Crossing 100 Employees While Keeping Your Culture Intact with Liveramp and Periscope Data

Please welcome Anika Gupta, LiveRamp President, Melanie Tantinko, Periscope Data Vice President of People Operations, and Caitlin Bartley, CRED CEO. Alright, I'm on. Welcome guys. Good lunch? Yes? Good energy? Hopefully you got a little bit more fuel for today for our session. So welcome, thank you so much for being here. We're excited to be here. Particularly passionate topic of mine personally. I know it's something that we struggle with, and I'm sure one of the reasons why you're here is because you are too.

So my name's Caitlin.

I'm the CEO of CRED. And I'd like to welcome these ladies to the stage. So Anika is the President and Head of Products and Platforms at LiveRamp. And Melanie is VP of People Operations for Periscope Data. So one of the things we're talking about today is obviously crossing 100 employees while keeping your culture intact. But it doesn't matter if you have 100 employees 20 employees or 1,000 employees, like, just keeping the culture consistent is something that we can all relate to. And I think it's something that's really important. So I want to dive into it. I want to give these ladies an opportunity to introduce themselves. And I thought it would be interesting for us to learn when they started at their companies, how many employees they had at that point, and then how many they have today. So Annika.

Sure.

So I started at LiveRamp about 8 and a half years ago. And we were about 25 people. Couple million dollars in revenue. Now we are, 8 years later, we're close to 1,000 people, about $250 million in revenue run rate. In that time, we went through an acquisition and recently we spun off as a public company. And so it's been a really exciting journey and the topic of culture is really near and dear to my heart because it's something that we struggled with, we struggle with every day because we're scaling so quickly both in terms of our customers and the number of people we have in the company. The number of locations. And so it's something I spend a lot of time thinking about as we consider how to build an incredible company as we get bigger.

I joined Periscope about 2.5 years ago, and I was employee 49 there. Today we're about 160 employees, and we're all based in San Francisco. And the Periscope culture is genuinely mind-a-mess-up. It's a fantastic place to be, and I spend a lot of time thinking about it.

Amazing. So we met before this to prep on topics because we can obviously go in a lot of different directions with this one. So we've broken it down into 4 key areas. So we're going to dive into that. So we're going to touch on hiring first. We're then going to talk about people. We're going to talk about churn. And then we're going to talk about just some tools and processes in terms of measuring culture. So diving into it, just kind of— I guess before we even dive into it, actually, how would you guys define culture? So what would you say if we had to say, what even does culture mean to both you and the company?

Yeah, so the way that I view culture is that it's everyone's responsibility. It's a living and breathing organism, and everything that we do represents who we are as an organization. So from the recruitment process and how we think about marketing the candidates, and also every single time we bring in someone for an interview, we have to protect the culture and also be very mindful that we should scale it accordingly and, and be very inclusive. And so every single person at the company knows that they can contribute to the culture either through the formation of an ERG or the way that we communicate and things like that.

Awesome. Anca, what would you say?

Yeah, I would say that culture can feel like a very amorphous thing, but when I think about culture, it really starts with and is rooted in our values. So what are the values by which we decide how we wanna be acting every day, how we wanna show up, how we want our employees to act, how we want to be treating our customers, and that's the foundation. But then it is what we do that reinforces that and how we act that reinforces that. And that's, I think that's how I think about culture. And when I think about reinforcing it and building it and growing it, it really comes down to how do we live by our values every day and how do we put those into action.

Awesome. And one thing you mentioned the other day when we chatted is just about how culture is about the people, right? So it's not necessarily about the perks or the benefits, which we can talk about all day too. But it is each and every individual of those almost 1,000 employees that makes up for it. So touching on hiring, Melanie, what are some ways that you guys have incorporated culture into your hiring process or your recruitment process?

Yeah, so we have dedicated swim lanes for each position that we're recruiting for. And culture is an integral part of how we vet a candidate. And so the person who's in charge of vetting for culture specifically asks questions around how people embody our values. So going along what Annika said, and they have to give very specific examples as to how they are kind and inclusive and positive. And we have 8 total values. And so they can pick one, whatever their favorite is, and tell us a story about how they contribute, or that they could potentially contribute to our company.

And just curious, is that then something that your employees have to reflect back on when they're considering that potential candidate? Do they comment on, or is that in sort of your debrief?

