The self storage industry can be a lonely place – stores are manned by small teams and dotted around the country.

A challenge we always face as a company is how to unify these disparate teams and instil a positive culture.

While this would typically be the role of the HR team, we’ve definitely been able to influence culture with our local charity work.

Give to get

In 2011 we kicked off an annual Easter Charity Campaign, putting our stores and staff around the country to work, collecting and storing Easter eggs for their chosen local charities.

After doing something similar on a much smaller scale, we realised encouraging employees to give back to their communities, builds a happier and far more motivated workforce. This in turn benefits our customers and overall business.

Connect your colleagues and customers

Setting up a charity campaign can be quite daunting at first. Adding ‘volunteer work’ to your staff’s already long to-do lists is not always met with enthusiasm upfront, yet the success of our Easter campaign relies fully on getting everyone on-board and working together.

To spur the project on we encourage our colleagues to connect with their customers and team up for a good cause.

Charities are great to work with and this common purpose fosters tighter relationships, adds an element of fun and doubles the campaign presence; increasing donations, enthusiasm and awareness.

Think local

In the past five years we have worked with both local and national charities. We’ve found local is definitely the way to go.

Each of our stores enjoys the autonomy of choosing which charity to support, and feels an immediate boost from seeing the community they live and work in benefit from their efforts.

By supporting local charities, some of our stores have even generated new business. A good example of this is the Queen Elizabeth hospital in Birmingham: we have supported them in our Easter and Christmas charity campaigns which has built huge rapport between our employees, the hospital staff and their patients, with many of the latter becoming our customers.

Media friendly

Working within local communities, for local charities, has the added benefit of appealing to local press. Media acknowledgement is a huge motivator for our employees, customers and charities, inspiring them to dive into the next year’s campaign with even more enthusiasm.

In addition to this we also make sure we encourage teams to send us photos and updates that we share on our blog and social media channels. This acts as a form of intra-company recognition and builds healthy competition as other teams try to beat donation totals set by their colleagues.

Before long my inbox was flooded with pictures of Easter Egg donations from around the country – each team wanted their efforts to be recognised, and rightly so!

Get engaged

Employee engagement is important to our company, and with good reason: disengaged employees can drag their colleagues down and impact productivity.

Encouraging them to get involved in volunteer work as a team, has helped them create stronger connections with their colleagues, customers and communities, and benefited our business in return.