Facebook’s new office in Palo Alto

If you’re interested in showing people you’re committed to a work environment, the easiest way to do that is by getting rid of your private offices. Seriously. While this isn’t the only way to show your committed to the free-flow of information, I believe it’s a powerful way of setting the stage—so to speak—for your employees to pick up on the importance of free-flow information, feedback, and ultimately, success.

When I was a little kid in Winnipeg, Canada, I attended the first “open concept” school, which meant that there were no classrooms, no walls, and lots of great buzz. Sure, there were lots of distractions, but also lots of absorbing what others were doing, too. From this experience, I learned how to focus when I had to, and also how to filter out what I could learn from others around.

Building an open office doesn’t mean that the employees work out in the open and CEO and other senior staff can retreat to private offices. Everyone has to be out in the open—and I mean everyone. Of course, you can still have groups of people with glass walls between some areas. For example, why not create the “Finance Fishbowl” and put all the finance people in one area and give them a glass wall if needed. You can also go radical and have the only barriers be forty-two inch high work stations–that’s only three and a half feet, so you really aren’t blocking much at all.   Everyone can see everyone, which means no hiding.  If you aren’t working, it’ll be obvious.

The benefits of an open work space are numerous. For starters, open offices teach you to filter out the noise and still concentrate on your work. They also allow everyone to hear what’s going on, which means they’ll understand others’ roles better. Best of all? You’ll feel the energy and togetherness grow within the company because you can see everyone more than when they are hiding out in walled offices. Obviously if you want to have private work areas, spots to take confidential phone calls, or little places for private discussions, you can still have lots of small meeting rooms. But whatever you do, get out of your offices!

pic Chill Out Point

This interview with Sarah Robinson – the famed Escaping Mediocrity blogger – is all about Building an Awesome Company Culture.

No need to really say more – it’s worth the 1 hour listen -

Download it here… http://bit.ly/crhpHM – only takes 45 seconds…

It should really be called Dagney & Hank…

When culture has a chance to flow freely from individuals and across an organization, it grows stronger and more rapidly.

Once you get rid of private offices, make sure your employees aren’t divided from one another either.

Mix in sales with engineering, marketing with support. Put members of your leadership team in various parts and floors of the office.

Not only will this build culture, but also it will enhance each employee’s understanding of what other people do in your company.

How can you possibly be connected to your customer or your employees if all your la-di-daa senior executives are on the top floor or in a corner office with the door closed?

Don’t act all ‘Les Nessman’ by removing yourself from the same space your employees occupy. If you sit with them there won’t be an us/them mentality, and you’ll absorb the same work culture your employees do.

If you have private office, take a sledge hammer to the walls and put the door on eBay.

Also ideas like a ‘Dream Room’, a ‘Wii Room‘ and a ‘Nap Room‘ will be very popular and drastically help break down department barriers and reduce employee turnover.

What does your office environment look like when you first walk in? Is it organized? Fun? Stimulating?

People should be able to get an idea for what it’s like to work in your office from the moment they walk through the front door.

If you don’t bother with first impressions, believe me, people notice.

One of the companies I’ve mentored for years is called Nurse Next Door. The very first time I visited their office in British Columbia, paper and boxes were everywhere. It was a disaster, and I told them that.

They listened, and every Wednesday ever since then, they have held “Wasteless Wednesday,” a day where they throw out anything they can to make the office, the walls, and people’s desks look clean and neat.

The difference in their space and the mood of employees has been profound: the energy is different, and they can actually fit more people into the same space without feeling crowded at all. Best of all, just recently, they were named #1 Company to Work for In British Columbia!

Oh and here’s a tip, since it’s 2010 and all: GO PAPERLESS!!

Open spaces create transparent and energized work environments.

This leads to the development and transmission of office culture across people, departments, and finally, the entire organization.

Years ago, at 1-800-GOT-JUNK? we had all our employees on two wide open floors in an office. There were no walls.