Yeah, it's part of the evaluation process when we're looking at candidates, and it's also carried through in the performance evaluation process. So every employee also has to give examples of how they embody all of our 8 values within a 6-month period. So it's really top of mind for everyone.

[Speaker:JASON M. LEMKIN] Yeah.

And just to add to that, one thing that we found is that when we were a 25-person company, and even when we were a 50-person company, we could have our CEO or other senior leaders interview every single candidate that came through the door. And over time, that's just not scalable. You end up spending like 50% of your time or more interviewing, and you need to do other things with your time too. And so what we've found is over the years, as we just are bringing in more and more people, we've had to tweak the way that we think about interviewing for culture and who are those people that are going to be those ambassadors for culture. So we put in place what we call our Talent Ambassador Program, where we had different people from different teams in charge of interviewing for culture. But even that process broke down last year because we were bringing in so many new people and those those individuals on the team ended up being bottlenecks in recruiting. And so we've had to go back and reevaluate again, how do we just get each person in interview panel interviewing for one element of culture so that we're able to scale the hiring practices and still look for those critical elements of culture without creating blockers and creating a slow interview process for the candidate.

So sorry, just backing up there. So what exactly did you do? You had one person that was responsible for hiring or interviewing for culture. Was that person a recruiter, or what was their background?

Was it someone that was on their team? Yes, so these people were people that had been on the team for a long time who, as a leadership team, we felt like they were able to interview well for culture because they were great cultural icons within the company. And so it was a group of 6 or 7 people, and the way we did it is after an onsite interview, We would do another phone call with the talent ambassador if we were going to make a hire, and that person had to, like, they could say yes or no. If they said no, it was still the hiring manager's decision whether to make the hire or not, but they had to carefully consider what the talent ambassador had said in their interview scorecards.

So we take a slightly different view on the culture ambassador at Periscope because, again, everyone contributes to the culture, everyone should be able to evaluate against it, and so it helps us scale from an interview scheduling process, which we all know is really hard to do. And you can— my recruiting coordinators can literally pick anyone in the company and have them do the interview.

That's awesome.

Yeah, that's really awesome.

What did you guys do to change that bottleneck about a year ago?

Now what we do is something similar to what Melanie is talking about, which is like everyone in the, in the company needs to be able to interview for a culture, and we ensure that through structured interviewing. We actually have specific questions and specific elements of our culture that we have in the onsite interviews we have individual interviewers interview for.

Have you— can you guys maybe think of for a second just a mistake you've made with hiring? And kind of off that, I mean, have you ever come across, or can you tell us maybe about an example where someone is a perfect fit for the job from technical skills, but maybe they don't fit into your culture and sort of what that conversation looked like, imagining if you're not the hiring manager, they're probably pushing for something, but if they don't fit the culture, like, do you guys have a specific example that you could share for that?

Sure. I think making hiring mistakes, it happens all the time, right? It's really— interview processes are imperfect and you're never gonna know whether someone actually is gonna perform in the role until they're in it. And we've certainly had challenges over the years where we've brought in people that have an amazing background but aren't necessarily a great cultural fit. And this is, I think, the struggle we felt was in the times where we were trying to bring in someone really experienced for a specific role or a specific function, and we wanted them to come in and take over from maybe someone who had grown internally in the company and was running that function but was maybe hitting the their own capacity for what they could do. And I think some of the challenges we had where there was, in particular, someone that I brought onto my team, onto the product team, that didn't end up being a good fit. And I think one of the good things is that you can tell if someone's not going to be a cultural fit on their team if they're just not able to perform. If you're not a cultural fit, if you're not able to gain the respect of your colleagues, if you're not able to really get things done within the organization, if you're constantly falling behind on your email and you have a culture of like, you know, people are going to be responsive, all of these things like end up impacting the performance. So it's like the, the person just doesn't end up performing in the role. And that's, um, I like— it may be because they're not a cultural fit, it may be because of something else, but they're inherently intwined. And if they're not, then there's probably— then probably the way that you're defining your culture is not actually what is leading to success within your company.

Yeah.

So I can tell a quick story about a time when a candidate made a mistake. Um, so this was a candidate, was a salesperson. They were like a million dollars over their quota. They had tons and tons of stories about how they've been super influential on, you know, the way they've changed enablement, etc. We didn't hire this person because he was rude to our receptionist. And also incredibly difficult to work with from a recruiting coordinator perspective of like flying them in, wanted like 5-star hotels, et cetera. I didn't find out about this until after the person came in, and once I did, I just said, "We probably shouldn't hire this person." And we made the recommendation to the hiring manager to not.

