How to Create a Workplace People Never Want to Leave

Having true accountability in your culture is very important because the spotlight's on you. You're responsible for that. It's not going so well. Guess who that's on? That's on you. We put our accountability chart inside our LMS. We would update it every 90 days. When new people came in, they were introduced to this, they saw the accountability chart, they knew who to go to. And when we found those holes and those gaps, we would just fill them in. It really gave us that roadmap for, like, the way things are supposed to happen in business and grow. And having true accountability in your culture is very important. You know, J camp Another thing that it did that was really good is once you have that accountability in place and you're having these meetings, it allows the accountability to bubble itself up so that you don't even have to call people out because the spotlight's on you, you know, like you're responsible for that. It's not going so well. Guess who that's on? That's on you. You know, if you're in charge of our development team and there's a problem with development, I get to go to Jacob and like, what's going on? And when you're showing up to a weekly meeting every week and we're going through our to dos and our issues, they're either getting done or they're not. And you know, you're in front of your team and so, you know, what can you do? You know, you have to either own it or you don't. And if you don't, usually you're. Bye. Bye.

Yeah. One of the funny things about development in general on that note is it's very, very obvious when something's broken. If there's a bug in other areas of a business, it might not be as obvious where it falls, but with code, that's one thing that I think is nice about it. And.

Yeah, well. And in most areas of business, maybe to the CEO or to that individual, it's not. To someone, it's very obvious. And here's the problem. If it's not obvious whose it is, then it opens up a can of worms for another problem, which is there's nobody who owns it. And that's like who's supposed to. And then someone has to jump in. And that's the chaos that happens, especially when a company is growing and they don't have anyone to fill that function and you're growing. So you really have to have things documented. You really have to be able to communicate that to your team. We Put our accountability chart inside our LMS. We would update it every 90 days. When new people came in, they were introduced to this, they saw the accountability chart, they knew who to go to, they knew who was responsible for what. And when we found those holes and those gaps, we would just fill them in. And so very process oriented, which again, for somebody who's not a process oriented person, it really gave us that roadmap for like the way things are supposed to happen in a business as you grow. So that was really cool.

So it's interesting that you started talking about eos and your experience getting organized. Really, it seems at your company. It seems like what was really key for you at that moment was basically just turning chaos into order and having systems in place. But I think when most people think about company culture, certainly myself, it's organization and systems like you've described is not the first place where my head goes. When I hear the word company culture. I typically think of like happy hour with the team or something like that. So how did you, what about that aspect of your company? How did you build that part of your company culture? I'm not talking about happy hour in particular, but hopefully you know what I'm getting at.

I do know exactly what you're getting at because that's the result. People aren't going to go to happy hour unless they enjoy the people that they're with. And so at the heart of all performance, at the heart of any team being happy and smiling at happy hour, there's trust. Period. And one of the things that we did was we focused heavily on building trust. Because if you don't have trust, you have sabotage. If you don't have trust, you have people out looking for themselves. And when you trust and you build trust and it's like a brick, brick, brick, and you just keep building this trust, it builds over time. And everybody's got a different way of defining trust. And you have different levels and types of trust. You have ethical trust. You know, are they going to do what they say they're going to do? You have strategic trust, which is going to be, you know, do I believe that he can take us to where he says he's taking us? You've got personal trust. Do I trust myself? You know, and I think, you know, between ethical trust and there's just so many, so many different types and levels and people have a different worldview and belief. I have a lot of people that would say things like, you know, I'm not going to trust until you, you earn my trust. And here I am. I extend that trust on day one, almost blindly, until you prove me wrong. And even when you prove me wrong, I'll give you another chance. So I think everyone's kind of baggage their past has a lot to do with, you know, where they lie on that trust. But what we do is we brought everybody together in that culture. And I did that a couple different ways. One, EOS did that for us. It brought everybody together to work on a common structure. We also heavily invested in professional development, so we would practice as a team and do leadership practices. Not everybody showed up, but we didn't need everybody to show up. So when we did come together, we were transparent and vulnerable in a way that we tasted trust that led to flow that was so magical that companies just don't. They don't taste that kind of stuff before. And the connections were so real and they became so tangible that, you know, addressing conflict ended up just being a conversation. And so it just, it transformed the culture over time. But at the heart of all of that, with trust being the foundation, there were core values. And our history with core values and my personal history with core values was a real wake up call for me when I met this structured way of doing it, because I always put core values up on the wall. I always stood up in meetings and talked about how important the core values were and how to do the right thing and how to be. You know, I had all the. I had a whole long list of core values that I preached and preached and preached for years. And looking back, I think I was doing the right thing. But I know now it was going in one ear and out the other because people didn't care. And I think if you just stamp words on the wall and you parrot them out by yourself, that's what you get. You get people who think it's really nice, but like, okay, so what? And that's really what it comes down to. What we did in the exercise as a leadership team was we would, on a whiteboard, paint a picture of our best, most talented teammates, and we would describe those teammates as a team, and we would light up our whiteboard with all the qualities that we'd love to see in that person if we could duplicate that person. How many people can we get that have these qualities and what makes that person so special? And then we had fun wordsmithing things and just coming up with really cool, really labels that we all bought into and said, these are our core values. So, like, for us, we had distinct and deeply connected. Distinct because we knew who we were deeply connected, because we knew we couldn't do it by ourselves, and we wanted to be connected to other people. My favorite one was love. You know, I ran my company based on a way of being compassionate and empathetic, not only to the people that we were serving, but to my employees. And I wanted everyone to do that with each other. Cause I feel like businesses get so cutthroat and so focused on profit, and. And they lose the personal touch. And so I brought that back in, and so we had. Responsibility was our number one. My number one core value. So we came up with our core values, and the game changer for us was what we were taught to do, which was recognize, reward, hire, and fire. Right? So think about that. If you're hiring and firing, recognizing and rewarding people for your core values, and you're making that a discipline for your team, imagine what happens over time. It's incredible. First off, you have people catching people doing good things because they're exhibiting the core values. I'm giving people recognition publicly. And we did all kinds of cool things. We gave away pto, we gave away bonuses if they got picked. We had a thing at the end of the month where everybody voted who did the best at exhibiting this core value and that core value, and we made a big deal out of it.