Then we moved into a downtown office tower and had to use the 14^th floor of the building for the better part of a year while our real office space was constructed.

For the first time ever people had private offices, and it was interesting to see what happened.  For the first week or so, people loved having their own space.  They felt more focused, appeared to get more done and had the quiet they needed to think.  Then, after a week, the chatter started. People said, “I miss everyone,” and, “Where is Greg? I haven’t seen him in ages,” or, “Is so-and-so sick today?” It went on and on.  After about three weeks, it was unanimous: private offices killed the buzz and employees wanted their open workspace back.

Everyone knows you’re hiding out in your private office playing on FaceBook, Twitter or surfing porn.  So go join the rest of your team – open up your entire office space.  When I mentor CEOs I push them all to get rid of private offices.  Including their own.

This slide is at Google’s Zurich office.

Nothing kills creativity like boring photos on the walls or using super-traditional board and conference rooms when you’re running a new and exciting business venture. Boring rooms, mean boring employees, mean customers go elsewhere.

Go a little crazy and use the physical space as a blank canvas to elevate the mood of the team. For example, at 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, one of our boardrooms was called the Blue Sky Room.  We had a huge wall with a blue sky and clouds.

ReThink Marketing in Vancouver has a Lego room, a drum set, globes hanging from the ceiling, a ping pong ball board room table and Astro turf for carpet.

Don’t be confined to some old school vision of the workplace. You’re not an old school company.  Plus you’ll get Free Publicity from building an awesome company culture.

Some of you will balk at the suggestion to make it easier to socialize at your office, but it will quickly help you develop culture. Provide your people with a BBQ that is always kept clean and ready to use with propane so people can cook casually for lunch or dinner. This kind of interaction builds culture in an authentic and relatable way. With even less effort, have your kitchen stocked with free fruit, cereal, various coffees, teas and more. You can even have the food delivered weekly by the grocery store. Whatever you do, make people feel at home and they’ll work longer and harder for you.

I have a client in Toronto that I mentor called I Love Rewards. Two years in a row they’ve been ranked as one of the top companies to work for in Canada.  They actually create rewards programs to help employers create great cultures – so they get it.

One of the things I love most about I Love Rewards is that they have an employee area called the Red Point Lounge. Every Friday at 3pm, you can go have a drink there.  Their company drink is called the Red Point.  They have these little crystal glasses with Red Point etched into it, and all the employees – I’ve got one too – carry a little card that has the recipe for a Red Point drink on it.  A Red Point is one and a half shots of Crown Royal, one and half shots of Sour Puss Red Raspberry, and 3 shots of Red Bull. You have a couple of those and you’re cranking out some extra work at the end of the day.

In addition, the folks at I Love Rewards don’t take themselves so seriously that they can’t have a little fun. They have white leather sofas in their office. They have a casual dress code that they call “First Date Dress Code.” If you wouldn’t wear it on a first date – don’t wear it to work.  They get culture.  No-one quits I Love Rewards.

Building a magnetic and infectious culture isn’t accidental; a company has to make a conscious decision to foster and grow it.  Once a company decides to actively cultivate culture, the process required to grow it is sort of like chasing the horizon: you never quite ‘get there‘ since it’s always moving, but the journey is wonderful.

In every industry, there are companies with fantastic cultures and others with terrible ones: Google gets it, Microsoft never has—but both are tech companies.  Both have about the same amount of money and both do roughly the same thing.  However, Google decided that they wanted their culture to differentiate them from the Microsofts out there, and they succeeded.

When you walk through Microsoft’s main campus, you can actually feel a cultural void.  Everyone at Microsoft sits in the dark in their private offices cranking out code without anyone around them to engage them in simple human interaction.  Google, on the other hand, has open space and whiteboards everywhere so people can put up ideas when the spirit moves them, and have unstructured discussion time.