[Speaker] That's awesome. And Anika mentioned something earlier just about time is not scalable, right? So CEOs, I think it's really important for every CEO to get a buy-in from a candidate until a certain point. So at what point did your CEO stop interviewing people?

So he still interviews people, but it's very strategic. Oftentimes it's to help close or to help with equity explanations or to talk about the strategic vision or roadmap of the organization. Organization. And then he typically will want to be involved in director-level positions and above, because these folks will have a lot more influence within his kind of layer.

Is there a point though that he sort of got kicked out of the normal process? Like at what—

Oh yeah.

What size of the company were you?

I think, well, I was employee 49. I think he stopped interviewing everyone at like 53.

Okay.

We kept that process too long. We probably should have stopped at 53.

What about you?

I think we stopped at like probably 200. But yeah, it was— at that point, it's like you're spending 60% of your time interviewing. Yeah. And that's—

Well, Oren and Travis obviously made that a priority too, which is great. Okay. On from hiring, natural progression into people. So something I'm always fascinated about is like culture is not something that you can write on your to-do list, but we've clearly talked about, and you're all here because it's super important. And there's definitely no coding behind it. So how do you ensure that culture stays top of mind for both yourself but also for the company? Can you put a sticky note somewhere? Do you have a reminder in your calendar? What are some of the reminders that you've done to make sure that it stays top of your mind for day to day? Annika?

So I definitely— I don't think I need sticky notes to remind myself of this, just because it's so inherent in like, is my team performing well? Are people motivated? Am I ensuring that I'm creating an environment for the company where people feel like they can be successful and they can help the company move forward? And so I feel like that's just, it's the part of the fabric of what I do. But it's certainly like when you're thinking about, oh, your culture is on some trajectory and you need to be an active player in defining what that trajectory is. Otherwise, it can go in a direction that potentially you're not excited about or you don't think is good for the company. So one of the specific things that we do is when our leadership team meets and we do an offsite meeting, say once a quarter, we always have some topic around culture. And 2 weeks ago, we had an offsite. And what we did to talk about culture especially now that we're quite large, is we solicited a list of things from the different leaders in the company that they felt like were not working well. And we actually had them tie the things that were broken to the values that we state for the company. And so we collected all that feedback, and then we looked through it and said, okay, there are 4 or 5 themes here of issues that are causing problems. What are the problems in the company today? 'Cause clearly a lot of people are commenting on this. And for example, one of them was escalations. And so in our offsite, we actually broke people down into small groups and had different leaders look at these different areas. And I was in the group of escalations and we talked about, okay, what is the actual problem here? Why did everyone talk about escalations as an issue? And so we talked about, okay, this is the problem. We talked about what are the things that we can do to help solve this at a great scale, and what do we need from our employees to do that? And from that, actually, the next step is now going through each of these. We had a discussion about them with the whole group, and taking from that, we have a bunch of action items that we're gonna take away and put in place so that we can fix some of these issues. So a lot of these broken areas end up being the things that erode your culture, and take it in the direction that you don't want it to go in.

Awesome. You mentioned sort of you just recently workshopped your values, so tell us about some of the things that you have done to kind of instill that in your culture so they're sort of friendly reminders but not something that has to be written down or has to be really forced.

Yeah, so we're still pretty small, about 150 employees, 160 employees. Every Friday we have a celebration. We celebrate the wins of the week together because everyone's still in San Francisco. And an employee will get up in front of the entire company and talk about one of our values and how we embody them, whether it's the speed of our recruitment process or how they were empowered to create an ERG within their first week of working at the company. They can pick any topic that they want across our 8 different values and they can talk about it in front of the entire company. And we try to cherry-pick across the different orgs, so it's not just the same department representing all the time.

Awesome. Any other kind of things that you've done to make sure that they're top of mind for people?

We do other things like we have tons and tons of dashboards and screens all over the office, and we measure like our diversity metrics, things like that, and because one of our values is inclusivity. Another thing that we do is we have them actually rotate our actual values are rotating in our interview rooms as screensavers, so that way when candidates are waiting for their next interviewer, they can see that we are kind and we are positive, we are inclusive, we are transparent, et cetera. And then it helps feed into the culture interview, which is, can you tell me about an example where you embody one of our values that have been rotating on the screens in front of you?

