Episode 275: How Team Work & Play Drive Innovation (Lessons From Our Offsite)

So, Mark, when we were faced with that challenge of what can we do in person that we can't do over Zoom, that. That threw us for a little bit, didn't it?

Yeah, Yeah. I think it was really hard. And to be honest, I think coming up with the schedule is by far and away the most stressful part of putting this event on. It's not coordinating travel, it's not coordinating what we're going to do at night, it's not coordinating where people are going to stay. All of that stuff is obviously stressful to some extent. But coming up, the schedule was. Was really difficult, and I think it was because we've recognized in this whole, like, Zoom world that we live in that a lot of what we do as a team can be done as well, if not better, via Zoom. Right. And I think that's. That created the stress because when we were putting together the schedule for In Person experience, we're competing with what Zoom can do, in many cases, better.

Yeah.

So it was, how do we hold ourselves to this different standard?

Yeah.

And, and I think, I think that was challenging. But I'm, I will say that the entire team came up with just such a great structure and, and, and a format, and we'll get into specifically what we did in just a moment. But in terms of how it is that we really challenged ourselves at every part of the schedule and said, could we do this better on Zoom? And the answer was yes, then we wouldn't do it.

Right. Right. As I mentioned in the intro, we're not going to go through the whole agenda. We're just going to share what's really important because we learned a lot. So anytime we learn a lot, we're like, well, how can we share this with the community so that others that might be trying to do the same thing can learn from it? So we kind of had three main quadrants. We had work, which were presentations by senior management, each respective area. So we kept those to 10 minutes each. But this covered everything from marketing to sales to development. And 10 minutes is a fast presentation, especially when you got several VPs. Then we had brainstorming activities. So those were like team engagement activities. Like, we had a values workshop, which we'll talk about in a minute, and we had a hackathon, which we'll talk about in a minute. And then we had what I call play. Now, I want to stress to me, play is in the sense that shoe dog Phil Knight would say he wanted a. He wanted to build a business that was built around play, and he meant Everything that, that encompasses, like challenging people, not just relaxing and playing on the playground, literally playing like the, the terrible basketball game that we'll, we'll probably end up talking about.

Oh, it wasn't terrible. It wasn't terrible. Okay, so scheduled time.

So we had scheduled time for play and this was different for us because typically we've scheduled meetings back to back, meetings back to back, and they were just meetings on top of meetings on top of meetings. But this time we l spent time hiking, volleyball, swimming, Jacuzzi. It was all participatory like it was, it wasn't mandatory, it was highly recommended. And virtually everyone participated in this. So those were the three, three things. Work, brainstorming, and play. I'm going to pause for thoughts. What are your thoughts as we structured around those big three things?

Well, I think to go back to what we were talking about before, what was stressful about this is that in the past I think we've had this mindset that we're bringing people together at a great expense. Yeah, Expensive. And so when people are all coming together, let's wring out every piece of value that we can get. And the reality is that while past experiences I think have been positive, I think people have left exhausted. And I still think people left this event exhausted, but hopefully in a way that felt different, more enriching or more positive. And so by having large chunks of the event that were non presentation based, that were playful or that were participatory or that were really collaborative was a departure from what we've done in the past where I think we felt in the past that we've had so much information to communicate. Well, let's communicate it while everyone's in person. Yeah. And, and, and so that was a little, that was that, that felt that I think the risk that we were running in, in planning it that way is that the event was not going to be as quote unquote productive and that the concern is that people would leave and go, well, that hq we just played volleyball, like what the heck? And the reality is that it couldn't have been further from, from, from, from that. And I think that by dividing it into those three areas, people left enriched. They left feeling as though they were closer to their colleagues, many of whom who hadn't met each other before. And that I think probably most importantly, we all felt that we were coming together around solving common problems, you know, whether they were problems or opportunities around company culture, values or business problems that we were looking to solve in, you know, with our hackathon. And. And that to me felt like a really special recipe.

