Culture: A Living Organism
By Marcus Lee Hollan | Chief People Officer
March 12, 2020 is a date that in my mind will forever define the beginning of not only a global pandemic but also the cultural rebirth of a young, thriving small business in San Francisco. Studio 5 had already followed the direction of many other businesses and implemented a work-from-home mandate. No one knew at that point how long that would actually last. Like any nearly bootstrapped small business, “the show must go on.” Our naïvety at the time, and our hope, was that everything would go back to “normal” in a few short weeks.
Although the offices of our Thought Partners were closed, our homes were not. Jesse Lee Eller, Founder/CEO of Studio 5, and I decided to keep a strategy design meeting with one of our Thought Partners, and on March 12 found ourselves headed southbound on Caltrain to Redwood City, CA. There was an eeriness to how quiet and abandoned the trains were, when on any given Thursday before they would have been packed with standing room only. We zipped past vacant train stops as I glared out the window with a feeling of uncertainty on what tomorrow, or even the following week, would bring. We arrived at our stop and took an Uber to our final destination, nestled in a foothill of oak and redwood trees.
The strategy session took place in the living room of one of their teammates' homes. At the time, we were planning for an in-person professional development experience for their 150 managers. We talked about leadership development and learning strategy, and we also unpacked the unknown—the “what-ifs” on where this pandemic would take us. We left there after several hours with some great ideas for next steps, some new relationships, and warm hugs goodbye. It was the last time we would see each other in person, and that single visit south was a pivotal moment for Studio 5, not just for our business model, but for our culture as well.
Every day, Studio 5 works with some of the leading global companies in helping them build the culture of their organizations. I’d like to take you on a journey of the evolution of our culture over the past 18 months, the lessons learned, and the key takeaways. I can’t promise to provide anything profound, but I hope there are some morsels of knowledge you can walk away with and apply with future teams.
Sourdough Starter
The pandemic brought on some new hobbies for many of us; some learned a new language or obtained a new academic degree. I focused primarily on anything I could make in the kitchen. Once I had mastered homemade pappardelle pasta and canning lemon curd from scratch, it was on to a more complex task—making sourdough bread. And, like many others, I also proudly posted my final product on social media. Sourdough bread, although simple in nature, is not exactly simple to make. It takes practice, a lot of do-overs, and patience. In short, it’s a labor of love and really worth it. It all begins with your sourdough starter—the living organism that you create and feed. To create your starter, all you need is a 2:1 ratio of flour and water (and a jar, thermometer, and scale) and you’re set. Over the next 5-12 days, you grow your living organism. Each day, you discard some of the starter, only to replace it with more water and flour. Each day, it bubbles more and more as it takes shape, as it transforms from two simple ingredients into a beautiful, although messy and stinky, masterpiece.
I find a unique parallel between company culture and sourdough starter; culture is a living and evolving organism. Leaders within organizations are tasked to create a set of company values, a mission statement, and guiding principles. We use those to hire new employees in order to build the team that will grow the organization. But through the experience of helping lead a team through a pandemic, it’s more clear to me now how the culture of an organization should be treated like a living breathing organism; it should evolve and pivot in the moment to meet the needs of the employees and the conditions of the business. It has to be fed and nurtured, and, in order for it to grow, you need to give it the conditions for the culture to take shape. It’s not just about setting company values, but more importantly about how we invite the employees to own these values.
Prior to the work-from-home mandate, our company was one of those typical Bay Area startups. Everyone strolled into the physical office space in downtown San Francisco around 8:00 am, coffees in hand, or sometimes a group walked over to the local coffee shop (there was always a split debate on who had better coffee, Starbucks or Pete’s). The day started with catching up from the night before while also sharing the latest news and dabbling in some pop culture gossip. Next, morning huddles got us set for the day, then it was heads down at our desks as we slayed in our lanes, and got down to business. Lunch was often eaten together. Countless times, our small but mighty team worked late into the night to get deliverables over the finish line. It was also not too uncommon, after a long productive day, to then go out for business development or networking events.
For us, our “teamness” was deeply rooted in our shared experiences, so the very thought of hiring someone who wasn't able to work from our office seemed ludicrous. I mean, how could a creative learning design firm produce magic if everyone is not sitting in the same room? The day we all unknowingly left the office for the last time in March 2020 was the moment the culture of Studio 5 began to shift. The organism was taking new shape, and all we could do was feed it, keep a pulse on our employees, and reevaluate along the way.
