David Cummings on Startups

Category: Corp Culture

  • Ideas for Making Remote Employees Feel More a Part of the Startup

    As a startup grows, the demand for specialized skills grow as well. With significant talent shortages for key technology positions, more startups and companies are resorting to remote employees as a long-term solution. Working in a different geographic location from the majority of the team makes it difficult to feel the same as a team member that’s in headquarters. It’s important for entrepreneurs to recognize this and go out of their way to make it the best situation possible.

    Here are a few ideas for making remote employees feel more like they’re in the home office:

    • Fly the team member to headquarters for one week per quarter to reconnect and celebrate with the team
    • Incorporate Google Hangout or Skype Video into the weekly routine so that there’s a face-to-face connection (e.g. staff meetings, all hands meetings, etc)
    • Coordinate trade show opportunities so that remote employees have a chance to work the booth or meet customers with other team members

    Several or our employees work full-time from home and these techniques have worked well. With technology, effort, and the right personality types, remote employees are just as happy and effective as in-house team members.

    What else? What are some other ideas for making remote employees feel more a part of the startup?

  • Visually Representing a Corporate Culture

    Recently I had the opportunity to meet with a startup that is very focused on corporate culture. Now, this is a growth stage company that many would say have moved beyond startup phase but they still had a number of startup elements.

    One of the many things that impressed me is how they visually represented their corporate culture throughout their office. Here are some ways they present their culture in a more physical manner:

    • Creating a logo or graphic that represents the culture, as separate from the company logo
    • Incorporating the visual representation into standard office items that all employees use like pens, notebooks, cups, etc
    • Painting the walls and other physical building elements with the graphic

    Many companies put their values or mission statement on a wall for team members to read on a regular basis but miss the fact that for a culture to care about these things they need to be alive on a daily basis. By visually representing a corporate culture throughout the office with many different mediums, and walking the walk, the culture is reinforced and significantly strengthened.

    What else? What are some other ways to visually represent a corporate culture?

  • Transparency of Information in a Startup

    One of the best ways to built trust in a startup is through transparency of information. The author Jack Stack argues for extreme transparency in his book The Great Game of Business. Transparency, to me, is a great way to get everyone on the same page company-wide, align interests, and engender trust. Communication of information, especially information that changes frequently, is one of the more difficult parts of building transparency into the culture.

    Here are some techniques to help facilitate transparency of information in a startup:

    • LCD scoreboard in the lobby with near real-time information on progress towards goals
    • Simplified One Page Strategic Plan updated and rolled out to all team members quarterly with financial information like revenue
    • Bottom-up daily check-ins throughout the organization
    • Anonymous town hall questions where nothing is off limits
    • Discourse and explanations around company changes as opposed to edicts with no reasoning

    Creating an environment of transparency is tough and requires commitment from the top down. These techniques and methodologies help set the tone and promote transparency.

    What else? What some other ways to promote transparency of information in a startup?

  • Entrepreneurs Fail at Hiring Sales Reps

    As part of yesterday’s EO event on hiring, Adam spent a fair amount of time talking about hiring sales reps. Ah, the elusive sales rep that makes an entrepreneur’s life easy, or so you would hope. Previously, I advocated for entrepreneurs to hire a sales assistant to help give them economies of scale of their time before diving into a full-time, quota-bearing sales rep.

    Well, Adam articulated nicely why hiring salespeople is so difficult, especially for entrepreneurs. Here are his words why it is so challenging:

    • Great salespeople are always in demand
    • Mediocre salespeople are A-Players when it comes to selling themselves
    • Great salespeople are a product of environment
    • Entrepreneurs get desperate to fill the position

    The next time you’re out there, ready to hire your first salesperson, consider why it is so challenging, and look for someone who has the four super-elements.

    What else? What are some other reasons entrepreneurs fail at hiring sales reps?

  • The 4 Super-Elements for Startup Hiring

    Earlier today I attended the Entrepreneurs’ Organization workshop lead by Atlanta native Adam Robinson of Hireology. Adam did a great job taking us through best practices around hiring. This wasn’t a workshop for sourcing candidates, on-boarding candidates, or any other recruiting best practices. One of the segments that I really enjoyed was learning about Hireology’s so called super elements. Much like the periodic elements in nature, there’s a long list of elements to analyze for making great hiring decisions, with four being the most pervasive regardless of position.

    1. Attitude – their general feelings or disposition
    2. Sense of Accountability – the extent to which a person believes he or she has control over their own outcomes, also called the “locus of control”
    3. Prior Related Job Success – having met formal goals in past jobs that are similar to the job at hand
    4. Culture Fit – the degree to which the candidate shares similar values with the organization, and demonstrates an authentic interest in the job at hand

    Adam did a great job and entrepreneurs should pay attention to Hireology’s thought leadership content and application.

    What else? What are your thoughts on the four super-elements for startup hiring?

  • Sabbaticals as a Startup Benefit

    Recently we rolled out a new program for team members to take a two month paid sabbatical for every four years of employment. Four years of employment seems like a long time, especially in the startup world, but we already have team members that have passed that and our goal is to be the best place to work and the best place to be a customer, so amazing benefits for our team members fit in nicely.