Awesome. And do either of you have any interesting or unique things to maintain your culture? So I'm thinking of like celebrating anniversaries, or, you know, you sort of mentioned it with standing up. We do something at, um, at CRED that's like an MVC, we call it, so Most Valuable Credian, but it's their value of the week. So people can submit people, and we have a trophy, and they get a gift card. So is there any kind of fun, unique things that you guys do that you think kind of creates your culture, or some of the things that sort of make it?

Yeah, I mean, ever since I've been with a company, we've done an annual company camping trip. And when we were 20 people, it was literally going to a campsite. We had tents. We cooked food together. Now we go to this big— it's an old Boy Scout camp, and now it's an event venue up near Mendocino. And we bring almost the entire company out there, and we spend a couple days together and we play board games and we do crafts, we do different kind of relay and sporting activities together as well. And it's a really great way to connect with each other, especially for us now. I'm really jealous, Melanie says that her entire team is in San Francisco. We're now spread across 16 offices globally. And so it's really hard to sometimes stay connected. Connected to all the people, especially when we have so many new people starting in every location. And so getting everyone together in person and really being able to spend that time together, it actually— we found that it really helps teams work better together. Because now you can put a face to a name. You have a relationship with someone. If you need something, when you go ask them, you're not just this nameless, faceless person that they don't know, but they're actually willing to help you.

Awesome. Do you guys have any?

[Speaker:JASON M. LEMKIN] Yeah, I think that one of the unique things that we do is, again, I mentioned this earlier, but we actually have employees and their managers evaluate each person on the values. So they have to give a very specific example of how they've embodied the values, and then their manager can collect 360 feedback or in their own observation they can create that example as well. What's really interesting is seeing the juxtaposition against like what someone believes is kind versus what their manager thinks is kind. And then we have converse— really interesting conversations there around how to define it.

Can you maybe give us an example of like a kind—

yeah, I mean, I've seen something as simple as, you know, I held the door open for our security guard when he was delivering boxes. Like, that is an— that is an example of being kind. It's not something you think of every single day, but it meant something to that employee to to think to themselves, "Oh, I am embodying the values." And they were obviously hired for being nice.

Anika, some people have been at LiveRamp since day one, which is crazy to think about. Why do you think they've stayed?

I think it does go back to the culture. You're one of those people. Yeah, I mean, I've been there for a long time, and that's unusual, especially in San Francisco. I think a couple of things. We have created a company where people are really excited to come to work every day. They know that they have a lot of growth opportunities. We really show by our actions that we're willing to put people into stretch roles and allow them to grow into those roles while balancing that out by hiring experienced people that can mentor others on the team. And we've been really fortunate that our business has gone through a huge amount of growth. And so, that's created tons of opportunities for people, and they see the value that we're providing to our customers. They see that we're able to do— that we're building something great together. I think that gets them really excited. But I will say that it's not always good. You don't always want the people that were there in day one staying with the company forever, because people that are really good for a company when there are 20 people may not be the people that are really good for the company when you're 1,000 people. And that's the reality, and that's sometimes a tough position that you're in, is trying to figure out, do you want to keep— who do you want to keep in the company, and who are you okay with churning out? And churn is actually a good thing. You do want people leaving the company if they're no longer a good fit for the company. But you have to be really— if you're good about your culture, you're good about setting the vision, good about saying what's expected of people, then you can be in control of the people that are churning out and the people that you're bringing in and ensure that that culture remains vibrant and ensure that you're setting up your teams for success.

That's amazing.

We were originally talking about this topic, and we actually, 2 or 3 weeks ago, like, the topic was scaling our company with zero turn, and it was not a heavy debate because we all agreed, but a certain amount of churn is a healthy thing, right? So one question I had is like how you account for churn and how you almost— like it's a healthy thing, but it's not necessarily something that's positive when you're thinking about employees leaving the company, especially if you don't have that many. So Melanie, like employees leaving, obviously we're arguing in this case that some churn is a good thing. How do you plan for this? So especially in your role, like looking at reporting and forecasting, what are some ways that you can kind of plan for churn when you're doing quarter after— looking quarter over quarter, year over year?

Yeah, so any team that has more than 10 people, I typically will forecast 20% attrit. Um, so I'll put a backfill forecast into that, and so I can staff my team accordingly. You never want to be caught, you know, in October having to fill 40 positions because a bunch of people have left. So if you're forecasting for it, I typically will do, again, 20%. It's typically a best-in-class metric. But if I know, for example, through an engagement survey, the manager isn't doing very well, I might tick that up a little bit more or tick it down if a manager's doing really well.

