Culture is Like a Savings Account — Storyblocks, A Best Place To Work Feature

By Scott Case, CEO and Co-founder of Upside Business Travel

What does it mean to be recognized as a best place to work?

Some best place to work (BPTW) awards are decided by how much a company is willing to pay-to-play.

But others like the Top Workplaces list presented by The Washington Post are based on real employee responses about their own company.

So, how does it work? The Washington Post partners with employee engagement firm Energage, LLC to survey employees from hundreds of companies located in the Washington D.C. area. Employees at over 400 companies anonymously participated in this year’s survey, and the winners were based on employee engagement and satisfaction.

I’m Scott Case and I’ve been lucky enough to work in the startup ecosystem for a long time. About 10 years ago, I relocated from Connecticut to the D.C. area with the dream of doing my part to develop successful tech companies in startup ecosystems like DC.

In 2016, I co-founded Upside Business Travel which has been awarded The Post’s 2020 Top Workplaces award. When I looked at the list of the other recipients, I reached out to the leaders at the other recognized companies to hear how they’ve been navigating and supporting their teams during the current chaos.

This post is the first in a series of interviews I’ve done with BPTW leaders.

Enter TJ Leonard, CEO of Storyblocks, the first and largest subscription-based platform providing unlimited stock content and tools for creators to keep up with the growing demand for video, for a candid conversation about building and maintaining culture as 2020 has unfolded.

My top 5 takeaways from our chat:

1. Some things can be repurposed and carried forward into a remote world. But there are situations where you have to come up with net new ideas to replace the things that were thrown overboard.
2. Create your own “quaranteam” to keep a pulse on the team. You don’t bump into people in the kitchen anymore, so be more intentional about those kind of informal check-ins.
3. Redesign your onboarding for new hires. What worked in person doesn’t necessarily work in this all remote world.
4. Think of your tenured employees like they’ve been depositing into a culture savings account for years. They have a stockpile they can withdraw from, but new hires don’t have that same asset.
5. People appreciate authenticity. Be more open leading in areas that may have typically been kept in your personal life. Don’t be afraid to take personal parts of your life and bring them into the office.

Watch the video, listen to the interview, and read the full conversation below.

Scott Case
So again, TJ, thank you for being here to talk about the Washington Post Best Places to Work award that Storyblocks received. And, I’m here with TJ Leonard, who is the CEO of Storyblocks. TJ, why don’t you tell us a little bit about you and about the company?

TJ Leonard
Yes. Thank you, Scott. Good to be here. Always appreciate it when folks in and around the DC area think about the Storyblock’s team. So thank you for having me on. For people who don’t know, StoryBlocks is the first and largest subscription-based provider of stock media and simple tools to help creators of all backgrounds create enough digital video to keep up with the demands of their audience. So, you know, everyone from a hobbyist to a small business, a freelancer, all the way up to big production companies, big broadcast companies are Storyblocks customers. And, you know, we believe that the biggest challenge facing creatives today, again, it’s this idea of keep creating enough content to keep up with the demands of their audience. It’s all about more and more and more while at the same time you’re getting less, less, less budget and, you know, have fewer hours to go complete these projects. So that’s us. I’m a DC resident. I live up here by American University. I’ve got a couple kids, elementary aged kids. So like many of us, I have been moonlighting during the day as an IT specialist and co-teacher and all that sort of fun stuff.

Scott Case
You’re running a school campus out of your home. How big is the team and what was the situation kind of pre pandemic for you and your team working together? And then how has that changed in the pandemic times here?

TJ Leonard
It’s been a time. I think it changed for everybody. We certainly have experienced our fair share. Our team is about 125 people today. We’ve hired close to 40 people. We’ve hired 40 people this year. I think about 30 of which occurred after we had shut the office down. We like most, we closed on, I think it was the 12th of March. So it’s changed quite a bit. We’ve also changed ownership. So we have a new set of investors and a new board. And then lucky for us, the business has done very well through the pandemic and, you know, so hiring growth plans, all of that have remained largely unchanged, but, yeah, I think we’re seeing a big challenge. You know, early on, we had a lot of work that was relatively well understood, that was well scoped and you can sort of hunker down and stay in execution mode. And again, as the pandemic stretches on now, all those cans that I think we all kicked in the second quarter, hoping we’d be able to get back to work. We’re now trying to figure out a way to get those things done efficiently, despite facing virtual work, I think for another six, nine months at least.

