Company Culture- What it takes to be great!

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Hey friendly reader, it’s Casey, a Project Manager at Tech Guys. I just got back from a 30-day roadtrip from Michigan to Florida to escape the winter freeze and warm up with some reggae on the beaches.

Not to bore you with the details that pushed me to leave, I did manage to get a lot of Learning Time in during the trip. Mike, the CEO of Tech Guys, was recently out west at one of those fancy schmancy high-ticket price dinners with amazingly successful people, and in his goodie bag, he got a copy of Tony Hseish’s “Delivering Happiness” (Amazon). Tony is the CEO of Zappos.com, a wildly successful online merchant who started with shoes and now do sunglasses, purses, and much more. Mike got stranded on the tarmac and ended up reading the entire book. It’s a good thing Mike can read!

When he landed in Florida, he called me to chat about a few projects and couldn’t stop raving about Hseish’s book. The word he kept pushing was culture and why that mattered. So, when it came time to get on the road and head to Florida myself, I picked up the audiobook and started drifting down south. The book was about 8 hours long, easy to finish in just a few days of listening in the car, mixing in the necessary Deth Lok and electronica to keep the blood flowing. I quickly fell in love with what Zappos had done with their company, having their employees become their biggest fan.

A few of the pieces of culture that really stuck out to me were the following:

  • Tony emailed the entire company when it made sense, and did it in a very candid way. He let everyone feel like they were friends, and that he was available to listen to everyone.
  • Zappos takes care of their customers. They don’t mess around – literally offering the customer the ability to order 5 pairs of shoes in different sizes, trying them on in their own home, and giving the unwanted sizes and styles free shipping back to the warehouse. This is NOT the most profitable thing they could do on the front end, is it?!
  • The managers took care of the Zappos employees when there were issues with their family. Heck, Zappos even catered a funeral for one of their employees, just to help and support them.
  • Zappos is a fun place to work. The cubicles people work in look like a creative hurricane aftermath. There are shoes, pictures, toys, whatever people want — all over their cubes. That’s real self expression, and it made people love going to work.
  • There’s a full library of great books for the employees to take and read. Hundreds of copies of important books that are totally unaccounted for. There was no measured ROI on this, but it was in the CULTURE.
  • Finally, Zappos lets all their employees Tweet about the company without censorship. They want all employees to be given free will and access to post when and how they want.

Needless to say, Zappos kicks some serious ass when it comes to how they treat their customers AND their employees.

The first thing that Mike did to our team was to instate a rule that we all affectionately call Rule 34C-1. Rule 34C-1 states that if you identify anything that should be in place and isn’t, that it’s your job to get it done. This includes the Techs saying they don’t like a naming convention we use internally, or that someone thinks a Project Manager isn’t communicating well with a client. It becomes everyone’s job to make sure everything is as functional as possible.

After a few nights of meeting strangers (CouchSurfing.org [where Mike and I met!]) in Charleston, WV, Washington, D.C., and Raleigh, NC, I ended up in Gainesville. My plan was to crash on my best friends couch for a few weeks, and pop down to see Mike and Marie in Sebastian. I setup my office inside the Starbucks downtown — NOT because I am in love with their naming convention, mind you. I never ordered a Venti of anything. I just would say “I’d like a Vanilla Rude Boy tea in a massive cup. And your bathroom key”. In their defense, the baristas were some of the sweetest and nicest I’ve come across.

While at Starbucks, I overheard some Nerd Speak from a couple of people waiting for their [Italian Something or Other]. I struck up a conversation and it turned out that they work for Grooveshark, an awesome internet radio site where you can add songs to a play list. I’ve used it minimally, but it’s still very cool. After some schmoozing and threatening to get my scone crumbs on their pants if they didn’t show me their secret office, I got a royal tour.

Sitting literally above Starbucks, Grooveshark has a cool office chock full of brainiacs sitting in front of computers, working hard. I asked my new friends all about the company, their profitability, if they wanted to give us their smartest programmers (they didn’t oblige), and their culture. The short side of the story was that they were quickly expanding, and were running out of space. In the months prior, there was a small room with an XBox and maybe a ping pong table. That was where people could go and play to get their mind off work for a few minutes. But, as they started to expand (because they kick sooo much ass with this site, seriously), they had to squeeze more techs in their fixed area. The XBox’s were retired, and so were any kind of play equipment. I asked if it had hurt the morale at all, and they seemed to think it didn’t.