OK. And do you have— I mean, is 20% your ideal, or is that just an average based on your past history?

It's just an average based on my past history.

One question while we're talking about churn is, I feel like obviously we're in this little bubble in terms of location, so maybe more for you, Anika, when you have different locations, not even around the country but around the world, what does that look like in terms of accounting for churn in somewhere like Silicon Valley where it's super, super competitive and there might be a lot more churn versus elsewhere? Do you actually account for things like that when you're looking at different offices?

Yeah, we do. We don't do— because we're large enough now, we kind of apply basic heuristics like the 20% to our teams in general and just kind of assume that that's going to be the attrition rate. However, it's very true that depending on the location that you're in, you're going to get very, very different attrition rates even within the US. Like, we have a team in Philadelphia. They're an amazing team. We have zero attrition on that team. And obviously, San Francisco, San Francisco's a different story. And then we have teams in China and in London and Paris. So we have teams all over the place. And it's definitely true that the attrition rates are different. What's also different is the time it takes to hire someone. So in Paris, for instance, the labor laws are such a way it's gonna take— you know it's gonna take 3 to 6 months once you open a role to actually put someone in that role. So all of these metrics we have to balance, knowing what the labor markets are like in different areas.

And then when someone leaves, what does that process look like for both your companies? So I'm talking about in terms of like the way you guys communicate it to your team. How do you make sure that your employees that are staying still feel valued? And sometimes that can be a hard-hitting thing. Sometimes it's for the better, but not always. So just how do you guys communicate it currently at your companies? And sort of what does that process look like?

Yeah, so this has evolved over time for us. We've done a lot of mistakes here. First, we didn't announce departures at all, and then employees gave us feedback that they didn't like that their friends were all of a sudden missing. We also tried to do it via Slack. That was really interesting because then you'd see like all these little emojis pop up at the bottom of it, and then there'd be like a happy announcement and then a sad announcement, assessment. That was interesting as well. Now what we do is we, we put together really thoughtful emails which are sent to the entire company. It talks about what a backfill plan looks like. It has a link to the job description to communicate clearly what we're looking for. We remind people that we're looking for referrals. And then we also just open it up and say, if you have any questions, please come see me or see Melanie directly, and she's happy to give of color within the legal boundaries of what I can talk about. We don't put that in the email, but that's like the normal MO.

[FOREIGN LANGUAGE] So yeah, we for a very long time now have sent out emails kind of similar to what Melanie is saying, announcing people's departure. One thing that we really do is we try to celebrate people when they leave. And so we celebrate them in the email we sent. We thank them for their contributions. Often their team will organize a happy hour or a dinner or lunch or something to celebrate the contributions of that person. We do exit interviews as well to understand, hey, what could we be doing better? And also to understand, would this person actually like to come back and work at LiveRamp again? And we've actually had people leave and come back. And I think if you treat people really well when they're leaving the company, that pays off in the long run. Because maybe they'll come back, or maybe they'll refer their friends. And we get a lot of referrals from people that have left the company over the years. And so I think what's really, really important is that whatever you do, you're treating people really, really well.

Yeah, it's funny. I feel like people always get so nervous to announce a departure, and they don't know how people are going to take it. Tactic that you guys used to take of like, all right, it's done and move on. Like, it's surprising to me, but it in some ways it's not, of how employees that are staying actually want to know and they actually want to support that person that's leaving. And Anca, to your point, we were talking backstage about the boomerang effect. So when somebody leaves, you don't know where they're going necessarily, and you never know when they're going to come back. So that could be coming back as a new employee, it could be coming back as a client, it could It could be coming back as a partner. It could be referring their friends. And so just making sure that that experience or that exit process is really positive for that person is super, super important. And I've also had feedback too of, you know, people are afraid to tell me that they're gonna leave, and you wanna make sure that they feel confident enough and supported enough that they can do so. So that's great.

And—

Moving on, I guess, that's kind of all covering churn. I wanna really focus on tools and processes for measuring culture. So we've kind of talked about it's not really a numbers thing, maybe it is a numbers thing. Melanie, you have referenced some dashboards of how you guys sort of not even just measure culture, but probably some numbers or tactics of how you can really just keep a gauge page or a check-on culture. Can you tell us a little bit more about what that looks like and how you guys have actually built it yourself?