Yeah. Something that we have done through our events is place and context is really, really important. It's always been an important part. And when we go through the hotel selection for SKU Con or SKU Camp, what we have learned is that once we center on the right property, we then begin to build the agenda around it. So for folks that are trying to plan their own events and things, that's something that was really important in the pre planning stages because the particular place we stayed at, it was. How shall I call this? We kept joking and referring to it as severance because it was like stuck in this 1980 corporate resort thing, which sounds terrible, but it wasn't. It wasn't because it wasn't so resorty that it was like bougie and egalitarian. You didn't feel out of place. And yet it wasn't. So, you know, it wasn't. It wasn't dilapidated either. It was somewhere in between. And it was funny because it looked like a corporate structure. But the funny thing is that they had massive hiking areas around it. It had a little basketball court, it volleyball. It had all these other activities. So the context from which we could create sort of this canvas of an. Of an agenda was fun.

Yes. And what I love about it is that I think our crew rolled in and I don't think this venue had ever seen anyone like us before. Right. Because we're not really corporate, but we're also not this little startup either. Right. So you're kind of coming in with a decent number of people.

Yeah.

That are really well experienced in coming together and producing events, but aren't necessarily there for the bank strategic summit. Right, right. And. And so I think that. I think it really worked well and we felt really comfortable.

Yeah.

But it ultimately worked. And I. And I give our team great credit because they rolled in and then just adjusted. Yeah.

To.

To where we were at. Yeah. Yeah.

You can tell that they had. They don't entertain a lot of folks like us because when we. Aaron1 found this basketball court way down in the bowels of this place where if you walked down there, you thought you were going to get murdered. Like it was really down in the basement kind of thing.

And the court itself was pretty sketchy

compared to the rest of the property. But when I went to go talk to the guy about, you know, getting air in the balls or doing something, you know, it's. It's. He said, oh, wow, we've never had a full team. We haven't had a full team play on that court in a year. Here we are, man. So anyways, during our meeting, Mark, there were three things that happened that I think are worth sharing with others that were helpful to us and our team that you may want to consider as something as you structure your meeting. There was kudos, which has always now become an annual part of our meeting. There were values and there was a hackathon. Do you want to explain the kudos? It's real simple, but, but it's. We did it twice, twice in a row and two times in a row in our meetings and it was beautiful.

So this was an experience that Catherine and I had had when we were counselors at a summer camp many, many years prior. And it was at a staff meeting where there was a kudos box where people would go around and they would write a nice note about a fellow camp counselor and then it would be read or many of them would be read throughout the evening. And it was just a great feel good way of kind of closing out the day. And so we, we've started applying this to our common SKU HQs. I think we started doing it at our last one in December. And the same concept, right? Everyone's given these four by six sticky notes and they have, you know, 10, 15 minutes to go and write as many kudos as they want to a variety of different team members. And they can sign it or it can be anonymous. And it's just recognizing the great contribution that a colleague has made or like something they've done that's notable and very, very simple concept. And then they were all stuck up on the wall and was sort of this beautiful multicolored art project at the end and there was no more room for us to fit, fit these kudos on the wall. And then Sam, who was leading the exercise, read out, you know, maybe 25% of them. And you know, people were clapping and smiling and it was great. And then afterwards, everyone then came and then just went up kind of like an art exhibit and just read everything that everyone had to say. And to me it was a great leveling. And I'll use that word in a lot of the other exercises that we did. But it was this great way of being able to uncover all the great things that so many of the team members do. And it's not just, oh, Bobby did something great and Bobby, you're high profile and everyone knows that you're great. But a new colleague that joined say two, three months ago, and they've already started making an Impact for them to have kudos and for everyone else to see or what one particular person on the sales team or the dev team that may be newer to the organization like that, to me was this great leveling of the playing field and just it was such a wonderful way of spending the time. And to go back to what we were talking about before, maybe a more business oriented approach might have said, well, you know, in that 45 minutes, we could have probably spent time reviewing our strategy or reviewing our sales forecasts or something more business oriented.

Right, right.

And why would you do something like this that's kind of fluffy and touchy feely and what a waste of time. And I feel it was the exact opposite. Yeah.

And it, you know, you might have a tendency to go, well, would that really work? Well, people, it was fun. People had a blast. And of course they wrote funny things on as well. I want to say this too, that

you wrote a nice note to me there, Bobby. I appreciate it.

Yeah, yeah.

That's a rarity.

