Digital Pond: EP#5 Anouk Agussol— How to Scale Culture and Build a Happy Team for Remote-First Digital Working
In this episode, we’re joined by CEO and founder of Unleash.Company, Anouk Agussol.
Unleash works with startups to build and execute on great people’s strategies, operational, infrastructural and cultural workstreams.
Through their work, they’re able to help businesses build their culture, improve recruitment and make sure that teams are super productive, highly engaged and performing to the best of their abilities.
During this chat with Anouk we’ll explore how businesses are going to adapt in the future as we shift towards a remote first or hybrid style of working, why a toxic culture is bad for everyone and why bosses need to show consideration towards their staff’s personal life and how it impacts their professional life.
You can listen to the webinar in full on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
You can find the full transcript for the podcast below.
Transcript
Danny Bluestone
Hey, Anouk, it’s great to have you here today. How have you been? How’s the week been?
Anouk Agussol
Hi, Danny, thanks very much for having me. The week has been great. Tomorrow is Friday, which is a team day for us we’ve spent a lot of the day collaborating and learning. So, it’s always a joy coming into this day because that’s like my Friday.
Danny Bluestone
Cool. So, tell us a bit more about what you’re doing at unleashed.
Anouk Agussol
Yeah. Hi, everybody. My name is Anouk. I’m CEO and founder of unleashed, we work with growing startups and scaling businesses, on all things, people and culture, really helping them to establish strong foundations for growth, making sure they’ve got the right practices and processes in place to really help them scale both successfully and sustainably, working with them businesses as well to really put people at the heart of business strategy, so that people are enabled to grow the business in the way that the business wants to grow.
Danny Bluestone
Thanks, that’s great intro. I guess the key word here is culture and obviously we’ve seen it, where we said some businesses have fantastic cultures where people are empowered and of course, the examples where cultures become toxic. What really, most aspiring and visionary people want to build a strong culture, but what is really required to build that amazing culture?
Anouk Agussol
Yeah, so we can start there with, what is culture? But that’s really hard to define because culture is in affects everything, you have one, whether you craft or whether you can identify or not, it’s just how you do things around here and it’s not based on what’s said in a business, it’s based on what’s done in a business.
So really a leader’s role is to create an environment where a culture can grow. And that’s made up of everything, your processes, your policies, your values, your belief systems, psychological safety, and so on. And I think what’s really important when we talk about culture is also more obviously values and their associated behaviors because your culture will grow off the back of what you role model as a leader, what you tolerate and what you don’t tolerate, what’s okay to happen in the business and what’s not okay to happen in the business.
I think there’s a couple of misconceptions, however, around good culture versus bad culture because that can be really subjective. The kind of environment that I might thrive in might be a very different environment to what somebody else feels is a good culture for them to be able to work in. What does exist 100% is toxic cultures. And the difference between what for me is a good culture or for me is a bad culture.
A toxic culture is the kind of culture that really is bad for everyone and predominantly bad for people’s health. And often that happens when there’s an inauthenticity when it comes to leadership. So, the leader might say something and might want something to be a particular way but they behave very differently. So, there’s a lot of inconsistency and inauthenticity, which means that things start to become toxic because people don’t know where they stand, what they’re doing, how things work. They think that something should be one thing and it’s actually a different thing entirely.
Danny Bluestone
Wow, that’s a great explanation and I guess one of the things that you do is help to encourage business leaders and managers to revitalize or revamp their culture. It doesn’t sound like an easy thing, right?
Anouk Agussol
No, it’s not. It’s definitely not an easy thing. But I’m a big believer
[inaudible: 00:04:54 ]
the earlier you start or the sooner you start, the easier it is. For a lot of people to a really strange concept to very early in the business journey, define or craft your culture but actually it makes it far easier to steer the ship or the speedboat if you like, if you’ve thought about these things early, so what we typically do is we will go into businesses and ask them what kind of culture they would like to have in one to five years’ time and why. And we work with leadership teams on this and the reason why that’s important is because it’s really important to get alignment across the leadership team, about what a great culture for their business looks like because they can then hold themselves a little bit more accountable.