Yeah, sure. So Periscope is— I'm really lucky because I get to get— I have a team of data analysts that help me out. And I can measure anything in the company. And so I can measure— I have dashboards that tell me, are we promoting women or men faster within the organization? And what the average time to get a promotion is within our company by manager, by department. I get to look at our gender splits over time. And one of the fun things that I just saw this morning when I was prepping for today is across individual contributors, our management layer, and our executive team, it's all the same split for gender. 44% female, 56% male. And like, that was really cool to be able to say, you know, all the hard work that my team has put together and all of the interviewer panels, it's been fun to watch that progress over time and see that split change.

Do you have like one metric that's your favorite or that's really top of mind for you to track?

For me, yeah, I think my favorite metric is are we promoting men or women faster? There's no right or wrong answer. It's just good to have a pulse on, you know, who we're promoting. Are we promoting the right people? Are we making sure that we're mindful full of gender splits and things like that. Because if we don't mirror what is available outside, then it's not going to create the inclusive culture, which is such a strong part of our values.

And that's a dashboard that you guys have built yourself?

Correct.

What about another kind of culture measurement or tool or platform that you guys have used to help measure, but also just to keep employees engaged?

Yeah, so we also do engagement surveys every 6 months. And I look at it as benchmarks for, are my people happier than any other employer in the Valley? I also look at all of the colorful commentary that people provide. I usually hide in a room for a couple of days and read all the bad comments and then come out with a cocktail in my hand or something. And then the third thing that I look for is just when I do different cuts of data, so I'll look at it by floors in our office or by managers or by age demographics or recently promoted. I'll look for glaring red boxes to see if there's a specific group that we're just not privy to that feels less engaged and what can we do as a leadership team and a management team to go fix that.

[Speaker:JASON M. LEMKIN] So what do you do? So you notice a glaring red box. Like what happens from there? You come out of the room. You've got your cocktail. Like how do you communicate then that back to employees? Employees to let them know, A, we flagged this and we've heard it, but also B, here's what we're doing to change that?

Yeah, so every time I launch an engagement survey, I re-review all of the promises I made as action items, and I remind all of the employees that based on their last engagement survey feedback, these are all of the 10 items that we committed to as a team, and I give them status reports so that way they feel like their voices are heard and they know that action has been taken. So examples of this were— or an example of this, rather. We had an employee who was really passionate about having a women's ERG. And she asked me in a session, how come we don't have a women's group here? And my response to that was, because you haven't started one. And so through that public display of empowerment and showing her that she can do that, that not only exemplified our culture, but it also created our very first women's group at the company.

Awesome. Dashboards, numbers— curious to know what you guys have set up. And then also, just can you kind of talk about the breakdown between, like, do you look at engagement per location or per office location, and how does that kind of all come together?

So we have a similar engagement survey tool that Melanie was talking about. We use a company called called Glint. And we also run the survey every 6 months. And I think the single metric that I find most valuable is that basically they aggregate 2 or 3 of the questions that we ask and put that into an overall engagement score. So you can see for— and you can slice and dice so many different ways. Definitely looking for us by location is really, really important to know where, especially in locations where we don't have a really senior leader on site, how is that location doing, looking at the comments specific for that location. Then you can see things like, what's really interesting is that for every question, it's scored from 1 to 5. You can see the 4 and 5 people are going to be the people that are really engaged or are answering positively to to the question you ask. The 3s are like, okay, the people, we kind of see those as the people we can influence, 'cause they're the people that haven't made up their mind. And then the 1s and 2s are the people that are the detractors or feel really negatively about that, and it's gonna be harder to change their minds. You still need to do something for them, but often when we focus on the actions, we're focusing on, hey, who are these people that are really persuadable in the middle that we can actually, we can make a very positive change? Change for them.

And then would you say you spend the rest of those 6 months actually working on those things and then that every 6 months is kind of your another pulse check? Like, is there anything that people can do between that time to measure or to check on culture?

