- Good day guys, Peter Moriarty here.
Great to have you here.
Today, we're gonna be talking about culture code,
and how you can make sure that you and your team
are staying connected culturally
as you are working remotely.
This is really important, not only for businesses
that wanna work remotely all the time,
but just anyone who is a business owner
who doesn't wanna be chained to the office.
You might wanna do the kid run in the afternoon
and then work from home for a couple of hours,
or maybe you wanna take a few more holidays,
or maybe you even wanna completely switch off
for a week at a time,
and have some distance from the business.
Well, you gotta make sure that the business and the team
are actually gonna run without you.
So let's jump into our five culture tips,
this the culture code, what you must get right.
And number one, this is kind of like
my overriding tip for you guys,
it's not really a tip, but it's my overriding strategy,
is that, if you're working remotely
and you're working apart from your team members,
whether that's temporarily or on a permanent basis,
the most important thing that you can do,
manage the team as if you were in one place.
And what that means is, everything that you do culturally,
everything that you do to make sure
that your team are well-aligned,
everything you do to make sure your team are well-supported,
you need to make sure you do all of those things,
but find a way of doing them remotely.
Now, some of these are gonna need some tweaks,
and that's where I'm gonna be sharing
the practical things that we actually do for each of those.
So, without further ado, let's jump into the first one.
So the first one is making sure you've got
your values, your mission, and your vision together.
Now, it's pretty easy to say that right,
and in the corporate world you have perseverance,
and what's the other one, integrity up on the wall, right?
But that's not how a performing business
does vision and mission.
Vision and mission should actually be
a part of your culture.
It's what attracts team members to your team,
and it's what repels the people
who are not the right people for your team.
And so making sure you do this for your company
is absolutely critical.
Now, how do we do this when we're remote?
Well, we actually do this in our team get-togethers,
when we have our virtual conference,
when we have everyone working together online.
We actually do this using Google Jamboard.
So this is one of our Jamboards
that we created for one of our team get-togethers,
this was called Genius The Game.
We always have a theme
for each one of our conferences or virtual conferences,
and that really kinda gets everyone on the same page
with that Rockefeller habits idea
of having a quarterly theme for everything.
So I'm gonna go through my Jamboard here,
but I wanna show you some of the cool stuff we did.
Oh, by the way, we've got some amazing artists in the,
(laughing) in the company.
All right, I wanna go find the vision stuff.
Cool, all right.
So we went through and we drew out
the vision on the Jamboard.
The most important thing of this exercise, of course,
that this is an opportunity for everyone in the company
to actually participate in the vision,
and participate in building out
the culture that we wanna build,
making sure that everybody has a say.
Super, super, duper important.
So we've got here the vision that we all came up with,
with everybody's input,
and then we basically let everyone draw
and add their little bits and pieces
that they thought was a part of this.
Now, there's not really much here that's all that literal.
(laughs)
Although we did have some pretty cool pictures
that got thrown in there.
This one I like, is one of our ones around values,
although I think that was, yeah that the was version 1.0.
This is the updated one around our values,
which are grouped in 3 themes, 10x thinking,
service +1 and team,
and the guys really had some fun with that.
So you can see the Jamboard is a great little tool for that.
We even went through and when into
a little bit more depth here, and so, you know,
about what it is that our company means.
What it is that our culture means.
So super important for the team.
So, getting aligned on your vision, mission, value
is your number one,
to make sure that you have all of the team operating nicely
and comfortably together.
Cool, okay.
So, number two in the culture code
is one on ones and coworking.
Now one on ones are the little conversation and chats
you usually have team members
when you're in a physical office.
If you're like let say, sitting in a meeting room one on one
or you go for a walk down at the coffee shop.
And it's the ideal chitchat that you would normally have
with a colleague or co-worker,
that you just don't quite get to do,
when you're working remotely.
Even if you've got like a water cooler chitchat thread,
which we higher recommend in you instant messaging chat app.
