The Sound of Automation

In today’s episode, we discuss joy in the workplace with Rich Sheridan of Menlo Innovations. Listen in to learn why culture is such an important piece of attracting and retaining top talent. Rich and Bryan talk about the benefits of an intentionally joyful culture, and how it can help build relationships and grow businesses.

Podcast Transcript

Announcer:

Welcome to The Sound of Automation, brought to you by Clayton & McKervey, CPAs for growth driven businesses.

Denise Asker, Director of Mkt. & Practice Growth:

Hi, Brian.

Bryan Powrozek, Sr. Manager Industrial Automation:

Denise, how are you?

Denise Asker:

Good. How are you today?

Bryan Powrozek:

I’m joyful.

Denise Asker:

Wonderful. I’m glad you said that, because I think we’re going to be spending a bit of time talking about joy in the workplace.

Bryan Powrozek:

That is the plan for the next episode here.

Denise Asker:

Sounds good.

Bryan Powrozek:

So fortunate to have a Rich Sheridan of Menlo Innovations joining us. He’s written a couple books focusing on how do you bring joy to the workplace, to the people who work with you? Hopefully listeners will come away with a couple of good ideas that they can take away and implement.

Denise Asker:

Yeah, I’m sure they will. Before we get into that, though, I’m noticing that the industrial automation segment at our firm is focusing a lot around culture, and conversations on culture, and I’m curious why that’s such a topic? I mean, culture has always been important, but why is it heating up now?

Bryan Powrozek:

One of the biggest things as we talk to business owners right now that everybody’s trying to grapple with is growing their organizations. There’s a lot of pressures going on all over the place. You’ve got boomers retiring. You’ve got the great resignation that everybody’s talking about, people leaving jobs. So all of these businesses are trying to figure out, hey, how do I… I barely have enough people to do what I want to do right now, but now I need to add people if I want to grow, how do I find them? Where do I find them? And realistically, when you look at that, a lot of that comes down to your culture and establishing something that you can point to and say, “Well, this is what it’s like to work here,” and then find the people who are attracted to that type of environment. So while we, as accountants, can’t really do anything in that regard, it’s something we can try and share what we’ve heard from people that we work with. Business owners, other providers, people like Rich who are really kind of thought leaders in this area and can help businesses hopefully, like I said, take away a few things that might move the needle in their organization.

Denise Asker:

Okay. So what I’m hearing is because it’s on the minds of our clients, it’s on our mind too.

Bryan Powrozek:

Exactly. Yep.

Denise Asker:

Sounds good. I was going through some of the notes for today and I noticed that in our own mission for the firm, where we talk about passion to help other succeed, fun, performance and can do attitude… While we might not spell out joy, those qualities seem to infer that working with joy is something that we value as well in Clayton & McKervey.

Bryan Powrozek:

Yeah. You could probably sub fun in for that. If you’re having fun, hopefully you’re enjoying what you’re doing. But really it’s… I like when we’re interviewing candidates and things like that. I mean, it often comes up. Next to your family, you probably spend more time with the people you work with than anybody else in a given year, so you want to make sure that you enjoy that and it’s a source of pride and you feel like you’re contributing to something and you’re enjoying what you’re doing rather than something that you dread doing. You’re just doing it for a paycheck and can’t wait for five o’clock to roll around so you can go home. It’s an important aspect because the labor market is competitive. It’s been competitive. It’s going to get more competitive. So you really need to find ways to show people that it’s different here, working with us.

Denise Asker:

Sounds good. Well, it is a joy to work with you and I look forward to learning more.

Bryan Powrozek:

Thanks, Denise.

Bryan Powrozek:

Hello and welcome to another episode of The Sound of Automation podcast. Joining me today is Rich Sheridan of Menlo innovations. Rich, for those of you who don’t know him, is also the author of two books, Joy Inc., and Chief Joy Officer. Very excited to have Rich on the podcast today as we talk about culture and fit and how that can help organizations grow and sustain. So Rich, thanks for joining me today.