Yeah, we do. So, in between that time is basically we say that it's the responsibility of every leader and the HR business partners partner with the various leaders to do this, to come up with an action plan based on the results that they got in their survey. So taking that feedback and then communicating to the team, this is what I heard from you, this is what we're gonna do about it, then providing status updates, especially once we launch the next survey to remind people, hey, here's why we're doing this survey, this is what we did because of your feedback, and this is why your feedback is so valuable to us. And so we kinda repeat that process. Last time we ran it, that was our first, that was the first time running the survey, we actually launched a set of internal employee committees that we had them focus on a few of the big areas of improvement because some of the feedback we were getting was so broad that we really wanted people on the teams to own figuring out, "Hey, this is what the solution should be," or, "This is what the set of solutions should be for this issue." Received really positively, and then they came back and presented to the leadership and out to the company what their recommendations were, and we followed up on those recommendations.

And at what point would you suggest to people that they start to look at a platform like this?

So we ran our first engagement survey when we were about 75 employees.

And what did you use before that?

Uh, nothing. It was literally just me hanging out with the employees and getting feedback from them. So I knew it was really important. We had used it at my previous company before, but I wanted to wait for a critical mass to have enough survey responses to be able to actually do something.

That's something that I feel like it's just the simplest thing is just communicating to employees of like, on the executive team or people in upper management, they probably actually spend so much time thinking through these things, but they don't think to communicate that back to employees. So do you guys have a cadence that you do that, or do you have a weekly CEO email, or, you know, how does it break down to you from different departments to your company-wide or your entire organization? Thinking purely in terms of communication, and this doesn't have to just fall back on culture, it can fall back on transparency of numbers or processes or major changes that are happening, critical updates. So what are some ways that you're communicating that, like to make sure all employees feel involved and engaged?

Yeah, we definitely think transparency is really key to keeping people engaged. So there are a lot of different ways in which we're trying to communicate information out. And one of the challenges that we face now that we're a lot bigger is that there's so much information that you could communicate. You can't communicate all of it because you'll inundate people with stuff that they just— that isn't relevant to them and they'll stop reading. But one of the things— so on a weekly basis, Our leadership team has a spreadsheet that we fill out that's the positive outcomes from the previous week, negative outcomes, and objectives for the following week. And we all fill it out every week, and then we actually take that information and we put it into an email that goes out to all the employees. So people can actually see, "Hey, here's what— how the leaders on your team are spending their time." So that's something that we do on a weekly basis, and then we do monthly all-hands meetings where We have a bunch of content that we'll go over, and it'll vary from month to month depending on what's top of mind and what's important to communicate out. Each sub-team on our team has their own team meetings, and there's information conveyed there. We have Slack. We have a lot of different tools, and then we try to be really thoughtful about what it is that we're communicating out and what's the best forum for communicating a particular piece of information. Some forms are better because you can engage with people and get them to ask questions, whereas others you just want to push information out. It's a constant work in progress, and as we continue to scale, we constantly have to be evolving the ways in which we communicate to our employees.

Melanie, we're getting close to time, so 3 things that people can put in their dashboard to scale culture. Culture? You've already mentioned gender, or yeah, I guess just gender. I don't want to put words in your mouth. So what are 3 other things that people can measure, put on their dashboard?

Um, I would probably say, uh, take a look at just the traditional EEO cuts of what your employee demographic looks like, because you can't improve if you don't know where you are, right? So look at parental status. When I joined the company, there was one parent in the entire organization. Organization, and now we have 13. That's great for us. Because of that, we've had to redo our entire benefits program because we didn't really cover dependents at the time that I joined. So things like that. So parental status is one. And I would also take a look at where's— another dashboard that would probably be useful is where's the bulk of your employees coming from, either by company or by location, because that will help inform kind of where you target your recruitment efforts and things like that.

Okay. Last minute, we're going to do something that I like to call rapid fire. So I've got a couple of questions. They're going to list off the first thing that comes to their head or just a 5-second answer. So some of them are easy. Don't worry, guys. Okay. All right. Annika, favorite or latest book you've read about culture?

Book about culture.

You can go if you don't have it.

I'm going to say Powerful by Patty McCord.

Okay. One thing that keeps you up at night?

Retaining employees.

Yep. Do you have one? Same. Uh, the percentage of your role or time that is dedicated to culture, if you had to just throw out a number.

20%.

183%.

Um, and then last, what would you do differently if you could do it again? You came up with this.

There's so many things.

I would hire people for the scale that we think we need in the future versus hiring people for the scale of the company that we are now.

Awesome.

I would have probably implemented managerial training a lot earlier. I spend a lot of my time unwinding bad behaviors at the managerial level, and so implementing that earlier would probably be my one.

Cool. Well, thank you both. This was great.

Thank you.

Hope you guys found it helpful. Thank you.