Well, yeah, I want to say this too, that the makeup of our team, I think a lot of folks embrace our brand and see it as a very extroverted team. But really, you think about what a software company does. We have a lot of introverts, like on our development team and our ambiverts that are sort of introverts, extroverts. So when you think about it, you know, we're not all just gregarious people can't wait to talk. And so it was. We didn't have the challenge of people not wanting to speak up or not wanting to participate or do anything. So that was really refreshing. The other thing that we did was a values exercise. I thought this was incredible. Martha, our head of hr, did two exercises. One was called a brain cyclone exercise. There were three rooms and in each room was a board that had on it three things. In room one, we were supposed to fill in the blank. In room one, it was we are blank. It was written on the board, we are blank. These are qualities and attributes we already possess that make us who we are. In room two, we believe in blank things we would never compromise on even if it meant easy success. And room three was we should blank qualities or attributes we need to have to get to the next level and realize our vision. So she had pins and stacks of post it notes. We were divided into three groups and we rotated through these on a timer. And it was fun. It was like sort of. It was, it was a fascinating way to sort of extract information from People, you were supposed to write as many responses as you could. And again, the boards were full of these kinds of things. And what we're doing here is, of course is crowdsourcing this values experience. The second story exercise we had was also values based and it was on storytelling. It was a pick a story. You partnered up with one person, pick a story that feels like best encapsulates your overall experience of Commons Q in our culture, and turn to the person beside you and tell that story. First you had to write it, then you had to tell it just real fast. You had to like shorthand. But it was rich, it was really fascinating. And you mentioned something really important, leveling. And I call it like we're an anti hierarchical company. Right. Because you. It didn't matter what your title was, it didn't matter how long you've been at the company. We had folks, we had one employee that was their day one. That was their day one.

Crazy.

And so it was fun. Anyways, I'll pause and let you comment on the values.

Well, I think much like the kudos that everyone's contribution was equal, whether it was coming from me, who's been at. Or Catherine, who's been at the company since day one. And obviously we have a useful experience, but our experience and our input was exactly equal to that of as you say, when Caitlin, day one of the organization or folks that had been here for just a year or two. And I think that that, that was really eye opening and I don't think that we would have necessarily known how powerful it was until we actually went through it. Because I think in talking about it in advance, hence the stress, we're like, this could be seen as a waste of time or it could be seen as fluffy, as we say. And it couldn't have been more the opposite in terms of people were almost upset that the, the time had run its course. Right. Wanted more time to be able to put more ideas out. And, and that to me was. Was really refreshing and exciting to see.

Yeah, the reason I loved it too is I always say that culture is the person next to you. And so this got that perspective of each one up on the board. And of course what we're doing is taking all of those comments and assimilating those into what's similar and rises to the top. The third big thing that we did, I think was we did a hackathon. Now, Mark, you want to explain this? This was a lot of fun.

Well, you know what? Before we get to the hackathon and I'm really excited to talk about it. I wanted to highlight a conversation and ask you to share the conversation you had had with Robert Cathro Oliver, who is one of our original developers, been on our founding team for quite some time. And the two of you got into really a really interesting conversation about culture and technology and which one you can rebuild more easily than the other. And you might be able to do more justice to the story and just being able to. Yeah, tell us what, what he said, which I thought was interesting.

As a matter of fact, I'm going to share both of our stories because I have the luxury of doing that right now because I think it was really important exercise for both of us. And it was kind of vulnerable, telling a story that sort of represents your experience at the company. And so I turned to Robert and I shared this story, learned something new. Like, right now, the AI race is rife with threats about job security. And after a few weeks of angst and hand wringing and despair, I had to pause and ask the truth about our company. Do I face a threat or do I face an opportunity? And because I feel our values are so strong and rooted in respect and innovation, I realize that everything tech feels like a threat on the horizon is an opportunity, and if embraced as such, can be transformed into a powerful positive force, both individually and for our mutual collective future. So it's kind of vulnerable moment for me to share with Robert that, you know, what, what embracing new tools and taking risks at a company is like compared to certain cultures. But I'm going to share Robert's story because it was really rich. Robert said, of course, Robert's been at Commons Q since practically, like it was day one almost. Right. So he's there in the early days and he said this, and I actually had to write it down because it was so good. He said, even though we are a technology company, we're actually a cult company. You can scrap and rebuild the technology, but you can't rebuild the company. And I thought, oh, had to, you know, content person in me had to stop him and say, say that again. Write down every word. But it's a great example, you know, of how the values of your company come from within those inside your company.

Yep. Yeah, it was. No, it was. It was well said.

All right, you want to. You want to share a little bit about the hackathon that was new and risky.