And then what you can do is you can think about as part of that workshop, what is it that you want to see? What is it that you want to hear? What is it that you want to feel in your business? as it grows up? How will it be as an adult? If you were to write the GlassDoor of you and we talk about this a lot, and it’s quite a fun exercise, If you were to write a future GlassDoor of you, what would it say? And then that starts to give you your outcome, your success criteria and then as a result, you can start to make plans and build plans, you’re not going to get there straightaway, but you start to become very intentional about your behavior, about how you’re going to get there.
Danny Bluestone
It’s almost like reverse engineering…
Anouk Agussol
100%
Danny Bluestone
…beginning at the end and then working backwards step. That’s really interesting and another question is… obviously, once somebody hires you to start improving their… building their culture or defining it, is everybody aligned? And how do you deal with alignment?
Anouk Agussol
No, not everybody is always aligned. It’s quite common that people haven’t taken the time either as a result of capability or capacity to sit down as a group and talk about culture, unless you’ve got a people person in place, it’s very common that that hasn’t happened. So actually, when you first start talking about culture in the business, you find lots of different things that people want and some of those are very different to each other. So, then it’s a case of workshopping the impact of different things. I think what people forget a lot, for example, is like Org design. So, depending on what kind of structure you want in your business and this is just kind of an example of the different things to think about, depending on what kind of structure that will impact your culture. So, if you’re very hierarchical, then there’s going to be more bureaucracy, probably, communication will often be top down, there’ll be less voices that will be heard. But actually, decision making will probably be quite quick and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Well, if you have a culture that’s far more holographic and people spend a lot more time collaborating and ideating, then you’re going to have more voices being heard, you’re going to have people who are able to perhaps bring themselves to work a little bit more, there’s probably going to be a bit more conflict but that could be maybe managed in better ways.
But decision making might be slower, because more people will be involved in that process. So, things like structure will make a big difference to your culture as well. So yes, getting alignment on all of those aspects and everybody understanding the impacts is really important.
Danny Bluestone
Yeah, and culture is really important for both, attraction and hiring and also eventually creating that sense of wellbeing and making people ultimately comfortable and happy. How do you see the cultural role in those two things?
Anouk Agussol
The cultural role in wellbeing and happiness?
Danny Bluestone
Yeah,
Anouk Agussol
Yeah so, it’s huge. Happiness is a very subjective term. What makes one person happy and another person happy is quite different. But the sense of wellness is also down to the individual but it’s hugely important. If a company’s culture and how that impacts wellbeing and the desire for leaders to focus on wellbeing need selling into a business, then actually, I think there’s something a little bit wrong. I’m hugely biased, obviously but I call bullshit on splitting personal and professional lives. You can’t split them.
If I’m an individual and I’m not well, then I can’t do my best work. If most of my time is spent either at work or working, then that’s going to have a significant impact on my ability to do the good work. What it won’t impact actually is the potential that I have to be able to do good work. So, it becomes a leader’s role to really help people to be able to fulfill their potential. You spend so much time hiring people, hopefully you spend time onboarding them and if they’re not well and you don’t support them, what’s the point? In fact, to me, it actually doesn’t make sense, businesses want people to be able to perform really well and investing in people’s wellness as a result is how that’s going to happen. And that’s part of the culture, that’s part of psychological safety, that’s part of creating resilient teams, it’s super important.
Danny Bluestone
I think when we last spoke, you were talking about the difference between a resilient person to a resilient team, is one more important than the other? Or do they work together?
Anouk Agussol
Yes, I think resilient teams in business is more important than resilient individuals because it’s far easier to be resilient as a team than it is as an individual. Of course, it’s really important for individual performance and it has to exist, that people are resilient. But no person is an island. So, if you have teams that are… and I’m going to use the word again, I’ll get really sick of it resilient in your business, then it doesn’t matter if a person has a bad day because we all have them. What we all need is a team that has our backs. So resilient teams will celebrate their wins as a team, they’ll work to improve their processes and practices, they don’t blame, they learn. They know that their role as a team is to achieve together. And I say that a little bit like it’s easy, it’s not easy. It takes a lot of psychological safety and a lot of building and that takes time. But it can and should be done.
