by Frank Gruber
When new hires inevitably ask how to succeed at Care.com, Marcelo always gives the same answer. You're already self-motivated and Type A, she says; what you should focus on is being an exceptional team player.
One of Care.com's values is being respectful, which includes a “no assholes policy.” Marcelo recalls times when she actually had to take an employee out to dinner, thank the person for high performance, but explain that the person was difficult to work with and things needed to change.
Over time, Marcelo also learned that believing in people means giving them the responsibility for their own culture. When employees complained that Care.com wasn't fun enough, the management team rented a bus and surprised everyone with a day of bowling. But Marcelo realized this wasn't the key to a fun culture. So the next time someone complained about lack of fun, she told them: it's your job to make it fun. If you want to go outside and play Frisbee in the afternoon, do it—who's stopping you? Marcelo and Care.com understand that you have to translate your values into action—repeated action. Traditions take time to nurture, but they will take root in an everyday office environment where your core values are front and center.
Remember that there's a difference between core values and company perks. Culture is not about perks; it's about values. Perks can be fun, but they should be based on values. For example, unlimited vacation days would make sense only in an overall culture of trusting employees or work-life balance. Just layering on fun perks won't give you a healthy culture unless they all tie back to the master plan: your company's core values.
Julia Hartz
Julia Hartz cofounded Eventbrite in 2006 with her husband Kevin Hartz and Renaud Visage. The San Francisco startup offers a platform for event organizers to sell and promote their event tickets. As of September 2013, Eventbrite had processed $2 billion in total ticket sales, had nearly 60,000 event organizers using the platform, and had more than $100 million in funding. Hartz came to Eventbrite from the television industry, working for FX and MTV Networks.
As your company grows, you eventually might hire or select someone whose job it is to focus on culture. After raising a round of funding in 2009, Eventbrite cofounder Julia Hartz asked, “What would happen if a founder of a company…focused on people?” She decided to do just that—and five years later, with a team of more than 300, she still does. When your company gets to a certain point, your core job is managing the people and culture you've built.
The Harsh Reality
We've glimpsed at what can happen when your company develops a bad culture, as was the case with Tony Hsieh's previous company, LinkExchange. It went so far as to cripple the motivation of the cofounders. If that's what the cofounders were feeling, you can only imagine what the rest of the company felt like. That's why it's crucial to grab the cultural bull by the horns early, laying the groundwork for cultural success.
But it's not always a smooth journey—where you have a brainstorming meeting, come up with your values, and suddenly everything is perfect. At Care.com, first-time CEO Marcelo once had to deal with an employee who posted a profane comment on a public blog post. In a Thursday meeting, she and some other executives decided that the comment went against their company values, and they fired that person. She apologized for the situation to the whole company on Friday, but she felt troubled the entire weekend. Something wasn't right; she had been too hasty. So she called the fired employee, asked the person to come back, and had to stand up in front of everyone on Monday and admit her mistake. She decided that the values of compassion and embracing failure were more important. It takes time to figure out what your culture is.
You may be tempted to hire for talent only and not culture fit, but you'll soon see the consequences. In a post called “Never Ever Compromise: Hiring for Culture Fit,” serial entrepreneur Elad Gil writes, “Every single founder I know who has compromised on culture fit has regretted it due to the disruptions it has caused their company (having to fire the bad fits, creating a crappy work environment, good people quitting, trust eroding between coworkers, product moving in the wrong direction, bad actors building power bases, misaligned incentives emerging in the organization, etc.).”1
“One bad hire can lead to a domino effect of more bad hires and decisions costing a company millions,” echoes Hsieh. That's when you have to fire someone. Sometimes it will be someone whom you don't really want to fire, but it has to be done.
On the flip side, there are going to be times when good employees leave, and it will negatively affect your company and its culture. Only a healthy culture will be able to bounce back from these setbacks.
Celebrate: Enjoy the Journey
I love seeing how various companies get creative with the sole purpose of inspiring and motivating their teams. Here are four companies that focus on group activities, employee perks, and celebrations to motivate and create a specific culture for their brand.
Eventbrite, an online events management platform, offers employees a kegerator, massages, table tennis competitions, a giant Jenga set, and an annual talent show. The company also offers Brite Camp, where employees teach classes to one another during lunch, fostering continued learning.
HubSpot, an inbound marketing software company, offers new hires a way to get their questions answered with an Ask the Founders Anything session (think: transparency and communication). In addition to the office table tennis table, foosball, and standing desks, employees can sign up for a Mystery Dinner, where they get randomly matched with other employees for a dinner out. Other activities you might find employees enjoying are brewing beers, playing board games, doing yoga, playing in a house band, and teaching others everything from origami to poker to whiskey tasting.
