This post is long overdue. As I approach a weekend where I'll be holding a workshop on the importance of failure and its path to innovation, I'm reminded to practice what I preach. Therefore, say hello to the first post in a series of Social Focus Consulting's Failures and Learnings:
Failure #1: Not paying enough attention to building an effective organizational culture
I sorely underestimated the time required to oversee multiple projects (and manage its people) during the summer. This was in addition to time spent on other activities such as the daily marketing and business development required to build SFC's brand and secure future clients.
As a result, our "culture" (if you can call it that) became very project focused and lacked the cohesiveness and camaraderie of a truly effective culture. In turn, engagement in the organization (e.g. dedication to projects and other SFC initiatives) started to decline.
The lack of engagement was exacerbated by other factors such as a fairly large team (25+) for a startup and a geographically-dispersed team with no centralized office.
Learning #1: We need to take a cue from our company name and socialize more
Upon further analysis, the lack of engagement had little to do with there being multiple projects, or the fact that we had a large team or the fact that we were spread out geographically, or even the fact that this was unpaid work. The lack of engagement had to do with people who had no strong ties to the organization it was working for. And how could they? It took us about three months for us all to come together as an organization and socialize. Prior to that, people only knew one another by name or a picture from a website.
Although we could employ initiatives that make "virtual" organizations effective, I realized that this is not something I wanted for SFC. For us to succeed going forward, we'll need to place a greater emphasis on the workplace happiness of our people. And much of that will be nurtured by in-person socializing and more frequent face time.
Changes #1: Incorporating socializing into every facet of SFC
Some of these changes have already been executed, but there are still lots to learn as we prototype services at Queen's.
a) Include "Fun" as a corporate value. Previously, we had four corporate values (excellence, progression, innovation, community) which strongly mirror my own personal values. One thing was missing: "fun"! I'm very much a "work hard, play hard" type of person so I felt for us to build a culture that socializes, we need to explicitly include "fun" in our list of values.
b) Hire a Chief Happiness Officer. After doing some quick research on effective cultures (and later more in-depth study by reading Tony Hseih's "Delivering Happiness"), I realized that we needed to have someone help facilitate the building and monitoring of a healthy company culture.
c) Replace O'Day (Orientation Day) with a fun social outing. This has yet to be initiated, but I foresee future O'Days being far removed from the lecture-style format it has been in the past. For efficiency and convenience purposes, we'll be delivering information about SFC to new hires via YouTube. Their real introduction to the team and organization, however, will be more about socializing with their new teammates at a restaurant or coffee shop, for example.
There are many more initiatives we have planned to facilitate a "happier" workplace culture as we continue to listen to our Social Folks and understand their needs. There are also many more mistakes we've made over the past several months, but not building an effective culture is the one that needs the most attention.
We're forever eager to "fail forward", learn from our mistakes, and become bigger and better as we grow. See you after the next failure (and learning).