Anna Bohonek was the first employee of Time is Ltd, a Swiss army knife. From the beginning she worked on raising investor capital before laying the foundations of marketing, business development, and building channel partners. 

This past year has marked the age of employee empowerment. Technology has enabled people to work from anywhere, established new industries, and offers unprecedented opportunities in the job market that go beyond the borders of a prospective employee’s city. The pandemic sparked the acceleration of the digital transformation which subsequently contributed to The Great Resignation. As a result, companies are taking an employee-centric approach to improve the employee experience, win the talent war, and reduce employee churn. 

The American labor force is more emboldened than ever in this employee-first market, which has been a ‘game-changer’ in the hiring process. Employees are re-evaluating their prospects and are making moves to work with companies that more closely align with their values. The question of whether this stance persists is to be seen as we move into an economic crisis of epoch high inflation that will likely increase the unemployment rate. 

Regardless, the lessons learned from The Great Resignation is that the employee experience is everything…and company culture is the lynchpin. I recently published a post on LinkedIn about company culture to start a conversation about this topic. As Hubert Joly, Harvard Business School Professor, former Best Buy CEO, Best Selling Author, puts it, 

"[...] culture plays such a powerful role in making purpose and strategy come to life"

In Joy’s article on, Does Your Company’s Culture Reinforce Its Strategy and Purpose?, he explains how “Culture has been the fertile soil that has enabled both their purpose and their strategy to come to life and drive extraordinary performance at scale”. I wanted to visualize this article in an illustration. I drew it using Paper by WeTransfer and Adonit pen.

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Corporate Culture Illustrated by Time is Ltd.’s Head of Partnerships, Anna Bohonek

Illustration showing a visual analogy of company culture. The flower represents purpose, the stem equals strategy, and the roots are the culture. 

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I believe company culture is like a root system. Its quality helps nourish the stem and leaves, and allows the plant to flower. Through the roots, nutrition flows to the whole plant, as is the same with corporate culture; if it's weak, it will never bloom.

Purpose is connected to the vision of the company. First the purpose, and then values derived from its vision - and purpose - indicate its values. The main point I wanted to illustrate was that if you live and breathe the company culture, it becomes your anchor. In other words, it’s your grounding system guiding you to stay on course, do your work confidently, manage your team effectively, and judge ideas from the lens of the company’s purpose. 

The purpose and vision of the company becomes achievable, so as long as this system is well established - thus rooted. Therefore, the company grows in the right direction, like a plant nourished by the sun. The stem gets stronger, the leaves grow until then the plant stands firm in the wind, growing despite the ills of the seasons. And then it blooms. The flower is a manifestation of the reason it is here. The flower helps the plant to spread.

Employees are increasingly looking for something more meaningful than a paycheck when it comes to their job. The role of a company’s culture grows its importance in parallel with the growing impact and power of individual actions.

The Takeaway 

Not only is company culture important to me in regards to the place where I work, but it’s also a personal mission of mine to positively reshape company culture across multiple industries. As the Head of Partnerships, this is what gets me up in the morning. So if you’re a service partner or a reseller, then don’t hesitate to reach out to anna@timeisltd.com to chat more!