Every business is at risk of accidentally bleaching their culture

At a certain scale, most companies begin managing through dashboards.

This seems innocent, at first. Everyone wants to be more productive. The company rolls out an HR system and starts conducting annual reviews. But when people begin to rely on numbers, those numbers begin to decide other people’s fate.

Soon, managers feel pressured to measure employees by metrics. Employees feel this. It erodes their morale and begins to bleach the company of its all-important people factor. Suddenly, 68 percent of workers feel disengaged. The company’s attrition rate slips out of control and the board begins to have emergency conversations about ‘engagement.’

Ouch.

But you know what prevents bleaching and keeps the workplace thriving? Work friends, coworkers, and mentors. Your people factor is the beating heart of your corporation. It keeps everyone connected to the company and rooted in its mission.

Today, amidst a global engagement crisis, companies would do well to understand how this works.

Companies succeed when people connect

Everywhere I’ve gone in my career, I’ve invested in people. I was one of the founding business development representatives at my first tech job, where my director was my mentor. I got to watch firsthand how a great leader can build up everyone around them and get them to want to do what’s right.

In those days, I was highly engaged. I took a front row seat at every town hall and asked questions, not for attention, but to build relationships with higher-ups. I wanted to become a recognizable face and draw the focus of our executives down into the trenches where the real selling happened.

When I needed help, those executives often knew who I was. In turn, I gave them everything because I knew who I was fighting for. But as the team and the company grew, I itched to try it for myself.

I moved to Australia to help kickstart the office down under because I thought I could have a bigger impact. There, the team was a family. Our closeness translated into some really standout performance. It was a place where everyone felt free to be themselves, to make mistakes, and to endure the friendly heckling that came with it. But I wanted to take it further. Together, my then fiancée, who also worked for the company, and I volunteered to open yet another office — an even smaller one in Melbourne. She ran customer success and I ran sales.

The people who surrounded me through those years pushed me to be successful. At every stage of that journey, I couldn’t let my team down because we knew each other. I couldn’t sell bad deals because they’d go to my fiancée. All of our jobs hinged on our collective effort.

“At every stage of that journey, I couldn’t let my team down because we knew each other.”

My interest in building community deepened. I got into the local startup scene as a sales mentor. I brought in our office’s first few employees. The business flourished. Yet I noticed that not all of the companies we worked with were as fortunate.

Some were under tremendous top-down pressure to measure their employee engagement. Their leaders struggled to get people excited about their jobs and suffered high attrition rates, low morale, and a revolving door of junior management. This was the tip of the great disengagement crisis — the inevitable outcome of a culture bleach.

Nobody wants to be managed via a dashboard, yet most people are. We all have a human desire for connection and understanding, but when management decisions and feedback don’t make sense to us, or when managers seem aloof and have too much control over our livelihood, we become disengaged.

“Only 2 in 10 employees feel that their performance is managed in a way that compels them to do outstanding work.” — Gallup

Most employees around the world are feeling this, hard. Gallup reports that only 2 in 10 employees feel that their performance is managed in a way that compels them to do outstanding work. Only 1 in 7 feels that performance reviews inspire them to do better. Their companies are correspondingly lifeless.

I studied these issues firsthand. My previous employer helped companies diagnose their engagement problems and the prognosis wasn’t good: most people, most places, felt like ‘just a number.’ They felt underappreciated. And when their managers saved up all their feedback for one whopping year-end review, those employees felt ambushed.

I made more sales, we grew our Melbourne team, and life went on. But those lessons stuck with me.

Bringing it home

Three years to the day that I had left, I returned to Toronto with this big idea: The people factor is every company’s key to success, yet most companies have lost it. I didn’t know how to go about pursuing a solution. I just knew that surveys and workshops alone weren’t a complete answer.

I looked for companies who shared my idea. Snapchat intrigued me — it was a new communication format and criticism aside, the team there was pioneering new ways to connect people. Then I stumbled across Helpful.

At first, Helpful didn’t need me. They were still experimenting with their product which, at the time, was an enterprise internal directory. I could tell they were on the path of connecting people within companies and I could tell the founders were brilliant. I stayed in touch.

Around this time, I decided that I was committed to the Toronto startup scene. Lots of people were moving out to tech hubs in San Francisco and New York, but I had my big idea. I wanted to help build a company to tackle the global disengagement problem, and I knew that this city had the connections and people to do it.

When Helpful pivoted to video, I knew that was it. After testing out the product, I believed in it and it’s power to connect people so much that I went out and sold a bunch of companies on the idea, before even working there. I brought potential deals back to the Helpful team. That settled any debate about whether a sales-driven approach could work and the rest is history.

“My success is a function of whether I can create a culture where I can rely on the people around me.”

I’m now focused on building a fun and cohesive team of my own at Helpful. Things have come full-circle, in a way: My success is a function of whether I can create a culture where I can rely on the people around me. What we sell is the pure, high-octane connection of audio & video, and we sell it by exporting that connection to customers. We show them what it looks like to feel deeply invested in their coworkers and we offer a glimpse into a world that’s humming with the power of people.

When our team is successful, we connect people to each other and companies back to their mission. We’re rolling back the bleach one reef at a time. And for any executive, board member, HR leader, or manager who wants to know what a world beyond dashboard management feels like, let’s talk. It’s an untapped tidal wave of people-powered potential.