Team-building Tactics

Give your new teammates a uniform. Give them a uniform. This may sound like a ridiculously tactical nit, and I will tell you, I think it's one of the most powerful things done by any team because again, as an entrepreneur, think of what you are doing is amassing a group of people and getting them into forging them into being a team that is going to go take some hill together, right? Think about the greatest teams, whether it's in athletics, the military, and you pick your walk of life where you'd see a team. It is highly common that they have a uniform. And so at SendGrid, we serve a lot of. We go to lots of hackathons. We serve literally hundreds of thousands of developers around the world. We hand out these blue SendGrid T shirts. I think it's like something like 10,000 a year to developers. But these blue hoodies, Jose, one of our founders, is wearing this blue hoodie is given to each new employee and only to employees. Those hoodies are like these prized possessions and they show up on your very first day. You get your laptop, your key card and your blue hoodie, and you walk into any of our offices and you'll see on the coat rack lots and lots of these hoodies. It's a uniform. They feel part of something that is larger than themselves, right? As they say, like in athletics, you'll often hear great coaches say, you play for the name on the front of the jersey, not on the back. It's not about your name, it is about the team's name. That's who we play for. Creating that mindset amongst the teammates. And the business you're about to build, I would argue is critically, critically important. Building connective tissue is a catchphrase that we talk about a lot at SendGrid. It sounds kind of hokey. Again, soft skills, people stuff. I believe that there is no investment too large for us to make in building connections across our teammates where they get to know each other as people, as human beings, not just colleagues. We invest in things like this giant picture here is. You notice the beach in the background. Every January, we fly the entire company down to Mexico. In this case, it's Cabo. Other years, different places, but we get the entire company together in January, by the way. We do it again in June, and we have a full day, a day and a half, actually, of content and alignment, hard business stuff. And then we have a day where folks just hang. They're just by the pool together, they're going. And playing beach volleyball together, they're going, kayaking together, but building relationships where they actually care about each other as human beings. When you come back into the workplace, you now start playing for those teammates at a whole different level. At a whole different level, because you've got a connection to them that is very different. So we invest a lot of time and a lot of money in these things. And you go all the way down to 18 interest groups. We've got a wine lovers group and an outdoors activity group. But you create opportunities for folks to get to know one another as people.