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Company Culture at a Distance

chrisbrogan · July 19, 2020 ·

company culture
Photo by manny PANTOJA on Unsplash

To build a strong company culture for all employees challenges leaders when working from home (WFH) becomes the norm. Most leaders say that “corporate culture” ranks very high up on their list of priorities, but if I looked at 100 managers’ budgets, I’d find almost no money at all dedicated to creating a culture (or even reinforcing the existing one). Further, if you ask most employees to describe the culture of their workplace, they’ll rarely say what the bosses wish they’d highlight as competitive advantages based on the culture.

Core Values Are The Heart of Culture

Does your company value fast? Are your norms based around accuracy above all else? Is this a top-down organization or a performance culture? Without knowing this, how on earth would you communicate it out to your remote or even local teams?

If empowerment is important, for instance, your desired culture won’t emphasize a hierarchy. If you want a culture of innovation, then reward failure every bit as much as success. Teamwork thrives when every employee values accountability and a culture of leadership.

Start here:

  • Work either with the senior team or the whole organization to draft what you believe the core values of the team should be.
  • Highlight any inconsistencies where you’ll have to improve the culture to match the goal.
  • Keep these values posted visibly and talk about them in alignment with projects, briefings and updates. For your work from home (WFH) employees, mail out postcards with the values printed on them.

Successful Culture Tips for Remote Workers

We must adapt some values for remote work anyway. If trust is a core value, then “always available” employees runs counter to that. Just because leaders panic now that “butt in chair” management can’t be monitored, if you say trust matters, don’t force countless status meetings and ultra fast response times.

Instead, motivate and reinforce the leadership and communications values of your organization and point out that you want team members to send their own status updates to match company culture goals.

Employee retention comes from the feeling that employees are understood, seen, and valued. This requires leadership to connect and communicate and deliver even more feedback and praise while employees work remotely. When the team isn’t gathered, it’s easy to feel invisible and left out. Add extra “attaboy” experiences where it makes sense.

Emphasize cultural values often in communication. “As keeping our customer well informed is very important to us, we ask that the customer never go more than an hour without a status update until their problem is resolved.” Make the norms match the daily language. “It’s only a win if all your teammates also feel confident that they can lead if you’re away for a few days. Can we train them up to feel even more prepared?”

Remote work thrives on everyone acting accountable to their projects, their teammates, and their leadership. Reinforce this wherever possible.

“Play” is Part of Company Culture

Or it should be. Developing a culture with many remote employees means that spontaneous hallway conversations are at a minimum. While the whole Zoom Cocktail Hour experience feels a bit tired already, finding ways to build in non-essential interactions becomes vital for successful culture.

Even working memes into company culture would help. As we build desired culture elements, leave in personal interactions, family talk, and all that. It’s vital. Again, people want to feel seen and understood. They want to know that their contributions belong. And part of this involves a sense of acceptance as a whole person and not just the role at hand.

Work Culture is a Verb

Remote workers have tasks and schedules and meetings and status assignments. None of these have a “build culture” task assigned to it. That means it’s up to you as a leader to keep culture in mind at every turn. With your knowledge that company culture improves employee retention, speeds instructional comprehension, and encourages stronger team dynamics, it becomes your project to keep it rolling forward at every turn. It’s simple but not easy. But the payoff is quite worth the effort in this regard.

StoryLeaderâ„¢ is built around helping leaders use stories to improve their skills around remote leadership. If you want to talk about training concepts, get in touch.

Mitch Joel is a Wizard

chrisbrogan · December 12, 2019 ·

I did a 3 part video series with my pal, Mitch Joel. He’s so smart and I just wanted to dig in and get his smarts.

You’ll learn so much if you dig into these!

How Do You Absorb Information Best?

chrisbrogan · September 9, 2019 ·

I just released a new episode of my podcast, the first in a little while. Just before I hit record, I decided to also record it as a video show (and I use the term “show” loosely as it’s just a multi-camera talking head thing). But I did it for a reason. Some of us prefer to read text (like this). Others prefer audio because they’re on the go. Still others prefer video so they can watch when they have a moment to absorb something new.

How do YOU absorb information?

That’s the video (embedded above, if you can’t see anything, maybe click here.) I used that same video to create the audio player below:

It’s essentially the same thing, but for some of you, audio is the way to go. For others, it’s all about the video footage. Still others prefer text and only text. (Obviously, if you have a hearing or sight impediment, you’ll align your preferences accordingly.) Which is it for you?

Should you produce material for all the various media types?

This becomes interesting because ultimately, this can be as simple as what I did: record once and split off the audio file. But that creates a challenge.

  • People prefer audio lengths of 20 minutes or more.
  • People prefer video lengths of 10 minutes or 20 tops.
  • People only want to read for 300-500 words tops.

