(During many Small Giants Community events, we take leaders inside a wide variety of businesses for behind-the-scenes looks at unique best practices, leadership strategies, etc. While it may not seem weird for a leader to talk about how their workplace operates, we started to wonder what it felt like to be on the other side of experience.

What goes through an employee’s mind when a stranger walks in, stands in the middle of a set of cubes and starts to fire off questions about how the whole business works?

We asked Jonathan Melton, a member of the business development team at Small Giant Call-Em-All (Frisco, Texas) what it means to have his workday and workplace examined by leaders looking to take something home to their own company. We encourage you to share with your employees and examine what they would say about your office. -- SGC)

Whenever my Call-Em-All team welcomes a new visitor through our office’s front doors, I can’t help but feel a sense of pride rising within my chest. Oddly enough, I’d never quite recognized what these emotions are, and where they stem from, until now.

When people describe a company with great culture, many people immediately picture a laid-back and fun-loving atmosphere. This sells a good company culture far short, though.

Building a great culture is much more than just casual attire or Beer Friday—it’s more about the who, what, how, and why of your business. Your culture isn’t your perks, it’s your values. Building great culture takes some combination of time, money, and effort, but the payoff is a powerful business tool and the ultimate competitive advantage.

If you want to improve your company's culture, you need to start making love in the workplace.

We just hosted the Ann Arbor Small Giants chapter meetup with guest speaker David Mammano, author of the book Make Love in the Workplace. And we learned some fantastic principles about how to strengthen your company's culture. It's all about making love...sort of.

Here are 4 tips we gleaned from David about what it means to make love in the workplace and boost your company culture:

When it comes to being in an open, peer-driven discussion about running your business, you should always be willing to answer the questions you pose. So when Small Giants Community member Jim Mullaney of Edoc Service (Cincinnati, Ohio), posed six questions about running a business from a Small Giants perspective, we weren’t going to let him get away with not answering those questions about his own work.

How do Jim’s answers compare to how you’d answer the questions?

Am I building my company to last forever or to flip and sell it?

At Edoc Service we’re focused strictly on company growth, stability, and sustainability for the future. Selling the company is the farthest thing from our minds. Our current CEO may “age out” after 10 years and our strategy is geared to that timeframe.