So resilient teams don’t just achieve their goals, they do achieve their goals more often and to a higher degree, but they don’t just do that. They’re also more creative they learn faster and they’re more adaptable and agile. And if you’re adaptable and agile, you’re going to thrive in a world which is continuously changing and you’re going to work far better together. And that’s why resilient teams are more important, a small amount more important to resilient individuals.
Danny Bluestone
Yeah, because you spoke about the obviously, unpredictable world that we live in and one of the things that potentially might throw a less stable team is if you keep changing their priorities, whereas a resilient team will be able to adapt better, right?
Anouk Agussol
Yeah, absolutely. Resilience helps you, it’s not about being upbeat all the time and positive all the time. It’s about actually, when there are setbacks, you can come back from that and you can come back from it really well and stronger. And there’s always going to be setbacks in business. If someone tells you that everything is rosy every day, all the time, they’re lying.
Danny Bluestone
Yeah, absolutely. And what sort of role does culture have in attraction and is it bringing talent into a business? Because one of the things that I’ve seen, obviously, we’ve been hiring a lot of people, it’s almost doubled the size of the team in the last year. And sometimes there’s the need to bring people in quickly, how can I guess a culture, a good culture, help you to source and interview and then ultimately decide who the right people are and whether they’re going to be a good cultural fit?
Anouk Agussol
Yeah, it might seem… particularly from the point of speed, it might seem a little bit back to front but actually taking the time to really codify the culture taking the time to help make sure that everybody is clear on what great looks like in this business in terms of what we’re trying to achieve and what our skills are and what our behaviors and our motivations are and the way in which we like to work.
If everybody’s clear on that, it means that you can scale the culture far faster and you can grow far faster because all the different people involved in hiring for however many roles it is, can then be responsible for making sure that they’re looking for cultural alignment at the same time during the recruitment process. And with recruiting, often what you’ll have is if you’ve got a set of values as Part and they’re genuine values of the set of values, you’ve distilled what the behaviors are, that demonstrate that those values are actually true.
It’s far easier than to interview against those values, against those behaviors rather and have questions that help you to identify if somebody is going to be able to work well in your environment or not. And therefore, you can grow at speed by taking the time. You can grow fast without doing that but what typically happens is that, then there’s a lot of miss hires and hires that don’t work out well and then all of a sudden, you’re not growing because lots of people are leaving your business and you’re having to replace them.
Danny Bluestone
Amazing wisdom there. I mean, a lot of this reminds me of Patrick Lencioni’s book ‘The advantage’ where he talks about clarity and how important that clarity is and particular behaviors and how you should hire for behaviors. So that’s amazing to hear it from someone like yourself as well. That’s fantastic.
Anouk Agussol
Yeah clarity, is hugely important. We all have a need as people and it’s a neuroscientific need. And it’s been studied and it comes from David Rock, he talks about SCARF, which is an acronym for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness. And that clarity piece feeds into our need for certainty.
Now, some of us need it more than others, some of us are quite good at just working and going with the flow. But if you’re trying to create a business, it’s all achieving a particular goal and you all want to head in the one direction rather than kind of various bits and pieces here or there. Everybody needs to be really clear on what the purpose of the business is, why does it exists? What’s the vision? What’s the mission? What are the values? What are we trying to achieve? And how are we going to achieve it? So, your strategy, what are the goals? How do they contribute to the success of the business? Where do they find meaning? And what does great performance look like? So, one of the most important things I think managers can do to have impact with their teams is very much to talk about what does ‘great’ in their particular role look like? And thinking of what I call the three A’s of performance. The first one is Action. So, what is it that people need to achieve need to get done? The second one is Ability, what are the skills and knowledge that people need to have or develop? And the third one is Attitude, such as the behaviors and the motivation.
In the highest performers, are the ones that if you bring those three A’s into a Venn diagram, they sit in the center, they have equal amounts of all of those, equally high amounts of all of those. And that’s typically because they’re super clear on what it is they need to do and what it is that ‘great’ looks like. People don’t come to work, I say, come to work that can be at home or that can be in the office. They don’t work, intending to underperform. People want to perform. And often it’s just because they don’t know what the expectations are and therefore aren’t meeting them because they’re going in blind. So that clarity piece that you mentioned is super important.
