Scale like a shark with AvidXchange
It’s obvious really. If you want to learn the secrets of successful scaling, go to a company that boasts both record growth and a top employer rating.
We talked to AvidXchange, who are transforming the bill payment industry, automating invoice and payment processes for over 5,500 clients throughout North America. AvidXchange have not only grown massively, they have been recognised as one of the Best Places to Work in Charlotte for 7 consecutive years.
Their Senior Vice President of Human Capital and Talent Management, Todd Cunningham, is well placed to advise on team scaling, culture and long term planning. Todd used to work at Bank of America, where he managed a team of 60 performance consultants working with 140,000 employees across the globe.
What’s your biggest challenge at the moment?
One big one is our continued need to hire talent (current job openings at AvidXchange can be found here). We’re growing extremely fast at the moment — this year to date we’ve hired 230 people, taking us up to a total headcount of over 850. We’re a technology company, so the job marketplace is highly competitive both in the US and globally. There was a recent Manpower study that came out highlighting IT talent as the second biggest labour shortage worldwide, so to be able to hire top talent, we need to continue to be a brand that people want to work for.
Why do people want to work at AvidXchange?
We have a real mission — to revolutionise the entire payments industry. This is something that both existing and prospective employees get very passionate about.
On the people side, we have some of the sharpest and most driven professionals you’ll ever meet. There is a real energy in our company. Honestly, you can feel it, and it comes alive in our people. On more than one occasion customers have told us that they selected us over our competitors because of that energy. When you look at our new campus, ‘The Foundry’, that’s what you see. It’s reflected in the gaming centres, basketball courts, yoga studio and gym. Our employees don’t just work hard, they also enjoy just being together.
As AvidXchange is growing so rapidly, how do you maintain your culture?
Our senior leadership spend most of their time focused on culture: who we are and how we deliver to our customers.
One of the things we focus on is making sure new employees are onboarded in the right way. The first week is all about the culture. It’s really important for new team members to get the culture so that they can begin delivering on the work we have for them.
To help with this, we use ‘Scavify’, a competitive scavenger hunt app where new starts learn about AvidXchange’s culture, products and the company. New employees can also communicate with each other on the app and customise their experience.
Beyond the first week, the manager takes the lead and talks more specifically about the work area, and the work itself.
We’ve also built out Avid University, where any team member can create and teach content about topics they are passionate about, whether it’s product knowledge, the market, the business, our culture or our customers. This has been great for sharing knowledge — one of the ways we like to “Teach Forward” so that everyone has all the information they need to do their jobs.
How do you get feedback about the employee experience?
The main way we do this is with our annual survey called “Avid Awesomeness”. One of the questions is: ‘How likely are you to recommend AvidXchange to someone you know?’, which gives us key data about how we are doing overall.
Once we find the opportunities to improve, the key is then to work with people to be sure they are satisfied. We do routine mini-surveys to check in on progress. All this is managed by our external agency Quantum Workplace to maintain anonymity.
We also look for further opportunities from external sources such as the Charlotte Business Journal and third party review sites like Glassdoor.
Could you give an example of how you have followed up on feedback?
We received feedback that we could improve our formal communication processes.
So, we decided to have a Shark Tank to figure out what could be — complete with the theme music of the TV show and Shark Fin hats!
In our Shark Tank, the executive team are the sharks, and the Avid Xers form teams to give pitches around their ideas. Our culture is really to have fun with reacting to the feedback.
One team pitched an idea to improve our regular company catchup. Every Monday the entire company comes together for 15 minutes, to talk about what’s important that week. This is something we’ve done for 17 years, despite our growth and now being in multiple locations.
The new idea was to turn that meeting into the “AvidXchange newscast”, complete with newscasters, and a studio audience. That’s exactly what we’ve done. That process has been in place since January and has turned out to be incredibly productive — helping us communicate business information in a way that people enjoy being part of.
Do you have any controversial views about building teams?
We hire on culture fit — people who have a natural curiosity for continuous learning, who have high energy and drive to be part of a winning team and to be great teammates.
One tool we use to figure out culture fit is the McQuaig personality profile (see a sample profile here). We’ve got 17 years of history of using this tool - every single prospective hire fills out the online survey as they show interest in joining our company. This helps us get a sense of natural behavioural tendencies. Over time we have become very good at knowing what tendencies fit AvidXchange generally and what works for particular jobs. We know we can build skills, so being independent and creative, willing to think outside the box for solutions to common problems, is much more important.
This talent assessment becomes an input into the onboarding and development of new employees. This helps maintain strengths and highlight opportunities to develop and grow.
With such a shortage of technical skills, how do you deal with the pressure to hire on that basis over culture fit?
When you’re in a fast paced company with the need for certain skill sets, there is a natural tension between those needs and ensuring cultural fit. We’ve been able to maintain a strong record that tells you we select for culture because of the way we manage our existing talent and hiring.
We’ve instituted something I brought with me from Bank of America — an annual Strategic Talent Planning Process. This is where we forecast what skills we’ll need over the next three years to make sure we know in advance who we have to bring in or train up.
We’re also able to reassign internal resources if there are pressing immediate needs that come up. AvidXchange employees share their skillsets and interests in a profile, so we can look beyond the immediate visibility of a particular manager. We also post our jobs internally, so people can look for movement within the company.
If you were trapped on a desert island, and you only have one people management tool, which would it be?
I hope it’s a nice desert island!
My answer is Rhythm Systems. This is a tool/business approach we’ve been using since the beginning of the company.
How AvidXchange uses the Rhythm System
Using this tool, we connect our 10 year strategy with a number of 3 to 5 year actions we call “winning moves”. This then links to an annual plan and then finally a quarterly plan, which we call a “13 week sprint”.
Every quarter (we’ve done it for 66 consecutive quarters!), the leadership team spends 3 days together, talking about what worked and what the goals are for the next quarter. We then spend a day with the next level of leadership (our “senior operation leaders”).
An afternoon after that we pull the entire company together at all the locations to engage around the plan. “Here is how we did last quarter, this is what is important this quarter, how we’re going to make that work and let’s talk about what questions you have, what concerns you have.”
This aligns again to our annual plan, our 3–5 “winning moves” and back to the 10 year strategy, bringing together teams based on universally visible measurements.
A lot of companies are quite good at strategic planning but they fall down at the execution. Some companies are good at execution, but they don’t have a broad strategic framework. We find that the Rhythm System gets us both.
Being this deliberate on the planning side is the 20% of effort that gets us 80% of the outcome for engagement and team alignment.
Too often for a variety of reasons, companies miss a step, only to later run into some problems that are difficult to fix. That’s why we’re committed to spend the time upfront.
We talk about what we are doing “this Rhythm” on employees’ very first day as part of our Avid culture class.
Do you have any tips for ramping up hiring processes?
One tool I’d also bring with me to that desert island is ‘RIVS’, which stands for ‘Remote Interview Video System’. We’ve used this for about a year. Our recruiters send out a recorded video, linked to our culture and who we are as a company, with 3–5 questions. This gives us a better sense of who they are.
RIVS takes out a lot of the burden of scheduling, allowing us to quickly get to a broad group of people. This has allowed us to double our throughput.
How would you describe AvidXchange in a single tweet?
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