It was new and it was risky. And it was. And it was a big time block as well, that, that we put on the schedule. So you talk about risky in terms of whether it was going to drive the value. So full, full credit to, to Charlie, who's our VP of product. And I believe that Martha was also involved in coaxing the idea as well. So again, you put the challenge to the leadership team and this is what the, and this is what our colleagues came up with. And so the concept of a hackathon is quite simple. It's taking a time bound period of time where groups of individual teams will work on or hack a solution to a problem, to an articulated problem. And you know, there's obviously lots of problems or lots of opportunities I think that we're trying to chase at the company. And I think that the insight is that typically we as a leadership team will have lots of meetings about things that we want to do and opportunities that we're looking to invest in or problems that we're trying to solve or whatever the case may be. And we opened that thinking up to the entire company and split the company into small groups, groups of four to five. So they were small and intimate enough that people could really come together and solve a problem. And so we, we, we, we articulated a problem, we gave some context and then we gave two hours on day one for the groups to huddle in separate rooms. We had all these cool little breakout rooms where each of the teams came up with a name and they then came up with a slide deck and a solution to this particular problem. Their presentations were done on the day two and they were all five minutes, capped at five minutes. And we had an esteemed panel of judges that were made up of different people from the management team. And there was a little prize to, you know, make it fun. And I'll tell you that those four hours, two hours on day one and two hours on day two, the, the energy and the environment was positively electric. You know, people are stressed, they're terrified, they're excited, they're competitive, they're trash talking each other, they're, they're, they're talking to us and like, well, what do you think of this particular idea? And, and, and here's, here's the thing that I loved about it is that the teams were comprised of people from different aspects of the company. So we had dev, we had marketing, we had sales, we had support, we had finance, all these people shaken up and put into these different groups tenure as well. So we had some people that had been at the company for eight, nine years and then other people whose literal first day was when HQ started. So anyways, to finish this, it was so fun to hear the presentations and to hear the excitement and to get everyone collaborating and thinking, Thinking about how they can. How they were able to solve this particular problem. And I'll tell you, the energy I mentioned was electric, but the quality of the. Of the problem solving, the quality of the ideas from each presentation, it was very difficult to pick a winner, by the way, when you put all of them together, there was extraordinarily extraordinary value. Like, we could have done nothing but that, and we would have walked away with an incredible event. And so, at the risk of talking too much about ourselves, the whole point of this podcast is to talk about our experience and to talk about what we learn so that people listening to this can also bring in the same kind of thinking for their events. I will say in closing that Common SKU is definitely not a company that first came up with a hackathon. I'll give credit to many, many other companies that have done this. I know that John Norris at Promo Standards, a few months ago, they had a hackathon and there were great results there. So I think this is a concept to something that can apply to any organization in terms of how it is that they get different people, regardless of what position they're in the company, to come together and solve a problem.

Yeah. Speaking of, I would ask Robert, why do you think these hackathons work so well? And we sort of surmise together that it's because the roadblocks don't exist like you have. Typically, in a corporate environment, we're pretty fast, we move fast, and we make a lot of fast decisions, but you can actually break down a little bit. In this case, the hackathon just had this propellant energy that didn't have a lot of roadblocks. The other thing I want to suggest or encourage folks to do is that maybe you're tackling, maybe you're not sure you're tackling the right problem. Maybe you are tackling the right problem. The aggregate of ideas from every team. Like, we had a clear winner out on top. It wasn't clear. It was actually pretty close race. But we had a winner. But we also had so many great ideas come from every single team that we were able to aggregate this. We talked about those Monday in our management meeting. We're able to aggregate all of those things and come up with a solution that. That even individually, we never could have done.

Exactly. And Bobby, you've often said creativity loves constraints. Yeah, probably some obscure poet that I should be. I should be referencing, but I don't have that. But Right. Anyways, but the, you know, the, the story just quickly here. I think the. I think what we learned is that everyone has a voice. Everyone's experience and perspective, regardless of tenure and regardless of what, what role they have in the company or what department they're from, all approaches the problem from their unique vantage point. And that's not a revolutionary comment, but when we experienced it, it felt revolutionary. And the fact that everyone that was in the room that was participating in this exercise now felt like they had a stake in solving this problem. That was that, that to me felt revolutionary for our company.

