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

Welcome to Skucast, the podcast for entrepreneurs in the promotional products industry. Skucast shines a light on our industry's best work, features maverick personalities, and discusses what's really involved in running a modern promotional products business. SkewCast is the official podcast of Common Skew.

In Phil Knight's memoir Shoe Dog, Phil is out for a morning run when the revelation of what Nike would someday become dawned on him. Quote, "Like all friends, I wanted to be successful, but deep down I was searching for something else, something more. I had an aching sense that our time is short, shorter than we ever know." short as a morning run. And I wanted mine to be meaningful and purposeful and creative. Above all, different. I wanted to leave a mark on the world. I wanted to win. And then it happened. As my young heart began to thump, as my pink lungs expanded like the wings of a bird, as the trees turned to greenish blurs, I saw it all before me. Exactly what I wanted my life to be.

Play.

That's the word. The secret of happiness lay somewhere in that moment when the ball is in midair, when both boxers sense the approach of the bell, when the runners near the finish line and the crowd rises as one. There's a kind of exuberant clarity in that pulsing half-second before winning and losing are decided. I wanted that, whatever that was, to be my life, my daily life. When Phil Knight created a little shoe startup called Blue Ribbon, now known as Nike, we forget that Nike was not the behemoth success we know today. Nike then was a scrappy, hungry, fiercely competitive underdog who clawed its way through a heavily competitive landscape to dominate in a way that was creative, energetic, and even playful. In this spirit, at Commonsku, we recently hosted a company retreat But retreat's not really the right word. It was a combination of competition, collaborative brainstorming, values-building, peer-to-peer gathering experience. And we learned a lot about how to bring your team together in a way that fosters ingenuity, about how to spark the most progressive ideas to help our customers. It included our own hackathon, values exercise, and even play. And as we often like to do with something we learned, we want to share our experience with you. Perhaps you are planning an offsite or a brainstorming session with your team. If so, we hope this episode is helpful to you. Hi friends, I'm Bobby LeHew, Chief Content Officer at Commonsku. Speaking of collaborating with teams, did you know that one of the biggest reasons why over 750 of the most successful distributors in the industry chose Commonsku was to unite their team through project transparency? What I mean by that is Commenscue is built for promo people by promo people. We deeply understand how difficult it is to manage complex projects between you and your team and your vital supplier partners. We understand that at the handoff stage, everything can fall apart, and without a streamlined process and a simplified workflow, your errors increase drastically, which creates unhappy clients. Well, you can say goodbye to the frustrations of order management and come see how to make business simple, and fun again. Create happy teams and happier clients. Check it out at commonskew.com. Now here's my chat with Mark Graham, Commonskew's President and Chief Brand Officer, as we share our experience building a customer-obsessed HQ retreat. And by the way, a few weeks leading up to this gathering, in one of our management meetings, Mark framed our upcoming team experience by challenging each of us: What can we accomplish in person at this event that we can't do over Zoom.

So, Mark, when we were faced with that challenge of what can we do in person that we can't do over Zoom, 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 the 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 with a 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, and, and I think that's that created the stress because when we were putting together the schedule for an in-person experience, we're competing with what Zoom can do, in many cases better.

Yeah.

And so I think it was, how do we hold ourselves to this different standard? Yeah. And I think that was challenging, but I will say that the entire team came up with just such a great structure 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 3 main quadrants. We had work, which were presentations by senior management in 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 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 terrible basketball game that we will probably end up talking about.

Oh, it wasn't terrible. It wasn't terrible.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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 literally spent time hiking, volleyball, swimming, jacuzzi. It was all participatory. Like, it wasn't mandatory. It was highly recommended. And virtually everyone participated in this. So, those were the 3 things: work, brainstorming, and play. I'm going to pause for thoughts. What are your thoughts as we structured it around those big 3 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, expense. And so, when people are all coming together, let's wring out every piece of value that we can get.

Right.

And the reality is that while past experiences I think have been positive, I think people have left exhausted.

Yeah. Right.

