Seriously, if someone outside of our small circle asked, how would you describe our culture? Pause for dramatic effect. Don’t worry, I’m not going to put you on the spot. But do me a favor and go through the mental exercise of trying to answer this question.
Since most startups operate at a break-neck pace with a concept to prove or a product to launch within a rapidly shortening runway of financing, company culture often gets shoved aside. This is a big, big mistake: Nobody serious about their business should put culture in the corner.
Leah Busque, Co-Founder and CEO, TaskRabbit
No matter what is coming to mind for you right now, I’m pretty sure our answers would run a very wide spectrum. The truth is, one of the signs of a strong and well established culture is that employees can describe it to others in a consistent manner.
I’m not saying this to be critical. There are plenty of startups that take years to establish and grow their cultures. I’m saying most of us have been together for about a year now so it’s time we made an effort.
A starting point
Startup cultures tend to evolve organically with CEOs leading by example and employees taking their cues from the CEOs. For Simplifya, this has been a murky proposition because Marion spent the bulk of the first year fundraising – a task that is invisible to the rest of us. Nevertheless, I think I know Marion well enough to take an educated guess at the first two values, so let’s start there.
Accountability
I like accountability as a value for us because it’s also a critical selling point for our product. You may recall this was the subject of one of the first posts on Infused! If we’re going to preach to our clients about the importance of holding employees accountable, we should hold each other accountable as well. Here are some examples of how we can demonstrate this value.
- Our standard of professionalism is above that of many companies in the cannabis industry. Down the road, we should spend time defining the standard. For now, I think it’s enough to understand that it’s high enough to talk about as a value. Being accountable here means that we help each other achieve and maintain this standard rather than fall to the level of others. We understand that each of us is a piece of the company’s image, so we represent the company in a professional manner and conduct ourselves with integrity in all business matters.
- If it needs to be said, we are advocates of legalization and sincerely interested in helping the industry grow. We have no problem with employees using marijuana. From an accountability perspective, we expect employees to moderate their use of marijuana and infused products just as they would their consumption of alcohol. See the point on professionalism above.
- Internally, we respect each other as co-workers by meeting our commitments. If you say you’re going to do something, get it done. If you can’t get it done on time, let people know when it will get done. We all depend on each other for something.
Communication
If you think about it, communication is a form of accountability. If I respect you as a co-worker, it will be natural for me to communicate to you the information you need. I will expect the same in return, which is another way of saying that I can’t hold you accountable for your communication (or lack thereof) if I’m not accountable to you. That said, communication is worth being treated as a separate value. Here are some examples of how we can demonstrate this value.
If I don’t know why we’re in the meeting, and you don’t know why we’re there, then there’s no reason for a meeting. It’s very important to me to focus people and to keep them focused, and not just get in the room and talk about who won the Knicks game last night.
Annette Catino, CEO, QualCare Alliance Network
- When creating a meeting, tell the participants what the meeting is about. Better yet, tell the participants the goal of the meeting. I have to say we are TERRIBLE about this! Just write/paste something into the invite itself. It helps people come to the meeting prepared, move through the meeting more efficiently, and leave the meeting with stronger action steps.
- Every meeting should have a chair, someone who is facilitating the discussion. Generally, this is the person who created the meeting, but it should still be known in cases where it’s not (e.g. when Mark is scheduling for Marion). It is the chair’s responsibility to start and end the meeting on time, steer the discussion toward the goal, and provide a recap that puts names on next steps. If you’re the chair, you don’t necessarily need to hand out a printed agenda – I think it’s a little “old school” – but you should have an agenda in mind.
- We want to be seen as a responsive company. Ideally, we’d all respond to everything immediately, but it’s impractical to set that as a rule. Instead, let’s try setting rules for when the response is late. Note that these windows can extend from one business day to the next.
- For email, respond within four hours. This is the most difficult channel to manage because many messages require other work to be done before a response is appropriate. If you cannot get that other work done in the four-hour window, you should respond with a message explaining when you expect to have that other work done. Proactively manage expectations, don’t leave people in the dark.
- For voicemail, respond within eight hours.
- For support (John), respond within one hour.