Danny Bluestone
Absolutely. And one of the most important things is like how people manage other people, like managerial skills. So, this is something that we’ve discussed before and instead of having almost a mentality of radical candor so it’s a great book by Kim Scott and she talks about caring but not over caring, where you’re able to give radical feedback and candid feedback. What are your views on the top manager skills? And how can managers who are listening to this podcast up their game and become better managers?
Anouk Agussol
Yeah, so the top two skills that…there’s a lot of skills that managers need to be able to do, but the top two, they’re going to have the biggest impact on their team’s ability to do great work is the manager’s ability to coach and the manager’s ability to provide good feedback.
Radical candor and what kind of concept that Kim Scott put together. is very good. The problem I have with it is that I see it when it gets applied in business. I see it often as an excuse for people to just be quite rude and say, oh, I’m just candid and actually you know that square in her diagram is caring and honest. And that caring piece is actually important because if you don’t deliver feedback in a way that is honest but in a way that shows you care, you’re going to stimulate threat responses in people and they’re not going to hear you anyway or they’re going to get defensive or they’re going to ignore, the freeze fight or flight piece is going to be stimulated.
So, the caring piece that is really important. So, being able to give good feedback. And it’s actually caring to give honest feedback as well. I think that’s important to know because you care about your people’s development. So, the ability to give good feedback and the ability to coach are the two most ultimate skills, that’s basically what people look for from their manager will be different from person to person because we all have different needs as individuals. So, it’s the role of the manager and it’s a responsibility that managers shouldn’t take lightly. And that they speak to the individuals within their team and they find out how will I get the best out of you? How will you get the best out of you? And how can I support that? What do you need from me? Hire amazing people and get out of their way, like unblock any blockers that they have and make sure that they’re able to do great work. Learn about the people that work within your team as humans, not as resources. And I think that’s the key pro tip.
Danny Bluestone
Interesting. So, you recommend the managers sit down with the people that they manage and have a conversation like, how do you want to be managed?
Anouk Agussol
Yeah, absolutely. One to ones shouldn’t…they can’t involve updates on what’s going on but if that can be written down, particularly in a remote world that can just be written down, have the conversations that build connection, that build safety, where people are comfortable. Like if they’ve got a problem sharing that problem because if they’re not sharing it with their manager early, it’s going to build into something that they’re going to want to try and hide and it causes bigger problems.
Talk about what’s going well for that individual, talk about how they’ve developed or haven’t developed perhaps, talk about how they’re performing against what ‘great’ looks like, role profile type. Please talk about the things that have been challenging for them, how their wellbeing is, it’s a really tough time for everybody, how are they coping? So, all of those things are important for one to ones?
Danny Bluestone
Yeah, obviously, in the last 14 months now, life and work, the lines have blurred so much because obviously, we’re working from home and people seem to each other’s living rooms, and personal things that probably could have been masqueraded now can’t be. So, that work life separations become a lot more difficult and managers have to play a role that they probably didn’t play before. What are your views on that?
Anouk Agussol
Yeah, they do. And I think it’s a good thing, if managers are able to deal with conversations around personal life well and I do think companies need to develop their managers and what’s termed soft skills but they’re not at all soft, they’re extraordinarily hard, develop managers to be able to kind of have those conversations as well. I’m not necessarily saying that everything that’s personal needs to come into the workplace but what I’m saying is that it’s very difficult for individuals to separate work and personal lives, particularly now, but it always has been to an extent. So, it’s really important for managers to be able to find ways predominantly through coaching skills to support the individuals within their team, for them to be able to do great work. And that’s what I’m saying there. I’m not talking about the individual needing to…vulnerability is important and role modeling is important but it’s ultimately for a manager, it’s how to support their team members to be able to do the best work of their life.
Danny Bluestone
Yeah, we’re heading towards hopefully some summer in this country.
Anouk Agussol
That’d be nice.
Danny Bluestone
Hopefully, I know that you don’t have a time machine where you can go into the future, let’s say into 2022, 2023. But how do you see this kind of new hybrid worlds with people, some people going into offices part time some people choosing to stay remote and trying to make work efficient because we were talking also, when we last had a conversation about asynchronous working patterns and stuff. So where do you see the world of work going now and probably, within the Digital kind of space which where most of your clients are, right?