Scott Case
Were most of your employees and your teammates in a centralized office before all this happened. And now you’re all decentralized and remote. And what was that transition like?

TJ Leonard
Yeah, that’s exactly right. We all fit on one floor in one office in one location. So we had everyone at our Arlington headquarters where we can fit everyone on a single floor. We had a big open floor plan. We had places where we could do sort of ideation and creative work. We had places where we could get work done and crank. Our physical office was very much our hub. We do have some remote workers. We certainly allowed for flexible virtual work, but we really were an office oriented culture. So it has been a pretty big change for us. And you know, some things, again, I’m sure you’ve experienced this at Upside, some things translate nicely to the virtual world. You can repurpose it with the Zoom, other things we had to throw away completely. We’re not doing our innovation day this year, which was always one of the annual highlights. It’s just too hard to do it well when we’re all in different locations. And then we’ve created some new programs as well specific for the virtual world. So certainly very different, again, especially being I think more of an office oriented culture than some, and it’s been a bit of a mixed bag between things we’ve been able to just kind of neatly repurpose and carry forward versus coming up with net new ideas to replace some of those things we had to toss.

Scott Case
What have you been doing to kind of maintain that culture? Cause like you, Upside was very much, we’re all on one floor, in fact, a lot of the things that define the culture were enhanced by the physical infrastructure. What are the things that you’ve found that are working and what are some of the things that you’ve tried that didn’t quite work the way you expect?

TJ Leonard
Yeah. So one of the things I think we’ve tried to, you know, we created what we call our quaranteam very early on. The mission of the quaranteam is just help us keep a closer pulse on the team given that we don’t bump into people in the kitchen anymore, right? Like all those little moments of serendipity throughout the work week have been lost. So I think that was one thing we did that that’s worked well is like, just acknowledge that, be a little more intentional with, you know, when you’re reaching out just to check in, Hey, how are things going and understanding that everyone’s working situation is entirely different. So I think that was one thing, just being a little more intentional around those, kind of replacing those informal check-ins.

We’ve leaned a lot on our business resource groups. So we had three at Storyblocks. We have Black Storyblocks. We have Women’s Storyblocks. We have Out at Storyblocks. The last of which was sort of formally recognized here during the pandemic. So I think that’s another way we want to connect with the team, make sure that as we introduce new policies, make sure as we’re doing things like work from home stipends or other benefits that we’re thinking about those in an inclusive way. And we’re not unintentionally, I think, marginalizing certain groups. And then, you know, I mentioned this a second ago, but we’ve tried to be creative about new programming. So we’ve got, we call it live, laugh lunch, which started off as like an MTV cribs style exploration of everyone’s home office and has now morphed into like a weekly variety show. We’ve done, like who wants to be a millionaire trivia. We’ve had lip sync battles, we’ve done all sorts of kind of goofy things. But that’s I think been a big hit in a way we sort of all come together mid week and reconnect and have some fun. And then we’ve got these Friday experiences where we’ve tried like watching a movie together. We’ve had like, ice cream, it’s an important part of our office culture, and so we had this big like, Hey, here’s how you make ice cream from home. Since you know, these little Sunday socials we would have in the kitchen are no longer around. So we’ve tried to be a bit creative about that stuff. We’ve tried a bunch of things that haven’t worked. And I think we’ve acknowledged like, you know, going to be really hard to have a holiday party. It’ll be really hard to have an all company offsite can be really hard to have innovation day. So, let’s not wait to call the ball there, let’s acknowledge it. And then again, try and fill the gaps that those create with some other initiatives.

Scott Case
The experiments are kind of fun. And as you said, the team, I think having them be involved in it also improves the likelihood of both the things that work working and the things that don’t everyone can look at and say that wasn’t good let’s not do that again, which is good too. And so I’m curious on the recruiting front, you’ve added a significant number of people. Have you opened up your geographic lens? Like how have you thought about the recruiting process when you’ve obviously added 30 people during this time, both on the recruiting side and then also in the onboarding experience as you bring people up the curve?