Mark, this wasn't an inexpensive endeavor. I mean, how would you answer the objection that this was too expensive, that we don't have the budget, that it's not going to be enough of a net positive? And let me provide some clarification here. We do this event. We've sort of gotten into a rhythm now as a company where we do in person events twice a year. And we do. So we do quarterly meetings. And the rhythm right now is that first quarter we have a virtual meeting. Second quarter we have an in person meeting. Third quarter we have virtual fourth quarter around the holidays we have in person. But I'll let you answer that. How would you answer that? Hey, this is expensive.

So I think that part of this was experimental in terms of just going for it, right? At the end of the day, you can't do something like this on the cheap. You've got airfare, you've got accommodation. We put everyone up, regardless of whether they're out of town or whether they're local. In Toronto, everyone gets put up. So that way we really create this environment where people are living together for two, three days. And what I'll say is that the return was extraordinary. The return was extraordinary. And we would happily do it again. And the reason for that is there's no other way or there's no other effective way that I know where you can bring literally the whole company together and put them all on the same, all on the same page. And that could be fun. And if people can walk away and go, I am now much closer with the entire company than I ever was before. Like, think about, think about the business impact, right? If we're talking about, like, you know, sure, some people are listening to this. They're business owners and going, Mark, talk to me about the roi. And as a business owner, the ROI for me is having everyone who returns home that they're now that much closer to all these other colleagues and that they've got a More productive, collaborative working relationship in our business that can generate massive value. That's a massive value unlock. Yeah. And, and, and it feels crass to talk about ROI when you're talking about people and sort of experience and stuff. But at the end of the day, these are important, right? These things are important.

Yeah.

So that's. That, that's what I would say. And we're pleasantly surprised. Two things.

I want to give a shout out to Samantha Bridges on our team. If you're putting together an event, it's obvious that you need a point person who's going to be responsible for schedules and managing things and all the millions of details that go into. And I would encourage a lot of people. They end up saddling marketing with this. And honestly, our marketing and events team, we were, we were glad that there was someone else on the team taking the lead because we're doing events for customers all the time. So it was really nice. Samantha, big shout out. She was amazing. She was so attentive. And I know you want to talk about the basketball game we had.

I think you want to talk about the basketball game.

Yeah, I want to talk about it for a couple reasons. One, because I think it encapsulated something that I said in the intro that, that I shared and that is that when you can, you can cross this line where work and play become somewhat synonymous, you've unlocked something pretty special.

Yeah.

And so we had this full 5 on 5 basketball game where it was, it was developers and salespeople and me and Mark out there. Definitely a level playing field. Maybe, maybe Shannon and Aaron had one up on us in terms of athleticism, but for the most part, we were all about the same part. And it was an absolute, absolute blast. And there were. Nobody called a foul, but there were fouls everywhere.

Well, and you would know because you're such a technical player, given that you were a high school, you know, sat on the bench.

Right, I sat on the bench.

Exactly. No, but that, I mean the basketball, I think just broadly speaking, that whole period of time where, where there was the activities. Right. So the activities were everything from hiking to running to volleyball to bocce to playing foosball to playing pool or billiards or going for a swim. Right. Like that. That's what it was all about. And you know, not everyone wants to go play basketball. That's totally cool. But we had people doing a range of things and what was great about it is it was just creating these bonds and these connections with different people. I think about that basketball game like, we had representatives from every department and there was a range of experience and like, I was thinking, like we had one of our colleagues mujahed on our dev team who's amazing. And if I have this correct, I don't. I don't think he had ever shot a basketball ever in his life. And he's like, I want to go and play. And he's like, woo came out and he was great. Right? And I just think it was just, just, it was, it was a little janky. But that's sort of how we roll. Right? That's how we roll. And I'm so glad that we did it. And you know, that kind of. That physical activity I think was really, really important and provided a nice outlet for and, and people with a range of abilities. Right. Like, yeah, a company of jocks. Outside of you, of course. But, you know, it was, it was really great.

I thought it was a special moment. We were done with the game and there were three of us, the two developers. And one of them was. Calvin was the other developer who I'm not sure ever played the game either. And we're the last ones crawling out of the gym and we just hung out talking. I never would have talked with these guys in almost any other environment. And we just hung out talking. Of course, I was a dead carcass at that point, but these guys were still ready to go anyways. A lot of fun. We encourage. I hope you took away a tip or two from this because it was really helpful for us to go through this experience and as always, we like to share. Share it with you when it's going to be helpful. So, Mark, until next time.

Yeah, thank you.