Barry Carson of MojoDesk: Five Things Business Leaders Can Do To Create A Fantastic Work Culture

Something that will be important is providing a new level of flexibility with your employees to mix and blend the work from home model with work from the office. We’ve set a new standard of what can be done at home, and as management, we need to accept the benefits of that and try to tie in the benefits of that work experience to get a better overall employee experience.

As a part of my series about about how leaders can create a “fantastic work culture”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Barry Carson.

Barry loves figuring out how new technologies can be used to make someone’s life simpler. In 1991, MojoDesk’s parent company Xybix saw the potential in designing user-friendly, ergonomic, sit-to-stand desks for organizations that needed their employees healthy, alert and productive 24/7.

Since then, they have sold directly to businesses and government agencies such as the FBI, Mayo Clinic, fire departments, and thousands of 911 call centers. MojoDesk division was started in 2018. It is the brand’s first direct to consumer product and built to the same commercial standards.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

In the early the 90s, no one had really heard about sit-to-stand desks. It was kind of a rare thing. When we developed our first sit-to-stand desk, most companies we spoke to didn’t really understand why they needed this. They were thinking it would be for someone with an injured back, not necessarily for increased health and better work performance. Throughout the years, we had developed a product that met the sit-to-stand, ergonomic standard, even before it came out because we already knew what the height ranges would be to meet the different sizes of the population. When the sit-to-stand standard came out, there was something to measure it against, and we had already met that standard. The whole world started to see that you can sit and stand, then probably eight years ago, we started to hear that sitting is the new smoking, and things have really taken off since then.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company?

As we were selling our sit-to-stand desks to Hewlett Packard, the company split from being just Hewlett Packard to HP and Agilent Technologies. At the time of the split, they had to integrate all of the employees who were working in their buildings because everyone was working next to each other. They had to do what they call re-stack, in which they tear everything out of the floor, furniture included, and they rebuild it back. One floor went to HP and another floor went to Agilent, and so on. We had been selling them our sit-to-stand desk, but when this change happened, they told us that they were no longer going to purchase from us. At that time, we knew who the furniture supplier was supposed to be, and we knew they did not have a sit-to-stand desk that had adequate range to meet the ergonomic standards. We told them to have this company bring in their sit-to-stand desk representative, so they could interview him and find out if this desk can do what HP had specifically asked us to be able to do. They brought the representative in, and they told him what height ranges they needed to fit different sizes of people. The representative flat out told them this doesn’t exist. HP’s ergonomist said, “Well, let me take you out back here, and I’ll show you a couple hundred of them.” We ended up building the sit-to-stand desk inside of the cubicle for about 3,500 workstations. It was a huge launching point for our company. A project that big allowed us to buy new machinery and equipment and really upgrade how we did everything to improve our product.

Are you working on any exciting projects now? How do you think that will help people?

We have a number of new products in the pipeline. Some of them deal with the whole experience of the worker. Instead of just the sit-to-stand desk, this also takes into account lighting, temperature, heat and elements to make your work environment more comfortable, so you can stay focused, stay in the groove longer and get more work done.

We do have a new product launching in June, which we are super excited about.

Ok, lets jump to the main part of our interview. According to this study cited in Forbes, more than half of the US workforce is unhappy. Why do you think that number is so high?

I think a lot of that is attributed to people learning to be a good CEO, supervisor or boss and understanding how people work best. Often times, people are thrown into that position, usually with no training, but it’s not easy to learn how to be a manager. Now, there are a lot of other factors. That’s probably 50% of it. The other half can be environmental, for example, I’m always cold at my desk. That can be a reason. Or, I’m just uncomfortable. I go home and I’m tired. I don’t have energy to go play with my kids. If we can make the environment as best we can, hopefully, we can fix some of those problems.

Based on your experience or research, how do you think an unhappy workforce will impact a) company productivity b) company profitability c) and employee health and wellbeing?

An unhappy workforce does the minimum that needs to be done to get by, rather than sticking their neck out with something that could be could be risky but could be game changing. They stay quiet and hold back. That leaves you with an organization that moves very slowly and isn’t able to break out into new categories.

The products that make bigger margins are the ones that are unique and special, and somebody had to present an idea that may not be accepted the first time or not at all, but you’ve got to get in there somewhere. It may not be accepted, but maybe you thought about it because it might be such a revolutionary idea that it takes a while for people to let it soak in and understand it.

