Matt Vaadi, an HR leader and author of Ping Pong Is Not a Strategy, walks through how to build workplace culture without ignoring compliance. He overhauled his own hiring processes after realizing he wasn't following his own advice. The series mixes short clips and long interviews with concrete steps for small-business owners.
My name is Matt Vadie. I've spent the last 10 years running an HR services organization that helps small businesses to maintain compliance and create an awesome place to work. In 2018, I wrote the bestselling book Ping Pong Is Not a Strategy: How to Create an Awesome Organizational Culture. Culture is my life. I love the idea of creating a better place to work for employees so that they can have a more positive impact at home, in their community, feel better and live just a more thorough and fulfilled life because of what happens at their workplace. But the reality was I wasn't always following my own advice internally. Uh, some of the things I was telling my clients to do, I wasn't necessarily doing. A lot of the things in the book I wrote, I wasn't fully executing on. And that's when it dawned on me, I'm being a hypocrite. I need to improve my own processes. I need to tend to my own store before I worry about giving such great advice to other people. And that's why over the last couple of years, I've been on a journey to alleviate some of the bad hires we made, to make sure that we are following our own systems and processes and improve on those by finding more and new and better best practices to help serve our team and our clients. And on this journey in culture and compliance, I'm going to help you, A, get a little peek behind the curtain in how we go about doing things, but B, take some of that knowledge and expertise of the research that we've done to help you improve your own culture and compliance. And those are the two big things for me, right? So if we can create an awesome place to work, and we can make sure that our organization is compliant in the meantime, then we have a win as it relates to our HR function in our organizations. And too often I see entrepreneurs that ignore the compliance portion of it, trying just to create a great culture. And some of the early topics we're going to talk about are going to be right along that vein. Some of the biggest culture mistakes I see every day by getting the opportunity to peek in the window of hundreds of small businesses and see how they're run. So I hope you'll join me on this journey. We're going to be producing episodes that range anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour depending on the week and what we're producing. We'll do some interviews, we'll do some long-form breakdowns. I'm gonna keep it informal. I'm gonna produce some videos on YouTube that look like the YouTube videos you wanna see with 8 minutes and great camera angles and all that fun stuff. But at the end of the day, the goal is this: you have actionable information at the end of every single episode that you can go use in your organization to make sure that you improve your culture, which improves the lives of your employees, their families, and their community, and to make sure that you're doing it in a compliant fashion and you know exactly what you need to know. Nothing more, nothing less. Thanks for joining me on this journey. Again, my name is Matt, and I'm excited to go down this path with you.