Rich Sheridan, CEO at Menlo Innovations:

You bet.

Bryan Powrozek:

So to start this whole thing off, the titles your books, Joy, Inc., Chief Joy Officer. With so many books out there about how to grow organizations and they focused on strategy and this and that, how did you land on joy?

Rich Sheridan:

It was an interesting journey. It was really there right at the beginning of Menlo, back in 2001. We just celebrated our 20th birthday a few months ago. In the beginning, we talked about wanting to end human suffering in the world as it relates to technology. A little bit tongue in cheek, of course, but we take that mission very seriously. But hidden down in the bottom of our mission statement, we said, “We wanted to return joy to the world of software,” and we believe that software development is one of the most interesting, intriguing, and imaginative adventures mankind has ever undertaken. And yet the joy had been boiled out of software development for a long time. Most of us are tortured by software we work with every day. We call the users stupid, we write Dummies books for those poor people. And a lot of projects suffer, and we didn’t want that. We wanted to bring joy back.

Rich Sheridan:

That word percolated around for a long time, until we started hearing from Simon Sinek, where he said, “Start with your why. Talk about why you exist, what you believe,” and that sort of thing. And I started putting joy out there as the first thing we talked about, which surprised people. They would ask me, they say, “Rich, we’re here to learn.” We have these tours that come to Menlo, they come and visit by the thousands every year. And they would say, “Rich, why are you talking about joy? We’re here to learn about how you build software.” And I would point back to this room full of people behind me and say, “Well pretend half of them have joy and the other half don’t. Which half would you want working on your project?” They always wanted the joyful half and then I’ve asked them why. They said, “Well, they produce better quality. They care more about the outcome. They’d be easier to work with.”

Rich Sheridan:

So I looked at them and said, okay, there is in fact tangible business value to joy. Now let me go give you a tour, show you how we do what we do and I can draw a short, straight line back to our purpose, and that is to delight the people we intend to serve, and do it with a team of people that aren’t burned out, that are working crazy overtime hours, because our fundamental belief is that tired people make bad software and we don’t want to make bad software.

Rich Sheridan:

So the whole culture fits really well around this concept of bringing joy to the people we intend to serve, the end users of the software. And our fundamental belief is we can do that both for the users and their experience with the software, as well as for the underlying technology that doesn’t break every five minutes and lose data and suffer big problems all the time, which is typical of software projects and we just didn’t want that.

Bryan Powrozek:

It’s interesting to me, as we work with a lot of our clients and have really been looking at what are the challenges they’re having? I’m sure you guys can probably say the same thing, staffing is probably the number one concern on everybody’s mind. And it’s funny because I think it was the pandemic elevated it, but really if I go back, staffing’s always a problem. Finding good people, finding the right people. Now, different things happen like COVID, or everybody talks about the boomers starting to retire and all this. That’s all going to drive issues in for staffing, but really it’s not a new problem. And that’s really what you guys are trying… That was your approach to solve it. It was, hey, let’s create a place where people have joy and then we’ll attract the right people, attract the people we want to work with. I thought that was very interesting.

Bryan Powrozek:

So I was going through your most recent book, Chief Joy Officer and kind of pulling out some points that I thought were pretty interesting. The first one I wanted to ask you about, and you kind of touched on it there earlier is, a lot of books will start with the, find your why, find your purpose. But how does finding that purpose help businesses like yours… We were just going through an example here with your paired programming, how you guys have adapted that. How does having that purpose help you adapt to changes in the business environment?

Rich Sheridan:

When the pandemic hit… And as you note, we are this intensive, in-person, in the room, working shoulder to shoulder company, and now all of a sudden, boom. Change in an instant. That week of March 16th 2020. Get out of the building, it was like a fire drill. Go home, take as much equipment as you think you need. And I will readily admit, I felt that welling of panic inside of me when I thought everything we’d built for 19 years got pulled apart. Will it survive? And what I realized is what we’ve been working on for 19 years perfectly prepared us for this moment. The culture, the relationships, the human energy of our team, the empathy we have for the customer, the connectedness that we have between each other, allowed us to adapt. Gave us the foundation on which we could weather this tough storm that was the pandemic.