Like leaders in other organizations, we didn’t have the answers to what the next steps would look like. It’s a very difficult position to be in: employees are looking to you for guidance, for the answers, and to help decipher through the deluge of the chaos we were all experiencing in real time, together. Contracts from Thought Partners were dropping at perturbing rates, and all of our in-person delivery programs disappeared as if the hold on our calendars ceased to exist.
During the first several weeks, our goal was to try to harness the same culture, to make it feel “normal,” like nothing was wrong and that we were going to be okay. We kept our morning huddles (now on Zoom), and then added in quick connects to close out the day. We immediately tightened down on our schedules—meeting even more frequently than we did before. To help lighten the mood and keep the team from thinking the world was falling apart, my brilliant, people-leader self thought it would be a really good idea to implement daily spirit days. Yes, daily. It was fun for the first two days, and then I think it lost its flare.
I wasn’t listening to or assessing our employees at this moment—I wasn’t feeding the organism. I was in survival mode and kept moving forward with what I thought was best. Our team didn’t need Wacky Hair Wednesdays or helicopter micromanagers; they needed space to process. They needed more personal time to make sense of it all away from a laptop or Zoom meeting.
High Tides Raise All Ships
Studio 5 believes in the aphorism, a high tide raises all ships. For us, each person we bring into our company should be a high tide—someone who will elevate our company culture and our brand and leave the organization better as a result of their contribution. That theory also applies to the Thought Partners we choose to engage in business with. The work should be a high tide that pushes your team beyond its comfort zone. This encourages team members to flex new skill sets and grow richer in their craft.
After the missteps of the first few weeks, the months following would involve fewer meetings, less structure to the day, and more autonomy. As our designers continued to create learning content for our Thought Partners, a new side of the business emerged, which forced all of us into a world we were not ready for: virtual training programs and learning events. If you recall back to that meeting Jesse and I had in Redwood City, that Thought Partner reached out six weeks later to schedule a kickoff meeting for the now virtual training of their 150 managers, including the CEO of the company.
We said yes that day to designing, managing, delivering, and producing a virtual professional development experience. This included personalized and branded preconference swag shipped directly to each manager’s home, and an entire asynchronous experience that took place prior to their arrival to the synchronous learning experience. We worked alongside these incredible and visionary leaders to build out the content, create a technical run-of-show, and facilitate the live experience. And we delivered it all from an apartment in San Francisco. I am proud to say that our team hit it out of the park. Would we do some things differently? Absolutely. However, that single experience gave our team the confidence and grit that we needed to adapt to the changing times—it was the high tide that we needed in order to grow. Navigating that experience for the very first time, alongside a Thought Partner who is also experiencing this new normal for the first time, provided the perfect recipe for trust and proof of our team's ability to excel in this new frontier of Learning & Development.
The weeks and months that followed would continue to transform our company. We went from an in-person business model, to a hybrid approach, to a now fully remote workforce. For the first time in Studio 5’s history, geographical location was no longer a barrier to building teams, and that fall we brought on our first two intentionally remote employees: a Senior Learning Experience Designer based out of New Jersey, and a People Operations Specialist located in Sacramento. These new hires would once again shift how we showed up, and they made us rethink what employee development and the employee life cycle looked like in a virtual world. It was the beginning of a commitment to being a remote company and finding ways to build the teams differently. We continued to diversify the way we were producing content and the Thought Partners we worked with. By the beginning of 2021, we had grown to a point where we needed someone to help manage our design team as well as provide support with business strategy and development, which led us to hire another high tide for the organization, our Chief Learning Officer.
Nearly one year to the date after we closed the doors on our brick and mortar office and bid farewell to our old notions of how to run our business, we expanded our team with the launch of the Studio 5 Collective: a group of Learning & Development enthusiasts that includes learning experiences designers, facilitators, learning program managers, graphic designers and animators, video designers, copy editors, and even voice-over artists. The Collective allows us to work with talent from around the country and tap into some of the very best in the L&D industry.
But the benefits once again came with unanticipated transformation: full-time LXDs were thrust into management positions overnight, disrupting their “normal” and adding a heck of a lot to their plates. In addition, business continued to climb. By the time summer of 2021 arrived, we had grown by nearly 400% in headcount in less than 6 months. Once again, we had to reevaluate what it means to be on our team.
As the Chief People Officer at Studio 5, my role is to help set the course for the company culture and create a meaningful employee experience, from onboarding to exiting. Over the last 18 months, the empirical data that I have gleaned on supporting company culture boils down to three buckets: (1) employees define the culture, (2) you have to be okay with being messy, and (3) you have to understand that context and transparency galvanize trust.