Anouk Agussol
Yeah, absolutely. And it’s going to be hybrid. Let me cover off a few definitions because I think this is important because people talk about hybrid role working remote first, all of that a little bit differently. And, by the way, this stuff come straight out of LifeLabs, where amazing development business, if you haven’t heard of them, they’ve got some great resources on hybrid working. So, this isn’t just all mine but it’s how I’ve taken the work that they’ve done and how we’ve looked to apply it within the businesses that we’ve worked in, LifeLabs don’t just train but they do a lot of research with companies, both here and in the US actually.
So, from an office first is obviously the majority of people working in a physical location. And there are some people and this is probably what a lot of businesses will likely fall, some people who are remote here or there. Remote first is the majority of employees working remotely. Sometimes there is the option. In fact, there will be the option for people to work from their offices or hubs, fully remote or fully distributed is everybody working remotely, there is no office at all. And then hybrid, co-located employees some are remote, some are in the office, some do a bit of both and they move around between two days in the three days in the office and then at home.
So, I’m a huge believer, actually, for hybrid to truly work, but you have to operate as remote first, I think this last year or perhaps the last six months, actually, because the first six months are very much reactive in survival mode. But the last six months have been a really good opportunity to start being a little bit proactive in terms of how you’re going to make it work. If you haven’t started doing that, I think some companies will be feeling some pain, either right now or they’ll feel some pain very soon, especially as they’re trying to figure it out, by going back into the office.
What’s worked really well for businesses in the last while and what will work going forward, particularly when it comes to kind of asynchronous versus non asynchronous. There’s three buckets that we need to think about when managing hybrid and remote work. The first one, again this is straight out of LifeLabs. The first one is the managing comms or Communications, the second one is managing connection and the third one is managing energy. And what I find genius about this is when you back it like that, it makes it really easy to think if I need to manage communications, what is it that I need to be looking at? So, this is very much around, always be documenting. Everything should be written down and easy to find. This is really the only way to avoid meetings that are a waste of time, the whole zoom fatigue phenomenon, the slowing down of decision making or understanding. Write down what, why, how, who, and even that co-create a communication playbook with people in the company about this is how we are going to communicate going forward to make sure that everybody gets the right information.
Danny Bluestone
Interesting. Yeah, because we have a Slack etiquette, which is how to use Slack because obviously, not only for ourselves internally, but also for clients. And I think when you’re talking about knowledge, you referring to Wikis and systems like that?
Anouk Agussol
Yeah, Wikis. Decks that have everything written down. Notion is really handy is a place to have various links on different things. So, it could be your vision and your mission and your values. Or it could be the goals that we’ve set for the year and why we’ve set that goals. It could be meeting etiquette that you might have, it could be a Slack etiquette, it’s just everything is written down with good rationale so that people can find all of that information, including updates around how people are progressing on goals and things like that as well.
Danny Bluestone
Cool. Can you see, obviously lots of businesses and digital have benefited from, not purposely but have benefited from the pandemic and become very efficient and they’ve been able to hire people and expand and it’s forced them to go out there and hire people all over the place. Whereas before they wouldn’t, they would be confined to their geographical… 20 miles, 30 miles, 40 miles. You see a situation in the future where businesses will be hiring young talents who would not even meet their colleagues face to face or you recommend some type of combination or hybrid where those individuals were to have some real FaceTime as well?
Anouk Agussol
Yeah. Personally, I think having FaceTime, at least every now and again, is important, even those big companies that have… GitHub, for example, companies that have been remote first, for a very long time and get the teams together on a quarterly basis and it’s important to have that because that’s like the second bucket I was talking about, is managing that connection.
It’s so important that people… It’s part of our makeup, it’s part of our brain structure we’re wired to be able to be part of a group. And if you don’t feel like you belong, then you feel what’s considered social exclusion. What’s interesting with social exclusion, is that it actually stimulates the same part of the brain as physical pain. So, they’re one in the same and building that connection is important, particularly if people are new and finding those connections is critical. Some of the things that we’ve actually seen over the last year is that there’s this… in a number of businesses, the team that was pre pandemic and the team that has started since the pandemic who haven’t met anybody and the turnover or the employee churn amongst the people who have started since the pandemic started is higher than those that had started before, because they haven’t had the ability to build friendships and connections, get emotionally connected with people or have kind of really good social interactions. So that’s something that’s really important. And that’s the stuff you can’t do asynchronously, that’s the stuff that can’t be written down. It’s about having really good face to face time with people, definitely.