SpareFoot is a self-storage company based in Austin. Its values include a work-hard-play-hard attitude, transparency, and teamwork. During the process of onboarding new employees, the new hire has to tell the team about his or her favorite song, movie, food, and color. And in the office, there's a bar with the clock permanently set to 5 PM (hey, it's 5 o'clock somewhere). To foster continued teamwork, the company offers lunchtime classes called Eatucation and encourages team building through hosted events, such as a company prom and a boat trip to Lake Travis.
Denver-based TrackVia helps businesses build applications and believes in results, doing right by customers and colleagues, thinking like a customer, taking action, taking pride in your work, creating a fun and rewarding workplace, doing what you say, and being positive (finding a solution). Employees get gym memberships, coffee from a monthly mobile barista, and tickets to Rockies baseball games. All the while, the TrackVia Action Committee dreams up new perks that tie back to the company's values.
Final Thoughts
Company culture matters. Whether you're a startup or a large organization, the people who make up your business and the culture that guides it are crucial to success. If you want to read the Bible of company culture, I recommend you check out Tony Hsieh's book Delivering Happiness. You'll learn a lot about Zappos and how it approaches culture, and you may even be inspired to take a field trip to sunny, downtown Las Vegas and tour Zappos's headquarters, which the company welcomes.
Can't make the trip? Check out the Zappos Insights training materials and videos (online at ZapposInsights.com). You can review the Zappos Culture Book, which is an annual snapshot of Zappos culture with input from employees (good and bad). Delivering Happiness even spun out as its own company to take on helping other companies with their culture.
Tony Hsieh may have explained it best when he said, “A company's culture and a company's brand are really just two sides of the same coin. The brand is just a lagging indicator of the company's culture.”
What does that mean? A brand comes from all the interactions that customers have with the company, and how employees act in those interactions is influenced by the culture. If you get the culture right, you have a much better chance of having positive customer interactions. We have always believed that about Tech Cocktai
l—if our culture is fun, positive, and educational, then our attendees and readers will see it via our events and articles. If the culture is right, everyone wins.
1 http://blog.eladgil.com/2010/06/startups-when-how-to-fire-employee-at.html
Chapter 10
Celebration
Celebration is an active state, an act of expressing reverence or appreciation…Celebration is a confrontation, giving attention to the transcendent meaning of one's actions.
—Abraham Joshua Heschel
The startup journey is a hard one. It's a roller coaster ride where you can't always see the track ahead, so you just hang on and ride through amazing highs and lonely lows. On the good days, you want to belt out your favorite song at the top of your lungs while driving down the highway. But on the bad days, you might not want to get out of bed. You might want to give up on your company—or even worse, give up on life. I've seen it happen to startup founders and friends.
The common advice around startups about pulling all-nighters, sucking it up, and “just f***ing doing it” doesn't acknowledge the real emotional tolls of leading a startup. Starting up a business can both charge and drain your energy simultaneously. Fortunately, in my years of running various ventures, I discovered an underutilized yet extremely important tool that can leverage big and small wins and keep you and your team focused and motivated during the not-so-good times. This tool is celebration.
Yes, that's right—I'm calling celebration a tool. In this case, celebration as a tool means recognizing accomplishments of all sizes throughout the startup journey and sharing them with your team, customers, and community. You can use celebration as a tool to help yourself, your team, and your brand. Celebration can help you through low times and get you back on solid ground.
Company
If you think about the productivity cycle, celebration is a key part of it. You ideate, create, celebrate, and start over again. If you pause for a moment to commemorate an accomplishment—making a sale, fixing a bug, or acquiring a user—you can boost morale and energy, encourage progress, and motivate employees to work toward future celebratory moments.
By celebrating accomplishments both big and small, people feel recognized. We all want recognition and reward. When I was a kid, my parents recognized my good grades by dangling them from magnets on the refrigerator. Gold stars and smiley faces worked as motivators. But now, in the hustle, founders may forget to say thank you to employees for their hard work (since founders take their own long hours for granted). Building in celebrations can be a way to say that thank you. “Entrepreneurship is every bit as much about the spirit as it is about the skills,” says author Bill Aulet, the managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship.
Celebration can also send signals to your team. “By celebrating wins and milestones, you demonstrate confidence and a bright future. You are signaling that things are going well and good times are ahead,” says Lenny Kharitonov, president of SSTL Inc.
Brand
Celebration can also help your brand by communicating your successes to the outside world. Although I come from the Midwest, where tooting your own horn is generally frowned upon, I quickly learned a lesson that I live by as an entrepreneur: if you don't tell your story, no one will. No one cares about your story more than you do. So you have to be willing to scream it from the top of a mountain.
Help yourself by communicating about company wins, partnerships, and more on your blog, at events, and to the press. Let it contribute to your marketing. I think about it more as a continued story, a dialogue of your progress. Acknowledging and celebrating your company successes helps your story get out there, garner attention from more people, and be heard by people (investors, potential hires, or partners) who might care about your company. People don't gravitate to a void. They're attracted to what they know, and hearing from you regularly helps make any dialogue easier to pick right up.