Rich Sheridan:

Because let’s face it, I’m sure this is true for most of your listeners. It wasn’t just the pandemic that was causing problems. The economy tanked immediately. So now we’re facing two dual crises. Yes, there were a few companies like Zoom that just boomed during that time, but most of the rest of us had to deal not only with the raw power of this new force in our lives with the pandemic, but the fact that the economy… Everybody pulled back, everybody stopped spending money immediately. We all thought there was going to be a big recession. So again, the resiliency that came from building this intentionally joyful culture survived. And I knew the moment we were going to be okay.

Rich Sheridan:

There was one day… We have this other part of Menlo that’s not about software development, it’s about user experience design and we have gave it a special name. We call it high-tech anthropology. And the high-tech anthropologists at Menlo, their job is to go out into the world and study the users in their native environment so when we design the user’s experience, we are taking their actual workflow, their style, their vocabulary into account. Well, guess what? Our anthropologists can’t go out into the world anymore. So not only were visitors not coming in, not only were we not coming in, but our team that leads most of our new projects couldn’t go out in the world and study users because they weren’t there anyways. And I thought, how was this going to work? And at that point, one of our senior high-tech anthropologists, Molly, looks at the team over Zoom meetings. She says, “This will be so exciting to figure out how to do this remotely.” Thank you, Molly. Thank you.

Rich Sheridan:

This, again, is the spirit of the team that was crafted over 19 years, and part of it… Let me offer up a broad thing that your listeners can take away and start thinking about starting a minute after the podcast. Fear. Fear plays a big role in this. The absence of fear plays a big role in this. The idea that we could lead people, fearfully, trying to motivate them with fear, robs us of the most human part of our brain. The creativity, the imagination, the innovation, and the invention. So as leaders here at Menlo for 19 years, we’ve been trying to pump fear out of the room. Now, we can’t pump it all out. In fact it wouldn’t be healthy to do that. There are some things we should be afraid of. Should be afraid of not making payroll. We should be afraid of all the business things that you do to protect yourselves. But we don’t need to motivate our team with that fear.

Rich Sheridan:

So what I saw emerge in those earliest days of the pandemic was an organization that just leaned back and leaned in on their imagination and their creativity and their innovation, and it was huge. In fact, I will tell you, they led me out of that fearful place as I watched them adapt so quickly.

Bryan Powrozek:

I kind of see a similar thing when talking with past colleagues and things like that. The number of times you hear, well, the only reason I didn’t leave was the people. I love the people I worked with. I love that. So now you guys have kind of taken that next step of, hey, not only do I love the people I work with, but I love this organization, this group of people. I truly find joy in what I’m doing. So then it becomes a motivator for people of, hey, okay, we we’ve got this challenge. How do we maintain what we’ve already built given that… I kind of mentioned that the paired programming earlier, but I mean, it’s literally two programmers sitting side by side working on something.

Bryan Powrozek:

Well, now these two can’t sit by side-by-side, so how are we going to adapt that? Zoom made it very easy to do that. But yeah, that purpose then helps give everybody that motivating force to… Okay, we want to keep this alive and keep it growing, keep it moving.

Bryan Powrozek:

Another thing you talk about in Chief Joy Officer that I thought was… And this might just be my own background is as an engineer turned accountant, but systems. That creating systems is another thing that you advocate for. What are some of your thoughts on that, of how those… Because I think a lot of people think, “Systems, oh, that that’s a structured way of doing things,” and it seems like it would go counter to adaptability, but in a way, it really doesn’t.