Danny Bluestone
Yeah. So, all of the companies that have their quarterly retreats and quarterly… that’s the way to do it, basically.
Anouk Agussol
Yes, there’s also options around if you’re going to be remote first but there’s lots of things to cover off during onboarding that perhaps you come to wherever it might be for a two-week onboarding period, you put up in a hotel, you get to know the team really well and then you go back to where you live and do the work.
There are lots of different ways to do it, depending on what kind of business you are. But the important thing is that you’re really intentional about how you do it. You don’t leave it to just like “it’ll work itself out sink or swim”, we really have to work hard to make it happen well.
Danny Bluestone
Cool. Just in terms of LifeLabs is that a learning company or a medical genetics? Because I just sort of Google that. I haven’t heard of them before.
Anouk Agussol
No, they’re definitely a learning company.
Danny Bluestone
Oh, yeah. Like lapse learning.
Anouk Agussol
Brilliant.
Danny Bluestone
It’s like lapselearning.com. Yeah. How did those guys fall before checking outs?
Anouk Agussol
They’re based in the US but they’ve obviously got a lot of online courses as well at the moment. And they’re excellent.
Danny Bluestone
Oh great. Yeah, and finally, you’ve written about or you were about to write about your 15 kind of trends for managers and professionals. So, when’s that going live?
Anouk Agussol
Yeah, actually, I need to get around to doing that we’ve been so busy that we’ve written them down. But it was really interesting kind of reflecting on the last year, we gathered data from obviously what we saw anecdotal observational data, we gather data from surveys from our clients, we aggregated all of that information and we also got data from non-clients as well. We put that together and we identified 15 trends over the course of the last year, some positive trends and some trends that really require a little bit of fixing. And I think for managers, I’m not going to cover them all now, because actually, we probably need like a whole hour to do so. But I think what’s quite important for managers and for people, there’s probably five, which I’ll briefly cover now, because it will make a difference, hopefully practical difference to them if they’re listening but one learning by osmosis has decreased. And that’s quite natural and obvious given that we’re no longer in the office and that doesn’t mean however, that it needs to be that way. And that’s where the intentionality and the bringing to life loads of opportunities for learning is really important.
Asynchronous as we’ve mentioned, is kind of now the buzzword of 2020. And it’s allowed people to really do things in their time independently of others and that’s a good thing. However, number three, the levels of connection between teammates are within and we’ve discussed a bit of that. So, I won’t continue and go over it. Number four, except for whole industries that have pretty much had to hibernate, there’s loads of evidence that suggests that the mobility of people from job to job, company to company has not decreased, in fact, it’s increased because people are starting to think about what’s really important for them, what kind of work, what kind of life matters to them. And moving for that great talent will find other jobs, they won’t stay with you, just because it’s a pandemic and that’s a really important thing for managers to think about.
The last of the five that I’ll mention here and it’s actually quite thankfully because it’s a drum that we’ve been beating for a long time, more businesses are really starting to think about people strategy, alongside strategies like products development, go to market strategy, revenue strategies, as well, which means that people can really start to go to the center of business success, which is really important.
Danny Bluestone
That fantastic, and I love for us is a great note to finish on because you on your website, it says HR is dead, long live people and if you think about the word HR, it’s human resources, it’s looking at people like machinery, right? It’s human resources. It’s just another thing that came from the manufacturing you right and industrial revolution. So, where people were resources, and they say, so I think sort of finishing with that where you have to put your people first, that’s fantastic. So, it’s been great to chat. And yeah, it’s been absolutely amazing to have you on the show.
Anouk Agussol
Danny, thank you so much. I love a good chat about this stuff. I could talk for hours.
Danny Bluestone
Thanks for listening.
If you’re interested in learning more about Unleashed company, they can be found on LinkedIn or via their website unleashed.com.
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