can pay dividends in retaining workers, but when word gets out, it can also aid in recruiting, according to Choate.

“Everyone’s website is going to say they have a good culture,” she said. “You have to give people you’re recruiting an opportunity to experience it. You have to invite them in.”

Choate said KPM does campus recruiting each fall, and students get to spend an evening getting to know the company and its people.

“It’s so authentic, and students feel that,” she said. “They get a real sense of what it is like to be here. Yes, we have fun; we laugh; we work hard. But we also put out real high-quality work.”

Chism advises business leaders not to try to change or fix culture.

“What you really want to do if you have a culture problem is to fix what’s broken. Work on the business problem and the culture will shift,” she said.

It may be a little dangerous for a leader to declare a desire to work on company culture, since culture is such a big word, Chism said.

“What does that mean? You want people to be happier? Nicer to each other? You want your leaders to be comfortable having tough conversations while maintaining trust?” she said. “Define the situation, the outcome and the obstacles, and you will be so far ahead of a company that just says, ‘We want to improve our culture.’”

Hughes said it’s worth it to put in the effort.

“People spend the majority of their waking hours at work. If we get this right, they enjoy those hours, they go home better to their families, and they live a more satisfied life,” he said.

Hughes added that culture creates high achievers.

“A company full of people like that achieves more, and a company that achieves more puts more back in the hands of the people who built it,” he said. “That’s the flywheel we are after, and it runs straight through our people, their families and the community we’re part of.“