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

As a CEO coach, I would advise you that 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. As their business coach, I honestly told them that it was a disaster.

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!!

As a business coach and mentor, I always assure my clients that open spaces will always 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. This is one piece of good and effective advice that I always tell CEOs that I coach and mentor.

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.

One of the businesses that I coach and mentor is a company 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…

Zappos Gets Culture

This post is from a guest blog post I wrote last week for McNeill Nakamoto a great Vancouver recruiting firm.  Jessica Rozitis kindly let me re-run it here.

In October, I had the opportunity to visit the current cultural buzz factory ‘Zappos’ the billion dollar online shoe store.

I got a unique opportunity to have dinner with their CEO Tony Hsieh & their COO Alfred Lin.  The following day which was Saturday they set up a 90 minute exclusive tour for 12 of us followed by an additional 90 minute  behind the scenes Q&A session where they really opened up to us.

To start with – I was intrigued and a little bit cynical.  Where they REALLY as good as all this press was saying ?

I’d been the Chief Operating Officer for 1-800-GOT-JUNK? during the heyday of the companies growth and cultural buzz.  During the midst of my tenure I was lucky to be there when we ranked #1 Company to Work For in BC two years in a row by BC Business Magazine and then ranked #2 in all of Canada to Work For.  I knew how the whole culture thing worked.  I saw how we cranked it up – and I saw it go up and down at various points during our growth.  We were having tours & Q&A’s of our company every Friday during those days too.  Were they really this good ? What did they do differently ?

I’d also helped build a couple other companies over the years with awesome cultures. College Pro Painters was where I cut my teeth with culture, and Ubarter.com was where I had fun trying it the dotcom way.  1-800- GOT-JUNK? was where we nailed it.

So with Zappos, I just wanted to see if they were REALLY as good as all their press said (and I’ve had lots of experience getting Free PR too)…..

Here is what I learned at Zappos.  I wouldn’t say I was blown away – I wasn’t – but it was damn good and I learned.  I was and still am in awe of HOW DEEPLY rooted their CEO & COO both live the core values that eminate throughout the company.  I have to go back on a weekday now too – to be fair – in an office that seats 700 people only about 20 were milling about.  My bet is the energy is mind blowing when they bring me back.

Key Points I saw and learned:

—First 10 hires are the most important people to ever hire.  They hire everyone else and they set the direction of the company culturally.

—Core values first…Make all your decisions based on them.  They asked employees what the core values should be and they call each other on them daily.

—They grade employees on how they are living the core values in all roles, two times a year.

—They bring job candidates from the airport in a shuttle. And after they drop off the candidate they ask the driver for his thoughts on the candidates fit culturally – the interview starts at the airport.

—To figure out your company core values they really pushed to have us ask ourselves what are our own personal core values….the company values come out of those.

—Core values should be short phrases not just single words like “passion”

—They tell the employees that they are responsible for care taking the core values.

—Culture is like what makes a flock of birds work with out leaders as they all fly and turn as a group. It’s their cultural DNA.

—As their CEO Tony said – if you don’t fire people for not following core values they become a meaningless plaque on the wall (the values – not the people)

—In 2003 they decided they wanted to be about customer service. So they cut a profitable model of drop shipping to REALLY focus on Customer Experience – and um – it’s working.

—Most important thing they’ve done is exceed expectations.

—Every year they print and give out a Culture Book (I got copies of 2008 & 2009) and it is only edited for grammar and spelling.

—Tony is obsessed with Happiness  – and suggests we all read the “Happiness Hypothesis”

—I think their quirky decorating of all workstations is a little bit too cluttered, dusty, and could use a few days of junk removal – but if that’s the only negative I found then even a guy with all my A.D.D. could turn a blind eye.

These guys GET Culture.  I only wish I could buy shares in the company.  Too bad Amazon bought the whole company for over $900 Million a few months ago.

Cameron Herold, BackPocket COO at Zappos

Some say I’m not a good listener – but I sure try.  I’ve actually learned a ton about listening over the years of being a CEO coach.  I’m actually a great listener when I shut up and don’t cut people off while they are talking.

This is a photo of Katie Reiach, Founder of www.SparkGroup.ca and I.  She’s the woman who led the PR Team of 6 people for me at 1-800-GOT-JUNK? when I was there as COO years back.

As Katie put it when she sent me this photo from a www.TEDx.com event – it’s a slightly traumatizing photo of both – but it’s proof that I listen    Especially when there is something to be heard.