Let’s break those down a bit.
Employees define the culture.
A foosball table and a 5-star Michelin chef in a personal cafeteria are no longer the criteria people use today when selecting a company to work for. Prospective employees want to feel connected to a mission and believe that their contributions to the organization are impactful. I believe that smart companies create the space for employees to actively engage and contribute to and own the culture overall, beyond just a paycheck. Each employee we bring into our team adds value to the ecosystem; they contribute to the culture of the organization.
When we are allowing employees to define the culture, we are deliberately listening to what they have to say. Some ways in which we do this include sending monthly pulse surveys to assess employee morale and engagement, auditing meetings and systems to see if the frequency and purpose is still relevant, and looking to the team to define the culture rather than defining the culture and then forcing the team to adhere to unnatural contortions.
Be okay with being messy. Ambiguity is good.
The Learning & Development world is messy. Deciding on how to best design a learning experience to address a company-wide change management process for over 3,000 employees globally is not an easy feat. Yet L&D Professionals thrive by taking complex systems and making sense of them, often without fully understanding the topic. The superpower of the L&D professional is to work with ambiguity, ask a lot of questions, and strategically get in front of where the challenges are. One of my biggest takeaways from this year has been that, when leading teams, we have to be okay with the messy (sometimes scary) moments—the moments where you may not feel that you know the full scope of something or you are not able to provide all the answers at an exact time. Like developing learning, leading people can be messy and ambiguous. And, like developing learning, from that ambiguity, magic often arises.
Similar to the sourdough starter analogy, the only way for the organism to grow is by removing part of what created it to begin with and feeding it with something new. We have to recognize that sometimes a disruption to the ecosystem is what it takes in order to grow. When leading teams, we have to expect the unexpected and yet still be surprised by what comes our way.
Transparency leads to trust.
If a global pandemic has taught me anything, it’s that people demand facts and need context in their lives and that creating transparency through facts and context is the key to building trust. Why does this matter? Well, we can’t ask our teams to follow us blindly into the unknown without first establishing trust.
Transparency tells us the why behind a decision and keeps us accountable. It’s not about having all the answers, but rather it's about being vulnerable in the moments you do not. I will admit, being in a leadership position in a small business has, at times, challenged my notion of transparency. I thought that I was being transparent by telling the team everything that I knew. But, when I look back over the years, I noticed my gaps in transparency were really in the moments of the unknown. For example, during our growth spurt this past year, we didn’t foresee the full scope of how the rapid expansion of the team would impact our lead LXDs. We were so busy making sure business was moving forward that, for a moment, we lacked empathy for the very people who made it all work. And once we realized that we’d overlooked a major gap—our LXDs did not feel fully prepared to be managers—we didn’t act quickly enough (for my comfort anyway) to address the issue. We made it through, but that lack of transparency could have created a culture opposite of what we intended. I am certain the only reason everything worked out is because we hire some of the best people in the industry, and we had already established trust with our LXDs. They followed us into the unknown because we had already proved to them that they could trust that, even if we got it wrong, we would protect and support them.
Our way to gauge a culture of transparency is when there is a two-way feedback system established; where questions can be asked and concerns be addressed without judgement. A culture where there are growth conversations taking place throughout the year, establishing where employees want to grow professionally—and personally. Feedback isn’t just internal either, we need to collect it from our Thought Partners as well. It's creating a culture where a title in the organization is important for role clarity, but not as a designation of who should “sit at the table” and provide input and direction. Transparency and trust, without a doubt, are the two conditions that will decide if your organization will remain stagnant, or if it will evolve and grow.
Seventy-three weeks have come and gone. We are still wearing PPE masks and taking COVID-19 precautions. Each teammate, now spread across time zones, is embedded into different aspects of the business. And Studio 5 is a different organism today than it was when we started this journey. I’ve stopped trying to force culture on the team and instead listen to what the team needs. We check in as a team twice a week and get together in person once a quarter. We’ve shifted our employee experience to meet the demands of a remote, often isolated, workforce by implementing Wellness Fridays, where every full-time employee has the last Friday of the month off to focus on doing something that brings them happiness. We’ve established unlimited paid time off and a mandatory minimum of one week of vacation per year so that the team can engage in being unplugged from the business. And, if you check in with us a year from now, I can promise you this list will look a little different.
Since the beginning, the mission of Studio 5 has been to help people do the best work of their lives. How we accomplish that, and the nature in which we carry out that mission, may look different than it once did because that is our culture: our ever-evolving, living, breathing, culture.
How are you feeding the culture of your organization?