You may still miss out on the opportunity to,
just checking in with someone and say,
"Hey how are going?
How was your weekend?
How's your husband, or your wife, or your partner
or your dog or whatever?"
And kinda check in and just kinda do
a little bit of testing and see what people are.
Now, you know, everyone's got stuff going on
for them in some way or another in life,
it's not always bad stuff, you know,
they may be really happy with
where things are at the moment,
and that's great as well.
But you wanna make sure that you're actually
connecting with your team members and,
you know, actually getting a feel,
connecting on a human level to make sure
that you're operating as a team,
rather than just people who are
showing up to Google Meet or Zoom calls.
And so finding ways to facilitate one on ones
is super important when you're working remotely.
We do this once a fortnight,
so each manager will have a one on one call
with each team member on their team.
And they will actually check in on those notes,
they'll actually check those notes into HR.
Now it's not about like controlling or, like, you know,
report to me what you've been up to or anything like that.
Now, just to make sure that they do it number one,
but number two, if the team member mentions,
"Hey, you know, like, I've got some shit going on
with my family at the moment,"
or, you know, I don't know maybe,
"Money's kinda tight,"
or, you know,
"I'm little bit worried about what's going on in the world."
And that person maybe needs a little bit of extra support
from someone from an HR perspective,
then that's how that's gonna actually get filtered up.
And so, they happen inside,
we've got like an Asana task for each team member,
which is like their employee file.
Notes go in there and the right people who need to
kind of be on a lookout for that, will get a message.
Now I get to read every single one of those, which I love.
Because if I can see that someone needs
a little bit of extra support, I can drop them a message,
jump on a one on one, spend some time with them,
which I love doing with the team,
and make sure that everything's all right.
Sometimes you might be thinking or worrying
that someone's not having a good time,
and they're doing great,
or it might be the other way around.
You might think everything's fine,
but in a one on one session,
they divulge that actually they need a bit of support.
To making sure you're connected as really good.
We do a 30 minute meeting once a fortnight.
The other one that we have there is coworking,
and this one I really love.
I did about six hours of coworking
with my marketing manager Angel today,
which we do every Tuesday.
And that's basically having one persistent meeting going,
while you do your own work.
So it might be working together
or it might be completely your own work.
And you just kinda mute your microphone
when you don't wanna talk to each other.
But when you wanna chitchat,
you switch it on and you chat.
Now, the first time you do this,
it's gonna be a bit weird because you
kinda gotta like, excuse yourself
to get up and go to the toilet
or maybe you pick your nose or whatever.
But having that coworking window open
and getting that level of comfort with that person
by spending four or five hours with them,
is a really great way to feel connected,
even though you may be physically apart.
So absolutely love that one and the coworking.
If you are loving these, please write,
" I'm loving it."
Just write that down there in the comments.
"Loving these.
These are awesome."
I hope so.
Okay, cool.
Number three, personal development.
So this is another one to make sure
that we check in with the team.
We do our, what's called performance reviews,
but in our personal development sessions
with our team members.
And we usually do those once every six months,
every now and again we do an extra one each three months.
And there's something that I read a little while ago,
particularly if you're managing millennials
and Gen Y's inside your business.
And that is that, you know the old school traditional way
of doing a performance review once a year
and managing your pay raises and your,
you know, coordination for someone's job role once a year,
really doesn't work anymore.
With your millennial staff, they're used to gaming
and they're used to, let's say not waiting
for delayed gratification.
They're used to instant gratification
in many areas of their life.
And making somebody wait a whole year
for a performance review,
really makes them feel like
they're not getting any progress.
And so doing performance reviews every six months,
and possibly even every three months,
if you've got the time to be able to do that as well,
gives someone really rapid goals to work towards.
But also, even if you took what they would normally
get in an annual pay raise, and you halved it
and you gave that every six months,
it's actually gonna keep someone much more motivated
because they can feel the velocity in their improvement.
And of course, it's a good way
of giving feedback back and forth.
