Jump Towers!

Having spent a large part of my adulthood working in sport and what I consider to be high-performance environments, I’m always fascinated by how organisations, teams and individuals create their shared cultures. 

Business strategist Daniel Priestley puts it simply when he says ‘environment dictates performance’. It’s a mantra myself and my team lived by during my own sporting career, and it’s something I’ve tried to take forward in to my own businesses at Jump Media Group and jumpthink. 

Environments shape behaviours, behaviours shape actions and actions shape outcomes. So what shapes environments? What is our shared culture? 

I’m a firm believer that values are the starting point of all great environments and cultures. Shared values help to create an environment that is focussed, high performing and highly satisfying to be a part of. 

If you then lead expansion with values-based recruitment, you’re on to a winner.  

I think this leads to why I’d missed our base at the Innovation Centre so much during the pandemic-induced work from home spell; it’s the centre of our culture, with our values strewn across the height and width of our main office wall. 

I’m being deadly serious when I say that there isn’t a single decision that we haven’t been able to make by looking at that wall and following one of our values. That in turn has helped shape our culture in to one that is consistently and uniquely Jump and helps everyone stay on the same page. 

What started as something relatively one-dimensional – putting our values on the wall – has grown into a culture weaved through everything we do. The area that we give to people we work with during the web build process, for example, is named after one of those values: create the future. When each new employee joins us, we put the reference for their monthly salary payment as their favourite value. When something goes wrong, we go through the ‘embrace every failure’ process. They are more than just words on a wall. They are our culture. 

Since day one at Jump we’ve had a hybrid working environment, where people can come and work at our base or work from wherever they like. Its their choice. But personally, as someone who likes to leave the house to ‘go to work’, I wouldn’t ever have been without the office we affectionately refer to as Jump Towers and that wall, staring me in the face every single day, shaping our culture, and making us who we are today.

Steve Walsh