TJ Leonard
Yeah, that’s a great question. And you know, I think on the first half, how we’ve thought about bringing people in, you know, what we did was we got together as leadership team and we said, okay, obviously we’re virtual now looking at a lot of our peers, look at a lot of these big tech companies, many have gone out and said like, Hey, we’re going to really change the way we think about, you know, virtual work and our culture in the future. And we, and we got together and said, Hey, do we want to do that too? We want to be more virtual. And where we landed was actually no, like a lot of what makes us us, it’s got same thing. Like when we designed our office, you know, we actually made a physical path where you walk around our floor and through that path, like you tell the story of who we are and our values are there and our customers are there. And so the physical office, I think will be a big part of our future. Will we have more flexible work from home? Yeah. I’m sure that we will, but we acknowledged that, like, we still want to be an office oriented culture. And so for us, that’s meant let’s still continue to hire around, you know, our Arlington headquarters. So where we’ve been a bit more flexible has been hiring people who are willing to relocate, but are in other places today. And so instead of saying, cool, you know, you gotta be here within a month to starting, you know, everyone now has a little bit more time to get their bearings before they, you know, relocate. But, it’s a good question. One again, I think it all goes back to, well, what do you want the office we want the culture to be when we return to the new normal, how much will it look like the old normal, how much are we gonna redesign?

On onboarding, you know, I would say this was one of the big, my hands up here. This is probably one of the big areas where I think we misstepped is again, our mentality was okay, let’s hunker down and get through the second quarter, hopefully by the summer, certainly by the fall, things will be closer to back to normal. And, you know, we do quarterly pulse surveys and traditionally your newest cohort is your happiest cohort. Then you know, you’re still in the honeymoon phase sort of first 90 days tend to be really positive ones. And we saw it for the first time in July that our newest cohort was actually less happy, less engaged than older cohorts. And what that told us was, you know, it makes sense when you say it out loud, but all those older cohorts had, you know, relationships in the physical world that they could fall back on. They had been to the office, they had a desk, right? Like they understood our story. They understood the space. And, you know, I’ve always said that culture is like a savings account. They’d been making deposits for many years, time to make a withdrawal and you’re able to sustain that for longer. So I think that was one of our big learnings was, gosh, we’ve got to sort of redesign onboarding. We introduced a virtual mentorship program, all sort of built around this idea of how can we ensure that our virtual hires, our new people, have a successful first year can sort of successfully get to the point where we can all go back to that physical space and start building more traditional relationships.

Scott Case
That’s awesome. I love your culture and the savings account construct. It’s a really important point. And building on that, what advice would you have for leaders who in this moment forward would like to win best places to work? Or what do you think the core one or two elements are of having an excellent workplace culture?

TJ Leonard
It’s sort of like building great products, listen to your customers. In a lot of ways, I think we have always been very open to feedback. We, I think, we’re very transparent about the way we communicate. We have AMAs every week at our virtual company all hands. So I think that’s a big part of it is like, if you trust that you’re getting good data from the team, then you have good data to act on. And like you can resolve sort of budding issues before they become too problematic. So I think that one big one is, Think about building your team in the same way you think about building great products.

And then the other, which is probably a little newer, is more specific I think to the world we’re living in is, you know, I think this is a time we see it in our business around the type of content that our customers are asking for. This is a time when humanity is being pressed. It’s a time when I think everyone appreciates authenticity. And frankly, like seeing you struggle more than in the past, and so I think that for me personally, that’s been a change I’ve made is trying to be, I think, a little more open leading in areas, whether it’s social justice or others, where you would have typically kept it back in your personal life to, I guess, to put it in a sentence it’s, you’re taking those personal parts of you and not being afraid to bring them to the office as you would have perhaps in the past. So I think that one’s a little more specific to 2020.

Scott Case
Oh, that’s great. TJ. Well, thank you for doing this and congratulations for Storyblocks getting a Washington Post Best Places to Work award. You’ve obviously done a lot of great things with your team and will continue to do so. So I appreciate you taking the time for us today.

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