So we're gonna be sharing our full agenda
for that meeting, as a very structured agenda
that we use for that, in our Remote Work Playbook series.
And that's private for customers tomorrow,
but if you're interested in that, then drop us a message.
There's a chat link below and we'll get you hooked up
with our agenda for the personal development
and feedback session.
We do those all the time and they're really great.
Okay, number four, Friday night drinks.
You're gonna find a way of doing
a virtual Friday night drinks.
Ours is called TGIT, it's Thank God it's Thursday.
I think it's just because the first one was on a Thursday
and so that just kinda carried on.
And that's basically our time when we just hang out.
So we do this once a fortnight,
and everyone jumps on one big Google Meet,
and we switch it to Gallery View.
Thank you Google for implementing Gallery View
and Google Meet, so we can see everyone now.
And we look at everyone in that call, and we just hang out,
we spent about an hour, 90 minutes
and we spend time together doing everything except work.
So that might be playing games.
It might be our newbies that have joined the company
doing a talent show.
We force everyone to do a talent show,
which is pretty fun, nerve-wracking for them,
but we wanna make sure they're gonna fit our culture.
We might go through things like shoutouts for,
you know, someone who's done great at work,
but we try and keep away from any of the work talk.
It's really about playing games, spending social time,
and having fun together and just basically
doing non-working stuff.
The other thing this is great for
is if your team are working at home,
and all they have between work
and spending time with their family is, I don't know,
maybe like watching TV or computer game, or something
to kind of like switch off.
This is a great way of bridging that gap
between having your work colleagues
in your work time and then having the home family time.
This is a nice little in between,
they're spending some non-work time
in a really cool environment.
So we've covered Friday night drinks,
we use the Jamboard for that.
So I'm gonna show you what that looks like.
This is our one here.
Gonna go into, this is games night.
So you would say, we did some Pictionary.
Sorry if anybody is offended.
Sorry, not sorry.
And so we use the Jamboard for this,
and basically on our Jamboard
will sometimes like cut up squares
or use like a Pictionary word generator.
I don't think I've got any of the,
any of the cut up squares on here.
But yeah, this is heaps of fun,
'cause anyone can use the Jamboard.
It's just jamboard.google.com from the web browser.
Or if you're really clever, then you can,
you can go ahead and grab it on your
like your iPad or your phone.
I didn't realize how (laughing)
explicit some of our games were, but you get the idea.
Cool, awesome!
So let's move on to our last one.
Celebrating our wins together.
This one I really love.
This is something that our HR team have been doing,
which is a gratitude journal exercise.
And we again do this on Jamboard.
And so our team have been working
through gratitude journals as a challenge internally and,
looks like Peter's one is empty.
Maybe didn't get the memo in that challenge,
No, looks like they've done group challenges
rather than individual.
Anyway.
Yeah, I really love these.
Because it's just a way of connecting the team.
One of the things that I've seen
popularized in businesses and my good friend Dale Beaumont
has this in his office.
Each one of his team members has built a dream board.
Their own dream board and actually put it up in the office.
So you get an idea of what someone's goals are,
what their beliefs are, what they're interested in,
what makes them excited.
And those dream boards are a way of communicating
to the rest of the team, what is good for me,
and what am i aspiring to.
And so you know, if someone takes off
one of the bucket list items on their dream board,
then everyone gets to rally behind that
and get excited about it.
Can't do that when you remote obviously,
'cause you can't stick something on the wall
and have everyone else see it.
So that's where we'll do something like a Jamboard.
And we've done dream boards in here as well,
I didn't have time to bring up every single one of those.
But there is one more that I also wanted to show you.
And that is actual, our team baseball cards.
And so if you're a newbie
and you've just joined a company, right,
it can be a little bit scary,
because you've just walked
into a new team of new people.
And it's gonna take some time
to get to know everyone,
especially if you're working remotely.
And so if you're interested in making sure
that your team are connected to each other,
and learning about their new colleagues quickly
as they've joined the company then,
lemme show you one of the ways that we do that.