And I still think people left this event exhausted, but hopefully in a way that felt more, you know, 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 felt— I think the risk that we were running 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 then, the reality is that it couldn't have been further from that. And I think that by dividing it into those 3 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, 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 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 SKUCon or SKU Camp, what we have, uh, 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 dilapidated either. It was somewhere in between. And it was funny because it looked like a corporate structure. But the funny thing is that it had massive hiking areas around it. It had a little basketball court. It had volleyball. It had all these other activities. So the context from which we could create sort of this canvas 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. Yeah, but we're also not this little startup either, right? So you're kind of coming in with a decent number of people that are really well experienced in coming together and producing events, but aren't necessarily there for the bank strategic summit, right? And, and so I think that really, I think it really worked well and we felt really comfortable in that environment. Yeah, but it ultimately worked and I give our team great credit because they rolled in and then just adjusted. Yeah, they were open to where we were at.

Yeah, you can tell that they had— they don't entertain a lot of folks like us because when we— Aaron on day one 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, uh, 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 play on that court in a year. Here we are, man. So anyways, during our meeting, Marc, there were 3 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 we did it twice in a row, 2 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 Commonsku HQs. I think we started doing it at our last one in December. And the same concept, right? Everyone's given these 4x6 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 something they've done that's notable. And very, very simple concept. And then they were all stuck up on the wall and it was sort of this beautiful multicolored art project at the end. And there was no more room for us to fit these kudos on the wall. And then Sam, who was leading the exercise, read out maybe 25% of them and 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, 2, 3 months ago, and they've already started making an impact, for them to have kudos and for everyone else to see 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.

Yeah.

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 forecast 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.

So yeah, and it, 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. So, 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, um, did two exercises. One was called a brain cyclone exercise. Um, 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 pens and stacks of Post-it notes. We were divided into 3 groups and we rotated through these on a timer. And it was fun. It was like sort of, 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 these values. Experience. The second 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 CommonsQ 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-hierarchy 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 that would— we had one employee that was there day one. That was their day one.

I know, crazy.

And, and so, um, 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 was really eye-opening. And I don't 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 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 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 tell us 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. 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. I 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 realized 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 a 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. Of course, Robert's been at Commonsku 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 culture company. You can scrap and rebuild the technology, but you can't rebuild the company. And I thought, oh, I had, you know, the 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. Yeah.

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

All right. Do 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 a big time block as well that we put on the schedule. So, you talk about risky in terms of whether it was going to drive the value. So, full credit 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 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 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 4 to 5. So, they were small and intimate enough that people could really come together and solve a problem. And so we, we, we articulated a problem, we gave some context, and then we gave 2 hours on day 1 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, a, a solution to this particular problem. Their presentations were were done on day 2, and they were all 5 minutes, capped at 5 minutes. And we had an esteemed panel of judges that were made up of different people from the management team, right? And there was a little prize to, you know, make it fun. And I'll tell you that those 4 hours, 2 hours on day 1 and 2 hours on day 2, 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 talking to us and like, well, what do you think of this particular idea? And 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 8, 9 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 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 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 learned so that people listening to this can also bring in the same kind of thinking for their events. I will say in closing that CommonSkew 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, I think this is a concept, is 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 surmised together that it's because the roadblocks don't exist. Like you have typically 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 a 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 as 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 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 referencing, but I don't have that. But anyways, but the— sorry, 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 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 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 the 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, you know, 2, 3 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 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 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, 'Marc, 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. 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 things are important, right? These things are important. So 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 something like this. 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, 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 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. 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 a 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 blast. And there were— nobody called a foul, but there were fouls everywhere.

Yeah, well, and you would know because you're such a technical player, given that you were a high school—

right, you know, sat on the bench, right?

I sat on the bench, right? Exactly. No, but that— I mean, the basketball, um, I, 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, and what was great about it is it was just creating these bonds and these connections with different people. And 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, Mujahid, on our dev team who's amazing. And if I have this correct, 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 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 that kind of, that physical activity, I think was really, really important and provided a nice outlet for, and people with a range of abilities, right? Like this certainly isn't a company of jocks outside of you, of course, but.

Right, right.

It was really good.

Yeah. I thought it was a special moment. We were done with the game and there were 3 of us, the 2 developers and, One of them was Kelvin, 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'd like to share it with you when it's it's going to be helpful. So, Mark, until next time.

Yeah, thank you. Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of SkuCast. Be sure to keep up with our latest content by subscribing to SkuCast on iTunes or to our blog at community.comonscue.com. Until next time, friends, thanks so much for listening.