Rich Sheridan:

Let’s talk about some of the biggest challenges of adapting an organization. In my industry, and I think this is probably true in a lot, but I certainly know in the software industry. We typically, in the software industry, build hero based organizations. Individual heroes that are towers of knowledge in their particular area, and nobody knows what they know, and nobody can help them because nobody knows what they know. You end up with these very rigid structures. You have team members who are working inordinate amounts of overtime because their tower’s really important right now, and you have other team members who don’t have anything to do because their tower isn’t important right now. You end up with an incredibly inflexible organization. So I always differentiate in companies between two kinds of cultures. The hero based culture and the systems based culture. A systems based culture says, when something goes wrong, the leader should be asking, “How did our systems allow this to happen?”

Rich Sheridan:

Now, systems thinking is very different than bureaucratic thinking. Bureaucracy is about creating systems that prevent people from doing work. That create a layer upon layer upon layer of approval, spending all kinds of time in meetings, reviewing documents, waiting for approvals and signatures. That’s not what a true systems based organization is. A systems based organization frees people to run at the top speed they can. Those systems should be simple and visible and measurable and repeatable.

Rich Sheridan:

I often tell people, if you want to suck the human energy out of an organization, number one, have lots of meetings. Number two, do not, by any means, make any decisions in those meetings. And if per chance, by mistake, you just happen to make a decision, in those meetings, that’s okay. Just don’t act on it, and you will pull all the human energy out of your organization.

Rich Sheridan:

But wouldn’t it be neat in a systems-based organization if you have that kind of thinking? That your first inclination is to take action versus take a meeting. To say that, yes, our systems are there. They work for us. We will stay within the bounds of those systems, but we can innovate easily within those systems, to the point where the team is very comfortable with three key phrases here at Menlo. They keep our culture moving along at breakneck speeds. Make mistakes faster, because we acknowledge we’re going to make mistakes, so how about if we make small ones quickly rather than really big, expensive ones slowly. Number two, run the experiment, which is the essence of take action versus take a meeting. Don’t pause too long to contemplate and speculate and tell the 20 reasons why this new idea isn’t going to work, go try it. And three is, it’s okay to say, I don’t know.

Rich Sheridan:

Because too often, we want to feign knowledge. We want to pretend we know an answer to something we really don’t know. Here at Menlo, we have actually built it in to say no. Right behind me is a poster on a pillar here. One of the biggest posters in the room. It’s okay to say I don’t know. When you create that environment with a well understood system that people believe in, guess what? We don’t need any bosses here. Don’t even need managers overseeing stuff. I spend very little time worrying about what are they doing today, because I know they know what to do.

Bryan Powrozek:

To those points and kind of what you talked about there with running the experiment is you’ve really created a learning organization. An organization that the people aren’t… While yes, you have a system you want things to go through, people are on the lookout for these opportunities and ways to contribute. And learning, I think… And I’d like to hear your thoughts on this as well. You hear a lot of people saying, oh, it’s… The new generations, you’re going to be lifelong learners, and you’re going to continue this. Which to some extent, I feel is sometimes lip service, depending on who you’re hearing it from. But in reality it’s true that you don’t want people walking in the door saying, okay, I know this programming language and I’ve finished my learning. And really having that built into the fabric of your organization helps you then adapt to these things because you’re on the lookout for those opportunities to grow and improve and change.

Rich Sheridan:

Yeah. If I look back to my college days where I was taking computer science classes in Michigan, and this is back in the late seventies, early eighties. If I said, “Well, learning’s done,” I’d still be programming in ALGOL and Fortran and IBM360 Assembly Language, and I would never learned any of the newer languages. None of us went to college to continually reapply without any new learning, something we learned for four years when we were 18 to 22 years old. That’s a ridiculous thought about human beings, that we would… And of course, how many times in our hiring practices do we say things as managers and leaders, “Well, I need you to hit the ground running so we can’t spend any time letting him learn anything new,” and you end up with a very uninspired workforce. Because if all I’m doing is coming and reapplying everything I knew from yesterday, from last week and from last year, and I’m not learning anything new, my brain gets pretty dull at that point. Now I’m not bringing any new thoughts to work.