Science
I didn't just make this all up. Celebration is a type of savoring, an emotional skill that includes mindfulness, full engagement in the present, and an appreciation of what's happening now. And it's been shown to contribute to happiness and well-being. Celebrations help prevent you from being deterred by setbacks and help you see things in the best light, which is another skill called positive reframing. People who can see the positive even in negative situations score higher on tests of self-esteem, optimism, and hardiness, and the technique is particularly useful for perfectionists.
Celebrations can also help reinforce a sense of personal accomplishment, which fuels motivation. If you look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, a theory of human motivation, part of our esteem needs are achievement and respect from others. In startups, the sense of achievement can feel rather low because it takes awhile before the company is succeeding. Celebrations along the way create little successes that help your self-esteem and positively influence motivation.
Daniel H. Pink, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-selling author of Drive, puts it well: he explains that rewards actually don't make us perform better in creative work. Instead, he says, we should cultivate intrinsic motivation. Having a sense of purpose is part of intrinsic motivation, and celebrations can help reinforce that purpose. Intrinsic rewards are the very rewards that drive us to work, to vote, to jump on the scale, and to smile at our reflection in the mirror. Feeling good feels good. Celebrating feels good and fuels the reward chain.
How to Celebrate
With all this talk about celebration as a tool, let's dive into what it actually looks like. We're not talking about popping bubbly throughout the day. That would make for an interesting work culture, but it's not really healthy or sustainable. Let's start by examining some instances of what you might celebrate and how.
As a startup you may hit goals or milestones, launch your product, get funded, start making money, sign a partnership deal, win an award, get press, have individual daily or weekly achievements, grow your team, or make it through a big week in one piece. Each achievement calls for a celebration, probably of different magnitude.
Internal Celebrations
The team at a startup called inqiri does something called Whiskey Wednesdays, where they go to a local Irish pub together. James Elste, chief executive officer (CEO) of inqiri, explains, “It involves the acknowledgment of the progress we are making and successes we are celebrating, whether it is a minor achievement or major milestone.” He goes on: “I think it's important to celebrate success frequently in a startup environment. It…keeps people motivated and builds an esprit de corps throughout the team.”
Chicago-based BrightTag, a tag management system for publishers and website owners, uses celebrations to showcase development progress. After each build, the development team bakes a cake, and the entire company gets together and celebrates the new code push. This gives the development team recognition from the rest of the BrightTag team with a positive, tasty reinforcement of the progress they're making.
With the mission to create products that help people live healthier lives, New York–based Noom celebrates the growth of its team. Every time Noom has to expand its office to fit more people, a celebration is held on Friday evening. The first time this was done, the employees actually broke down a wall with a sledgehammer. Another time, everyone ate lobster rolls. Creativity is key: you don't have to celebrate the same way every time. (From a safety perspective, I'm glad Noom didn't up its game by going in next with a wrecking ball, then a bulldozer, and so on.)
Bulu Box, a Lincoln, Nebraska–based monthly subscription service of vitamin, supplement, health, and weight loss products, uses celebration regularly by hosting everything from bowling night to a breakfast of cinnamon rolls and mimosas. “Anything that rallies us together, even for a little while, to recognize how far we've come,” say cofounders Paul and Stephanie Jarrett.
External Celebrations
Externally you can also use celebration as a tool to connect with the community, press, invest
ors, potential new employees, and more.
Paul Singh
Paul Singh is a former partner at the 500 Startups accelerator and founder of Disruption Corporation, which offers tools, research, and advice to startups and investors. Disruption Corporation includes the Crystal Tech Fund, a fund for postseed startups; Indicate.io, which allows investors to research startups and track their portfolios; and Dashboard.io, which allows founders to compare their metrics to their peers', based in Crystal City, Arlington, Virginia, an urban neighborhood overlooking Washington, DC and National Airport. Indicate.io tracks more than 65,000 startups and more than 70 portfolios. Singh was a serial entrepreneur and did consulting through a company he called Results Junkies.
Lauren Thorp (the wife of our VP of Marketing and Community Development, Justin Thorp) was working full-time in finance while creating Umba. Umba started as a monthly subscription service so that handmade goods lovers like herself could easily discover great items while learning about the designers who made the products.
Taking Justin's advice, Thorp reluctantly pitched Umba at a local tech meetup in Washington, DC. And the response was a wake-up call for her. The interest and support from the community made her realize that her passion-fueled side project really had potential. Not only that, but investor Paul Singh was in the audience and invited her to the 500 Startups accelerator that summer. Without taking a moment to externally pause, share, and celebrate, she may have never gotten the attention of an investor and moved her passion project to a full-time job, catapulting her into her startup journey.