So this is called our baseball cards.
And I'm gonna have to go and find them now.
I think it's in here.
This is in our Google Site, obviously,
in our Google Site.
We wanna put all of our,
and no, it's not here.
I'm gonna have to try and find it.
Obviously in our Google Site,
we have like an onboarding guide.
This is where all of our systems
and processes and everything in the business is.
We've got some stuff on values, you know,
our corporate structure and other bits and pieces.
Here we go, I found it.
Okay, so meet the team, is where we have
all of our baseball cards.
So basically each person in the business
will put together a baseball card,
and we just use Canva for this.
And they will put together a card,
about all the things
that are important to them in their life.
And you know, they've got full creative control
on what they wanna share about themselves.
You can see the guys have had some fun here,
created some pretty cool stuff.
So if they're interested in food,
or they're interested in cars,
or wakeboarding, or whatever it is,
everyone basically gets their opportunity
to communicate who they are and what is,
what is it about them that is special.
And that's another way of getting everyone
used to working with each other.
Cool, all right.
I think we're on our last one now,
I don't know what number we're on,
but I know I'm up to my last note. (laughing)
So the last one is celebrating your wins,
making sure that everyone is celebrating
their wins together and making sure that everyone
is sharing in the excitement
and the celebration of achieving things together as a team.
Because when you're in an office and you make a big sale,
you can ring the bell, or you can dance up and down,
or you can high five, but it's a bit different
when you're remotely.
So you gotta find a way of doing that.
So every single day in our chat, and we do this
in the main chat in the in the main company
where everyone can see it, we're posting shoutouts.
So team members who have done well,
we have to go and find one, here we go.
So a customer has rated a ticket with a thumbs up,
and all the team jump in there,
and we'll give that person a shoutout,
which is pretty cool.
And you can see those all day long
when the team are doing well.
They'll be sharing cool stuff that's going on there.
So I really love that.
Really important to be shouting out.
And the other one that we do is when we have our all hands,
which we call T4, Thursdays 4 p.m.,
that happens once a month.
So in that meeting, in that monthly meeting
where we get the all hands, all company together,
and we kinda share exactly what we're up to and you know,
have a bit of a cadence for the numbers in the business
and the goals toward their strategic plans
and all of those kind of things.
We have a whole section which is called, Genius of the Week.
And that Genius the Week section,
we have each team member pick a company value
that we have all agreed that we wanna display,
and we shoutout one of their team members
whose been displaying that company value.
And I really love that 'cause it's a great opportunity
for everybody to share.
This is what I appreciate about my colleague here.
This is something great that I recognized in them.
We tie in the company values and so there's a, you know,
a bit of structure around there and of course,
we wanna make sure that we are celebrating
and rewarding the good behavior.
We're rewarding the behavior that's in alignment
with what we wanna say, as a team.
Which is, you know, everything is on board
and congruent with our company values,
and who we say we wanna be.
It doesn't matter what your company values are.
All that matters is that you actually
agreed to them and you stick to them.
Because there's plenty of different ways of operating
and you need to decide,
what is gonna hold your team together.
'Cause lemme tell you, it's easy when you got two or three
or four or five people in your business
and you know, making sure that everyone's the right fit,
but when you grow past 15, 20 or more employees,
which I've gone on that growth journey myself personally.
There comes a point where you don't work
with everybody day to day.
You don't spend time with every single person.
You don't know their mom's name
or how many kids they've got.
You as the CEO of the business just need to be responsible
for curating, and managing,
and being the custodian of your brand,
but internally, the custodian of your culture.
Super duper important.
And so this is one of the ways of making sure
that you foster that,
is getting everyone on board with it,
and then making sure everyone's enforcing it as well.
Until next time, catch you later guys.
Check out all the links below,
which has everything you need to access our private groups.
If you're on G-Suite,
or if you're interested in working remotely.
We've got two groups down there.
And if you need anything of course,
drop us a chat and a team
will be able to help you out.
Cheers!