7 Tips to Build a Strong Company Culture for the COO

One of the biggest things that I'm.

Learning right now from coos and listening to them and it's actually the reason we're even holding our in person event in September around building a world class culture. Everything that we knew about culture pre Covid has changed.

Everything that we assumed about how to.

Build culture has changed. Much of it continues and you're now doing it in hybrid or remote world. But CEOs and CEOs now are really starting to understand that it is going to be different and harder and they're going to have to spend time thinking.

About how do we actually get our.

People to know each other, collaborate like each other, work well together.

Not so much about how do we make sure they're doing work, but how.

Do we make sure that they're feeling cohesive and as a team because what we did before is going to be very different after. One of the biggest, I think, opportunities and biggest challenges that we have as executive teams, CEOs and CEOs right now is understanding how do we build a culture, a really great, engaged, productive company culture, when all of our employees are working remote. I'm going to start off by saying I don't know, I really don't have all the answers on this, but I'm going to give you a few things that I know are working. But I really want you to drop some comments down there with what's working for you because I think we as a community on this post can share some amazing ideas and maybe build like a little bit of an operating manual to help everybody else. So I want to get your ideas of what you're doing, what you've heard of that's working to build a company culture when all your teams are remote. So here's some stuff that I know is working really well every once in a while, like once or twice a week, have a one hour or two hour period over Zoom where employees just show up on mute and they sit and type away on their laptops, but you can see everybody around you. It's kind of like working in the office where you don't talk to everybody but you get to see them all there. Try to actually use slack to actually thank people and praise people and humanize the work environment. And CEOs stop worried about when people are wasting time on social media with that kind of stuff. They're doing it to engage with each other and we need to keep them engaged. Another great one is take a look at a company called workplay Jam. Workplay Jam will organize online super fun events for your employees, for you. I've done a few of those for our COO alliance members. And I'm not like the guy who's constantly laughing and having a good time. But I'll tell you, after doing an hour event where we were doing music bingo and some workplace trivia thing, I was laughing the entire time and a couple of my employees said they'd never seen me like that. Those are just some of the little simple things. But I'd really like to hear from you what you're doing that's building that amazing kind of workplace culture. Oh, another one that you can do is humanize your backgrounds a little bit. Have some zoom backgrounds. Change up this zoom backgrounds. Encourage people that when you're doing zoom events to throw on a filter and wear a stupid hat. Just have some fun once in a while.

I'm often asked if we really did have tours at 1-800-got junk of our offices. And the answer is yes. Every single Friday, we would have 30 or 35 business people, sometimes from other cities, flying into Vancouver to go for a tour of 1-800-got junk. The way it started was back around 2003, 2004, we, we ranked as the number one company to work for in Canada and everyone wanted to come and see our culture. And remember, we didn't have YouTube back then, we didn't have as much online photos, so people wanted to go and see that physical tour. And Brian and I could never really answer all the questions people had. So instead of us teaching somebody one at a time, we said, well, come on Friday at 10 o' clock and we'll walk you through. You can watch us do huddle. And it just kind of went on from there. And then two years later when we ranked number two to work for in Canada, we were literally having 30 to 35 business people every single Friday coming for tours of the office.

So in the old days prior to Covid, culture was often very much about your company culture. Your office based culture culture now really has to permeate across the whole hybrid organization. So if you've got remote employees, culture can't be the physical office space and the we room and the free lunches because they're not coming to work and they're not hanging out with everybody. They're not around. That water cooler culture is really alignment with your vivid vision. It's alignment with your core values, it's alignment with your bhag, and it's alignment with your core purpose. It's making sure that everyone in your organization is aligned with Those four things, almost like those are the four corners of your jigsaw puzzle. It's the alignment with that that supercharges your core values in the organization.

You're not just trying to hire people.

That fit into your company culture. What you're looking for is someone who really takes your culture to that next level. You're looking for one plus one equals three. So you're always looking for someone who raises the bar, and I've talked about this for years, that you always have to raise the bar with each new person you bring into the organization. Let's say that you've got eight people that work for you in marketing. That means the next person has to be better than at least 4 of the people in marketing. Whether that's with their behavioral traits, their core values, their energy level, the actual work experience they've got the level of drive that they bring in. Keep bringing on more people that are better than the average and watch what happens to the growth of your company. It's very similar to a sports team. A sports team would never just bring in the next person who fits in. They always want somebody who brings up the team in some way, shape or form. So you have to make sure that you raise the bar inside of your organization.

So now in the post Covid era, entrepreneurs are realizing, and their COOs are realizing as well, we have to build the strong workplace cultures, but we're not going to an office as often to have that company culture that we used to have. But the reality is most of the core systems and processes that build a company culture still work. If you're remote or if you're in an office. Culture is not about the massages and the free lunches and the perks. Those are perks. Culture starts with alignment with core values, alignment with vision, alignment with a core purpose, alignment with a bhag. All the right recruiting, interviewing, hiring, training and onboarding and leadership development of people. That's where culture really starts, is those things. It's the communication protocol. Communication top down and bottom up and laterally.

So all the systems that you needed.

To build culture, whether you were out in office, those systems still work if you're actually building the company remote. In fact, this September we have our COO alliance event and it's a two and a half day in person event where we're only talking about building company cultures in this post Covid era culture in your business.

Culture in every business is really critical and culture can actually be codified. You can actually create systems on how to create great company cultures. But let me kind of talk about how do I indoctrinate new employees into our culture. The first one is, is to teach them about the history, the genesis of how we got here. Right? The story, how did the founder start the story, how did the initial team build it? How did some of those initial employees build and craft the foundation of what you're joining today? So that's part of the indoctrination is teaching everybody about the history of of the company. Whether it's the history of how 100 got junk got started or how the history of how I started the CEO alliance with the first couple of meetings at a 10 bedroom mansion. Those genesis stories are key to indoctrinating people into your culture. The second is about your core values, really deeply explaining to your employees why the core values matter, how we live the core values in our day to day, what we saw in you in the job interview with our core values and why we thought you were a good fit with our company core values and how we fire people who don't live the core values. Really indoctrinating people into the core values is critical as well. And the third is around core purpose, really explaining to people why the business exists. Right. It's that Simon Sinek the why and really explaining the why. My why is to help entrepreneurs make their dreams happen. So my invest in your leaders course, that helps entrepreneurs because they grow their employees. My COO alliance helps entrepreneurs because I'm growing their second in command. My coaching, my books, my second in command podcast, even these videos all help entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial companies make their dreams come true. So everything is aligned with my core purpose. When you indoctrinate or teach your employees about those three things, you're building the foundation of culture and everything emerges from there.