As we move into the new world of the office, it’s going to be a mix of more at home and in the office. And a lot of that is also going to be people wanting to be healthier nowadays, and they don’t want their work to negatively impact their health. It’s critical that we have work environments, schedules, locations and flexibility that let people stay moving, have different exercise options to move around and change environments. One of the risks that we have with the new work from home model is that a lot of people are working at home on a terrible old steel or wooden desk that doesn’t adjust and is not the right height for them. We’re actually inviting more ergonomic injuries by having them work at home. That’s an area that’s going to need some attention to get appropriate ergonomic furniture for them in their own offices.

Can you share 5 things that managers and executives should be doing to improve their company work culture? Can you give a personal story or example for each?

I think as soon as possible, we need to get people reengaged in person. Once the vaccines are in, we need to get people back together. In a lot of companies, we have new teammates we’ve never even met. The togetherness is what helps build the culture in our company, so we need to work to rebuild that.

As management, we need to show that we do care for employees’ needs at work, their space needs and their physical setup. The temperatures, the lighting, the desk, every part of the work environment. We have to make sure our people can focus enough to ultimately get their work done.

Something that will be important is providing a new level of flexibility with your employees to mix and blend the work from home model with work from the office. We’ve set a new standard of what can be done at home, and as management, we need to accept the benefits of that and try to tie in the benefits of that work experience to get a better overall employee experience.

We need to have in-person meetings with our new teammates that some of us have never met. Schedule in-person meetings to get to know the company and its culture and have people tell them our company stories. Things like how we built the company, why we’re good at what we do and how we make our customers’ lives easier.

We’ll need to rethink workspace organization to promote interaction with employees but also ensure they have private space where they can get their work done. We took it a bit too far with the open office environment. We lost some productivity and employee satisfaction. By balancing out private workspaces and more open workspaces, we can have a more productive team.

It’s very nice to suggest ideas, but it seems like we have to “change the culture regarding work culture”. What can we do as a society to make a broader change in the US workforce’s work culture?

I think a lot of the change in work culture has already happened because of the pandemic. Companies have accepted work from home as a real possibility in many positions where it would not have been considered before. The challenge now is not to go back to our old ways but learn how to mix the work from home with some in-office work to provide the benefits of both the better culture and the better home life.

How would you describe your leadership or management style? Can you give us a few examples?

I like to get out with my employees and find their wants and needs outside of work because it helps us align goals and rewards for their successes.

For example, I have an employee who is big on fishing, and I am not a big fisherman, but I went out and did some fishing with him and understood what he enjoyed from it. I’ve learned it’s the separation and break from work life. It gives him an escape. I can use that with rewards — a trip or something to help with those breaks.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

I’ve been in business with my father since 1991, and he’s always given me good, solid business advice. He kept me out of trouble when I was a young, feisty 20-year-old in the business world and made sure that we always do business ethically and financially sound.

We had a big project that we were in the running to win. We were a small, scrappy startup at that time, and we really needed the business. The potential client asked us essentially for a kickback if they awarded it to us. That’s when my father immediately said, “No way, we don’t even want to do business with these guys.” At the time, it was hard because we needed the project, but in the end, it turned out we found other projects, and we succeeded. It was definitely a good lesson.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

My brother, father and I have been volunteer ski patrollers for about 30+ years each, and we go on weekends and help people injured people that need assistance.

When we make videos for our MojoDesk products, we also give back to the community by taking our videographer and making videos for small businesses. This initiative is called “MojoDesk Give Back.” We did a video for a hairstylist, so now they have good content to use. We do it free.

We’ve also done that for 911 Call Centers. We’ll go and make recruiting videos for them because like a lot of companies these days, they’re struggling to find good employees, so we give them a killer video to help entice people to come and sign up. We’ve seen success with that — one customer had double the amount of new applicants.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

Since we do a lot of R&D and product development, and product development never is linear, “Discover things that work or don’t work.” Things change a lot.

Another one of my favorite quotes is “Fail fast, fail often, fail forward.” The goal of that is to break things quickly, so that you find the problems with it and you’re able to address them when they’re still a small issue or you’re in the design phase where it’s easy to change, rather than leaving an error or a fly in until you’re at the very end and fixing it has then become too much work. Then you find yourself needing to push out a product that shouldn’t have those flaws. SpaceX is a great example. They’ve crashed how many rockets and blown them up and they go, “Hey, we got data from that.” Everyone else is saying, “Oh my gosh, they blew up a rocket.” And then they figured it out on the next one.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I would find a way to teach people empathy and how to see it in others. Right away, it takes away a lot of anger and differences that people pretend there are.

Thank you for these really excellent insights, and we greatly appreciate the time you spent with this. We wish you continued success.