Headsets.com: Hopping on a Flight to Improve the Culture

By Mike Faith, CEO

San Francisco is a great city to start a business, but it’s hell on the bottom line when you’re shipping to anywhere except Southern California. So we started planning for a more strategic shipping center. After looking around some, we decided on Nashville, Tennessee. 

We just wanted to hire good people and move ahead with our business. So that’s what we did. We hung the company mission statement on the walls and headed back to California, confident we were good to go. For the next five years, the Nashville office struggled with lower morale, lower performance and lower retention and job satisfaction than HQ. We couldn’t understand why.

At first, we attributed the disconnect to the differences between locations. Maybe it was just a case of Bay Area big-city folks not understanding the nuances of a smaller, Southern town? But that wasn’t it. The obvious cultural differences couldn’t explain the poor performance reviews, or the feelings of Nashville employees that they were unappreciated, or the sense that the Nashville office was a wholly separate entity from headquarters. It didn’t explain why there was an “us” in San Francisco and a “them” in Nashville. 

Eventually, when it started negatively affecting the business, we were forced to acknowledge there was a culture problem. We flailed around a bit, then settled on lots of Skype meetings, so everyone could see each other and pretend they were in the same room. Those probably helped, but didn’t really solve the problem. It’s hard to feel connected through a TV screen. Most times, the Nashville employees kind of zoned out as those in San Francisco droned at them.

So we took a hard look at how we were operating, and noticed that leadership trips to Tennessee were short and infrequent – maybe one or two days, two or three times a year. And they were always very goal-oriented. We were there to accomplish something and tick a box so we could go back home. No one in San Francisco really knew anyone in Nashville. We didn’t understand their lives or their problems or even how they were doing their work. 

If you don’t know your employees, you can’t connect with them, and you can’t expect them to feel connected to you or your business. So, we started planning longer, more regular trips out there for the leadership team. (That consists of me, the CFO and the customer service manager.) These trips were less about accomplishing a specific task and more about spending time with people – not just socializing, but learning about how they worked and listening to their issues and concerns about the business.

Basically, we said it wasn’t enough to slap the company standards up and keep the lights on. There’s a lot more to bridging the distance with a remote location. We learned it takes investing in our people. That shift was a huge change for us. We basically had never really considered how to integrate a remote office fully into the company culture. Initially, we naively assumed as long as they knew the mission and standards, we’d be fine.

The San Francisco-to-Nashville visits were so successful, we started doing it in reverse. Now, we also bring Nashville employees to headquarters. That’s led to even more sharing and more swapping of information and best practices and company culture. It’s even changed our San Francisco office. People visiting Nashville started coming back with tales about the varied, eclectic music playing all day. They wanted to know why we couldn’t have something similar at headquarters. So now we do.

Overall, it’s just been a great exchange. We listen to the folks in Nashville and have conversations about How can we fix X, or What needs to happen with Y? It’s also led to us hiring more remote employees – people who don’t work at either office but are completely separate. We have six or seven team members now spread across the country. We do the same sort of work with them, bring them into the offices to meet everyone and get a sense of how we work, and make them feel part of a large, cohesive team.

It didn’t happen all at once. It took time, and us showing a real commitment to making sure no one felt like the infamous “red-headed stepchild,” which someone in Nashville once used to describe the office. But the result is that we don’t hear the us and them stuff anymore. 

People who have been around a while also bring it up in their performance reviews and morale surveys. They say the company is more inclusive than in the past. They feel more like they are part of a team now, and that they are respected and appreciated. They tell us they’re proud to feel like they have a stake in the company, and like their efforts matter.

My thoughts for anyone struggling – or just anyone with a remote office at all – is to identify your cultural leaders and make sure they are spending time in the remote offices. It can’t be done with just webcams and Skype. You have to get people together, sitting there at the table, absorbing energy from each other.