If you create something ONCE, you either have to make your videos twice as long as preferred or make your audios half as long as preferred. The (nearly obvious) trick for making this still work is as follows: shoot a 10 minute video, peel out that audio, dump it into GarageBand or Audacity, and create another 10+ minutes of content to go with it. THEN you have what you can go with.

Oh. But wait. There’s a frequency issue. People PREFER daily videos. They are tuned for weekly podcast episodes. Can you create daily videos and weekly podcasts? Sure. But then you’re going to have to mix and match your production methods a tiny bit.

Should you even be thinking this way?

Yes. That’s the short answer. People want to consume your content where they want to get it. I offer a YouTube channel, a podcast, a blog, and an amazing newsletter. Why? Because I need to reach my buyers where they are. I’d do the same for clients (and have). It’s a powerful way to make it all happen.

So, what’s it going to be for you?

Sell Clean

chrisbrogan · February 20, 2019 ·

In July of 2006, I first learned of Humpy Wheeler, one of the foremost promotors of NASCAR. He was a guest on NPR’s news quiz show, “Wait Wait! Don’t Tell Me!” And what he did thrilled me.

Sell Clean

Humpy talked about running the motor speedway about 12 miles away from the theater where the episode was being filmed. He asked, “You want to come? I’ve got tickets in my pocket.”

Here’s where I have to stop explain something.

In my memory, I recall host Peter Sagal asking if he was inviting people for free. When I replayed the episode, that part doesn’t appear. Was this post-episode editing, or do I remember it wrong. (If you know me, it’s the memory.) But I’m going to tell you the story the way I remember it, not necessarily the way it was.

Humpy asked, “You want to come? I’ve got tickets in my pocket.” Peter Sagal asked, “You mean for free?” Humpy said back, “No, for sale.”

What I love about this is that Humpy Wheeler doesn’t apologize one bit. He sells a product he believes is of great value.

That’s the story for today. Sell clean. Believe in what you sell. Be clear that you’re selling it. Be clear WHAT you’re selling. And sell it often.

GoDaddy Conveniently Deletes My Fiance's New Domain Purchase

chrisbrogan · December 6, 2017 ·

After years of supporting GoDaddy (even through their rough times with public relations), I might be done defending them because of something they did to my fiance, Jacqueline.

GoDaddy Deletes a Domain Purchased From Their Site

So here’s the story. On Tuesday the 5th, Jacqueline calls me all excited and tells me that GoDaddy has new .health domains available. She purchases “woman.health” right then and there. She’s very excited about it. The price was $99.99 though Jacq had a coupon to drop it to 80.17. You can see that the purchase went through. Here’s the email confirmation:

Today, GoDaddy sends Jacq an email with the “helpful” subject line “We deleted some items for you.” As if they’re somehow doing her a favor. Look:

Note how the email says “If this is a mistake, please contact us.” Well yes it’s a mistake. This wasn’t Jacq’s request. GoDaddy changed their mind on the price.

Customer Service Doesn’t Help

Jacq proceeds to call “Breanna” who says that the domain was priced wrong. She puts Jacq on hold. She says it’s priced wrong. There’s nothing they can do. They can’t keep the sale because it’s not their policy. She says it’s Icann’s problem, and their price. And so they put it back on sale on the site. Here it is back on GoDaddy for $649:

(Mind you, Jacq bought it from GoDaddy.)
Breanna goes on to say that all .health domains cost a minimum of $500. Jacq says that’s crazy and proceeds to look up a bunch:



So clearly this isn’t accurate, either.
Breanna says “I don’t know. That must be incorrect.” Jacq asks if maybe there are more domains priced wrong? She couldn’t answer.
Jacq asked for a supervisor. Hold. Breanna says she can’t find a supervisor, but that even if she could find one, they wouldn’t be able to help her anyway, because they couldn’t honor the price, either.

No Resolution. GoDaddy Doesn’t Help

Now, I realize that this story will be published and lots of people will see this. So I panicked, because I realized that ultimately, Jacq wants this domain, so maybe I shouldn’t make a blog post talking about this without first securing the domain.
GoDaddy lets me buy it. Here it is:

So think about this.

  1. Jacq buys the domain for $80.17
  2. GoDaddy PULLS THE DOMAIN purchase from her account and emails her of this a day after the fact.
  3. GoDaddy puts the domain back up for sale for $649.
  4. I’m able to buy the domain Jacq thought she secured.
  5. GoDaddy customer service says they can’t do anything about this. And blames Icann.

So, do you think I can recommend GoDaddy as a domain registrar? Do you think I feel really comfortable with all MY domains being registered there, given this experience?
Jacq has over 100 domains registered there. I have a dozen or so. It won’t be exactly easy moving everything off, but what else can we do? Seems difficult to want to trust a company that does what they did and then couldn’t offer resolution.
What would you do?

Part 2 Coming Soon

In a subsequent post, I’ll tell you what any company of any size can do to avoid this example of bad customer service, and I’ll also share how this problem is resolved (or not).

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