    Here are some thoughts around sabbaticals:

    • Even though we have no vacation tracking with a policy of “be reasonable”, that means that people are free to do what they want, when they want, as long as their responsibilities are still being met — a sabbatical means that the responsibilities don’t have to be met for that period of time, thereby creating a different dynamic
    • Sabbaticals are meant for our people to pursue projects or trips that really clear their mind of responsibilities at the startup and enable them to fulfill dreams or check off items on their bucket list
    • Making sabbaticals fully paid is key so that team members actual use and take advantage of them

    Much like college professors have had sabbaticals for years, startups should consider have them as well so that team members have an opportunity to step away for an extended period of time.

    What else? What are some other thoughts or anecdotes around sabbaticals for startups?

  • Employee Housecleaning as a Startup Benefit

    After reading the interview with the Evernote CEO in which he mentions housecleaning as a benefit for every one of his employees I thought to myself that we should do that as well. Done. Housecleaning, when first mentioned, elicits a more dramatic response compared to the more standard benefits. It isn’t that housecleaning is so weird that a company shouldn’t offer it as a perk, rather, it’s that it is so unusual, yet desirable, that it resonates well with people.

    Here are a few reasons why we decided to offer four hours of housecleaning per month for each employee as a benefit:

    • All of our employees can afford to pay for it on their own, but many do not because they think it is frivolous since they can do it themselves, but the experience of cleaning provides negative utility for most people
    • We want to be the absolute best place to work
    • As a company, we get economies of scale to negotiate a corporate rate that’s better than an individual rate
    • Paying for the benefit for everyone, since it is a pre-tax expense, results in even more savings compared to paying employees, taxes coming out on the employer side and employee side, then an individual paying for it with after-tax money

    Over time we’ll develop more experience with the housecleaning-as-perk initiative but so far so good. It’ll be interesting to see if it catches on with more startups.

    What else? What are your thoughts on employee housecleaning as a startup benefit?

  • In-House Recruiters for Startup Growth

    Fred Wilson has a great post today titled MBA Mondays: Best Hiring Practices. In it he highlights a number of quality strategies and tactics to build out the most crucial part of a startup: the team members. A couple years ago I was visiting the CEO of Appcelerator at his office in California and he told me how difficult it was to recruit great team members out there, so much so that they had brought on a full-time in-house recruiter, even though they were much smaller then.

    When we started to grow faster than we could hire, we took the next step of bringing on an in-house recruiter. Here are some of the benefits we’ve found having an in-house recruiter:

    • Focus, focus, focus — it’s awesome what one person can do when they have a single focus
    • Reach — a dedicated recruiter has the time to cast a wider net to work with more outside, contingency-based recruiters, college career centers, potential candidates on LinkedIn, and more
    • Process — many startups are averse to much structure, but hiring is the one area that you can’t cut corners, making a strong hiring process that much more important

    When company growth outpaces the capacity to bring on new team members, in-house recruiters can really help close the gap and ramp up the hiring process, while maintaining quality.

    What else? What are your thoughts on in-house recruiters for startup growth?

  • The Three Parts of a Startup’s Purpose

    Continuing with takeaways from Clayton Christensen’s book How Will You Measure Your Life?, there’s another area of content I want to highlight from the book. In the epilogue, Professor Christensen talks about the benefits of defining a purpose for a family and how similar it is to defining a purpose for a startup.

    Here are the three parts of a company or startup’s purpose (pg. 196):

    • Likeness – what the key leaders and employees want the enterprise to have become at the end of the path that they are on
    • Commitment – a deep level of resolve to achieving the likeness laid out
    • Metrics – defined results enabling everyone associated with the enterprise to calibrate their work

    With these three parts of a startup’s purpose – likeness, commitment, and metrics – team members achieve clarity and alignment significantly increasing the likelihood of success. Purpose fits in with items like mission, vision, and values to paint a clear picture of the most strategic side of a startup.

    What else? What are your thoughts on the three parts of a startup’s purpose?

  • Consider Hygiene Factors and Motivation Factors in Startups

    Recently I started reading Clayton Christensen’s new book How Will You Measure Your Life? after seeing it mentioned on a few blogs I read. Professor Christensen is the author of the famous business book The Innovator’s Dilemma as well as numerous other ones. Last Fall I had the opportunity to hear Professor Christensen give a talk at the Executive Summit for Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce event, which was documented as Notes from Clayton Christensen’s Disruptive Innovation Talk (I also saw him on campus at Duke and his son, a Duke grad, was in one of my economics classes).

    This new book is part personal self-help and part business where different corporate theories are laid out in compressed form and then a personal or family analogy is introduced. One section I enjoyed reading about is the What Makes Us Tick chapter talking about the two-factor theory of hygiene factors and motivation factors.

    The two-factor theory from the book (pg 32):

    • Hygiene factors – things like status, compensation, job security, work conditions, company policies, and supervisory practices (not that compensation is a hygiene factor and not motivation)
    • Motivation factors – things like challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth

    Dan Pink’s book Drive, where he talks about autonomy, mastery, and purpose, is similar to motivation factors. For startups, it’s important to think through two-factor theory and work to build the best environment for the corporate culture. The next time a friend complains about his or her job, listen carefully to the reasons and ask yourself if it is hygiene factors or motivation factors.

    What else? What are your thoughts on hygiene factors and motivation factors in startups?