- For website inquiries (Rick), respond or forward within one hour.
- For text messages, respond within one hour. This is a tough one. I personally don’t like it when people are texting even while sitting in a meeting. If it’s that damn important, leave the meeting. So even though text messaging is a channel where an immediate response is expected, I want to give people the leeway to finish whatever meeting they are in. Lots of judgment here.
Next Steps
Hopefully, this post will spark some discussion about our culture and the values we want to embody. Certainly, we’re about more than just accountability and communication! In the coming weeks, I’ll try to facilitate this discussion, but please don’t wait for me to come to you if you have ideas (and thanks John, for your early input). The strongest cultures are rarely a byproduct of a top-down directive. They are built by the employees who live the values day-in and day-out. Let’s work to make this something that includes input from all. And as long as we’re talking about accountability, here’s my commitment:
- Blog post on Infused to start the process – done!
- Approach each of you individually to collect input.
- Use Town Halls as needed to brainstorm as a group.
- Continue to document our culture on Infused as it evolves!
Great post, Rick! And a very good thing to start piecing together (I’m not sure there’s any other way to do it). To your first point, “Accountability”, I’d add that it’s important for us to be good at documenting. The big reason being it’s paramount to our value proposition of operational compliance. We try to get people to document things, lest bad things happen to their business. Internally, it means a few things.
It will be how we move this ship forward as one single mind, by documenting user needs and wants and prioritizing them (something we’ve done much better), and documentation is the best way for everyone from sales to product to continuously have a full view of what our app is capable of — goes without saying but both web and tablet. Documentation is also key to helping our users understand how to navigate our app, and at the moment two great tools we have for this are the release notes and our ZenDesk (John’s been killing this). But above all is making a commitment to documenting (and equally important, sharing what we document) to make everyone’s lives easier.
There is also one major thing I’d add, and one minor one that could become major at some point.
The major one is “Self-education”. Education is something we all agree is needed for our prospective clients. It’s easy to say this is something we can exhibit for our clients, but it’s a lot harder to envision what that actually means in terms of engaging with clients (TBD). I think self-education is crucial to any start-up, but two reasons it’s especially necessary here:
1) None of us have ever worked on the MJB side of things, which means it takes a lot more to get into the heads of our clients, and that sort of self-education is what guides empathy and spurs new sorts of value within our app.
2) The inner workings of our app (particularly our content), are truly complex. We need to look no further than what Emily does on a daily basis to realize that. I believe we’ve ALL done a great job of working to understand those inner workings, which is to say we remain mindful of this, especially when it comes to instilling in others as the team grows.
MOST important for self-education, and where I think we can diverge from the cliche, is that self-education is more than just one of us saying “I need to learn something.” It is about self-education as a company, which boils down to sharing valuable information (and even “documenting” it, dun-dun-duh). Knowing how and where to share the information is a tough task, but it becomes easier with exercise and everyone being on the same page. Our product demoes (Dave needs to be better about those) and client feedback meetings fall into this, but there is even more we can do to make each other effective, and ultimately, more powerful.
And if you’ve made it this far, my last nutshell of an idea was “Automation”. Making technology work better for us, so we can take less steps (and time) on completing things we need to get done. On a grand scale, things like the soon-to-be-finished Question Import Tool is a good example of time-saving. But everyone does things every day that could be shortened by the process of automation (on-boarding emails, for example). I’m happy to be the de facto idea man for any one who would want help with this, so come and ask. And I bet Rick might even want me to write a blog post about that at some point.
Ha, you just wrote a full blog post in the form of a comment! Thanks for the suggestions Dave, insightful as always.
Great post, Rick. Communication and accountability are two things that many people struggle with in life, generally. At work, it tends to be even worse. I think it’s very important to include these values in our culture, and I hope that we will all hold each other accountable to following them.
I love Dave’s automation idea. We definitely need more of this – we are a tech startup, after all. Dave has already done so much to help with this on my end and I definitely appreciate that. Work smarter, not harder!
Really great post, Rick. Really great comments, Dave and Emily. I think all of us getting out in the field with Shannon or Brooke (when possible) will help us with self-education. Kudos to Emily for joining Shannon on a sales call last week.