Rich Sheridan:

So everything here is meant to spring that forth. The reason we pair people, not only does it improve quality dramatically, but it improves the learning system dramatically, because you know something I don’t know, and vice versa. Just the other day, I was talking to a pair of people here working on one of our biggest client projects and Kevin and Chris were paired together. Chris is one of our senior developers, he’s been here for six, seven years. Kevin’s only been here for three and a half months, fresh grad out of Michigan. I asked him about the project they were working on. They’ve been working on our code name, Project Snappy. I asked Chris, I said, “How long have you been on the project?” He said, “Four days.” And I said, “Kevin, how about you?” He says, “Well, I’ve been on it for about four weeks.”

Rich Sheridan:

And it was clear that it was Kevin who was bringing Chris up to speed. Our newest, fresh out of college programmer was bringing one of our most senior people up to speed and teaching him about this. And part of it too is that Chris is open to learning from someone who has far less experience than he does. This is the way you build an organization, because I will tell you, Kevin’s coming out of school with new thoughts, new ideas, exposure to new technologies that Chris hasn’t seen yet. Why wouldn’t we want to be learning from Kevin at the same time Kevin is also learning from Chris’s experience and wisdom from the six years he’s been working here at Menlo?

Bryan Powrozek:

The interesting thing to me about everything you’ve talked about here is the one common thread running through it all is people. That the organizations, yeah we have products or services we provide and physical offices, but in reality, the organization is its people. So a lot of what you’ve tried to grow and develop at Menlo is this environment where people are happy and they feel comfortable knowing that they’re contributing to something greater than themselves. You touched on it briefly there where you talked about as the pandemic was really shutting things down and had that little bit of fear inside you of, how are we going to get through this? How did you guys care for the people that you have on your team? Because that’s the biggest part of it, is all this is done because you care about the people that are working for you. So how do you approach trying to weather uncertain times? Because this pandemic will come and go and then it’ll be something else and there’ll be another… I mean, the chip shortage is…

Rich Sheridan:

I love your optimism. [inaudible 00:22:58]

Rich Sheridan:

I think for us, we have this sort of time-honored view of how you build great teams, and teamwork is of critical importance today. There are very few things that can be accomplished in the complex world we live in without a team of human beings working together. Well, how do you rally really good teamwork? Well, teamwork is built on relationships. Relationships are built on trust. The only way I know how to build trust between human beings is to spend time together. Now you can see that here. We’re pairing people for 40 hours a week. Switching the pair, so we aren’t just you and me getting to know one another, we’re getting to know everybody on the team. And of course, when we went to pandemic mode and everybody went home, we worried about this. We’re not all together anymore.

Rich Sheridan:

Well, we re-established a lot of our traditions of a daily standup at 10 o’clock and that sort of thing. But we added in a new tradition that will happen today at noon, and it has been happening every week of pandemic. The team noticed that while they were pairing with each other, the people they didn’t see any more where James and I, my co-founder and me. Now in the room here, I sit out in the room with everybody else. So they would see me every day. They could just casually stop by, asking me how it’s going, who you talking to? Who is that phone call with? How was that interview you did today in the conference room? Now they weren’t seeing us at all. So they asked, we want to see you guys. See, we want to know how you’re doing. So we established this new tradition that will probably live on long after the pandemic of Thursday lunch with Rich and James. And in that case, we’re over-communicating, we’re sharing, we’re transparent. We went through this whole stage of, how do we get back to thriving again?

Rich Sheridan:

We set up with the team a five-step plan to get back to thriving. Number one was survive. That was important. Number two is adapt. Number three was sustain. After adapting, let’s get back to some comfortable place where we know we can live to see another day. The fourth step, the biggest one, and this is the one we really did well at, was emerge stronger. Let’s take this opportunity, when we have extra time, to start rebuilding Menlo in a stronger way, and there’s so many examples of what we did. We said, if we do those four things consistently every single day, we will in fact thrive again, and that’s where we are now. Now we’re setting up a new plan to grow. So again, we over-communicate with the team, I guess. We double down on the relationship part, because this is the important thing that’s going on right now for all of us.