After I left the office and headed back to the Celestial Dollars, I thought about what they were doing, how cool they were, and how their company is a lot like Tech Guys. I realized that their team was very similar to us, but different. They had techs working full time in an office building. We have techs working across the globe, on their own time, getting projects done. They were growing so fast that they had to sacrifice play and postpone the development of culture, just to keep up with their ever increasing fan base.

Aaaaaaaaaaand let’s jump back in time, to September of this year. I was hanging out with a friend in Tempe, and he had met the owners of InfusionSoft a few weeks past. He realized that the company was only a few miles away, and just went over, unannounced. When I came to town, we blocked off an afternoon to head over there so I could get the real InfusionSoft experience.

Their office building is big, with 30 or 40 foot ceilings. There are chairs at the front, next to the receptionist, but no walls blocking the employed brains from us. The CEO came out, walked us to the popcorn machine (with a rack of 20+ toppings, including jalapeño flavoring), and we started chatting. I could see people sitting in a conference room, throwing around a hacky sack and answering questions. There was a huge TV screen on the other side of the building with the customer service complaints & praises being broadcasted. Everyone at work knew where they stood in the publics eye, and it was their job to make sure everything was right for the client. Similar to our Rule 34C-1, if negative feedback comes in, the Customer Service team gets on it. I asked how they gave out the tasks, and they said that they didn’t, that the employees just DO IT. Even if multiple people call and apologize, they think that’s better than just 1 person who HAS TO do it.

In the center of the office was a half-court for basketball, some balls, one of those balls-on-a-string-on-a-stick from Napoleon Dynamite, and other sports equipment. When I asked about that, our tour guide (the CEO), told me that the week prior, they were getting a bunch of bad calls. Nobody likes an F-Bomb in their face, and it seemed like they were being carpet-fbombed that morning. So, the CEO called a 30-min game of basketball to get everyone in a better mood and excited to keep helping people.

On their walls, they had the goals of the company, their motto, and inspirational quotes. Everyone was being engaged daily in the Bigger Picture, and they got to see how they fit in, and how they could make a change.

When I left InfusionSoft that day, I really felt like that company “got it”.

Now, last night, I went to a bar that I used to work at, while I was visiting my family for the holidays. A few of the waitresses told me that it had changed, and that things weren’t as fun anymore. The job became a JOB and not a place to enjoy, to look forward to. When I left, they were phasing out the Family Meal, a free meal for all staff at 3pm, during the mid-day switch. This meal let you talk directly to the chef, the managers, other servers, the kitchen staff, and most importantly — the bartenders! Any crap that was given the night before on the hot line was worked out over some mac & cheese, and everyone was full, happy, and at ease for a busy night at the nicest bar in town.

Taking away the Family Meal was taking away part of the culture. The ROI isn’t easy to calculate on something like that, but to the employees, it means the world. There’s one couple that has the husband work in the morning while the wife has the baby, then they switch at 3pm – and share a meal together.

Further, the bar looked to increase their cool factor by bringing in an Operations Manager. It’s very possible that it was needed, but the way that it was handled left for some room for improvement. It became just another level of bureaucracy that everyone had to work through.

All 3 of the companies I mentioned, (the bar, Grooveshark and InfusionSoft) are the top in their industry. They are ahead of the game with innovation and their marketing is killer. Take, for example, Peter Drucker’s quote:

“Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.”

He is absolutely right — Innovation and Marketing produce the most customers. But culture … culture is the missing piece that keeps the customers there, the employees there, and the innovation happening at a record rate. Major organizations, like Google and Apple, offer fun and intense work environments that push people to be creative, to innovate. But, like InfusionSoft, they also have an internal culture that keeps people engaged in their job.

So, here’s my New Years charge for you — If I gave you $10,000,000 right now, what would you do differently in your life? Would you quit your job? My guess is that if you don’t have the culture in place that supports you, that excites and challenges you, that you’d leave your job and go find it. Maybe you were lucky and your company already had a great culture figured out before they hired you — awesome! But if you’re like a lot of people today who fear going to work Monday, bitch and groan about y0ur lack of importance in the Bigger Picture, and you can’t get along with your co-workers, then I encourage you to adopt Rule 34C-1 yourself. Make change. It’s not going to come easy, but it HAS to happen.

Download and listen to “Tribal Leadership”. It’s a free book that Tony Hseish from Zappos introduces, written by Dave Logan, John King and Halee Fischer-Wright. See where your company fits in the different stages of evolution. Take their survey and see how you rank. I think Tech Guys operates in a Stage 4 part of the time and Stage 5 the rest.

I’d love to hear about your company, its culture, and how your making sure you’re making your company a bitching place to work at. Add to the comments below!