As one of my first mentors, Greig Clark, the founder of College Pro Painters said, “Building a great company means creating something that is slightly more than a business and slightly less than a religion.” What Greig was saying was that culture has to be more than a passing trend or some ideal to which you pay lip service—like any aspect of culture outside of the workplace, it has to be lived, experienced, and grown in order to be sustainable. It has to be a cult.  Cult-ure.

Your Painted Picture should include ALL aspects of the type of culture you want so that you attract people who fit your culture and repel those who don’t.

Pic: Tommy Panetta

I walked into my friend Kimbal’s company in Boulder, Colorado. He was an employee of mine 15 years ago and he’s been quite successful at building and selling companies since then.

Upon arriving at Kimbal’s office, I couldn’t help but notice the plethora of Herman Miller Aeron chairs—which used to go for about $800 USD. When I saw Kimbal, I remarked, “Wow, you’re really burning through cash on this new business of yours!”

Kimbal said, perplexed. “Why do you say that?”

“I saw your Herman Millar Aeron chairs everywhere!” I said. I was convinced he was already spending the millions he’d made in business.  I love Herman Miller chairs—I even have one—but I couldn’t imagine buying one for every employee.

So then Kimball asked, “You didn’t see the desks did you?”

I hesitated. “No, I didn’t see the desks.”

“Go take a look,” he said knowingly.  So I walked outside, took a look, and noticed he had all these white plastic fold-up tables pulled up to those fantastic $800 Herman Miller chairs. So I walked back to Kimball and said, “What’s with all of the fold-up tables?”

Kimbal paused for a moment. “Well, everyone wants to have an amazing chair.  You want to attract amazing people and keep them happy? Don’t give them a $200 chair.  Everybody out there buys $1,000-$2,000-$3,000 workstations or desks and they buy crumby $250 chairs.  So I buy $100 desks from Costco and Ikea, and $800 chairs.

My employees love me, never quit, and everybody walks in and sees we’re successful, but they don’t realize we spent $850 on each desk and chair while other companies spend $3,000 on their desk and chair – do the math!”

Expensive desks won’t support your back and make you more productive, expensive chairs will.

If Monkeys could be Business Mentors

I threw out the corporate 360 Reviews years ago in favor of something I made up that I call ‘Monkeys Looking Sideways’.

Years ago at a seminar I heard a story about monkeys in a tree.  When the monkey at the top looked down all he saw was smiling monkeys looking up.  However, the monkeys below had an entirely different view.

It was at this seminar that I thought about doing 360 Reviews live and in front of the rest of the team.  I always try to build teams that embrace healthy conflict and that want to build more trust.  Well open communication like this takes trust up to an awesome level.  I built this exercise so everyone on a team would know what everyone else thought and they’d hear it in person so they could grow together.

The Monkeys Looking Sideways exercise works like this.

Essentially it is a verbal, in person, group 360 feedback. Ideally get everyone out of the office for a half to a full day.  It’s a great exercise to do on company or team retreats too.

1) Give everyone 1 pad of Post It Notes and a pen.
2) Do the review of the groups leader or CEO first.
3) Have each person write down the TOP 5 things that the person being reviewed:

a) Should continue
b) Should improve on

4) Then with the person being review staying in their seats, have one person at a time stand up and read out each post it note.  Start with all the positives first and then they read the stuff to work on second.
5) The person being reviewed can only say thank you or ask a clarifying question.  There is no debate.
6) Have all of the Post It Notes put up on a flip chart and give them to the person being reviewed so they can type them up and refer to them in their one-on-one coaching meetings with their supervisor over the year to keep working on improving.
7) Repeat the process for each person in the room.

This exercise done properly takes about 45 min per person but will be way more effective than the garbage that comes out of any online or 3rd party 360 Review Process.

In addition to using it in your company try it with an EO, YPO Forum or TEC/Vistage group on a retreat too.  It’d be awesome…