Bryan Powrozek:

It’s interesting to me seeing the… Having worked in the auto industry for a long time and now in public accounting, and getting to see how a lot of different businesses operate, you hear that all over the place. Communication’s most important, et cetera. But then, I think in your case, because you’ve established this environment where communication is open and people are expecting it… You mentioned when you weren’t there, people were wondering, hey, well, why isn’t Rich in this meeting? So people are open then too when you come in and share that open communication. I’ve seen it on the other side where you don’t have an environment where communication is frequent, and then all of a sudden when there is communication it’s like, okay, well now you’re just doing this because you know you have to or you’re required to. It’s not a sprint where you can all of a sudden communicate and be transparent and then go back to… You’ve got to live it, breathe it, and build it into your culture.

Rich Sheridan:

And that’s why, after we really got into this and realized this wasn’t just going to last eight weeks, maybe it’s going to last eight years, I don’t know… Is that wow, I would have never thought about it this way. It was clear the 19 years we spent to catheter before all of this hit was critical preparation for the times we’re in now.

Bryan Powrozek:

Definitely. So Rich we’re coming up on our time here, but I did want to ask one last question here. If I’m a small business owner, and I really want to start differentiating my business and really establish that culture. Do you have one or two recommendations for how someone can get started who maybe they haven’t been as intentional about their culture?

Rich Sheridan:

I think that number one, right there is the word. They always say the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is today. So you can begin today. And be intentional about your culture. Don’t be the default culture of who do we hire, what behaviors do we tolerate, what attitudes walked in the door this morning? Be intentional. People should know what your culture is. And then, once you’ve established… We’ve established this intentionally joyful culture, and everybody here can speak to it. The second thing is, then you’re going to have to take a hard look, and I mean a really hard look, at every stage of your traditional HR processes. How do we recruit? How do we interview? How do we select? How do we onboard? How do we promote? How do we give feedback?

Rich Sheridan:

All of those things have to have a short, straight line back to your cultural intention. For me, and this is… Again, you’re asking the guy who writes books on this subject. My business card has probably the most important title of all on it for building an intentionally joyful culture. Chief Storyteller. Stories are what connect heart to mind, body to spirit, concept to reality. If strategy is… What’s that Peter Drucker famous phrase, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Well, storytelling sets the stage for building a strong culture.

Rich Sheridan:

This is always been true throughout human history. The totems, the campfire stories, the anthems of nations, these are how communities and tribes and nations build their culture. By first of all, capturing and curating their stories, and then telling them over and over and over again. Because having one rah-rah speech a year or a poster on the wall in the men’s room or something like that just ain’t gonna do it. This has to be a consistent behavior. Just like we learned as young parents, that we have to be consistent when we’re trying to grade a child of great ethics and moral character and that sort of thing. This is a consistency of leadership that your team is counting on from you.

Bryan Powrozek:

I would personally, having worked with Menlo for a while as a client, and then just the chance to hear you speak and see some of what your team has going on over there, I’d strongly encourage anyone listening to the podcast who maybe they planted that tree 20 years ago, but feel like they want to see another perspective and is there a way they can improve on it, or if they’re looking to plant that tree today, to reach out to Menlo, go to their website, take a look. Like you said, you have people in for tours to see this firsthand and really experience just how the workplace can be different, and how you can kind of re-imagine this. And they don’t need to create a carbon copy of what you did at Menlo, but create what works for them and builds the team like you guys have built there, which I think is a testament to the work you guys have put in over these past 20 years.

Rich Sheridan:

I want to emphasize a point you just made. Yes, we do tours. Used to be in person, now they’re virtual, so it’s a lot easier to come. It’s just the click of a Zoom button and you can come, free tours. You can read the books. But the important thing is we are not putting these stories out there in any way saying we have found the one true way of working, copy us. Our intention is simply to be a concrete example of a living, breathing organization that’s been doing something a particular, some might even say odd, way for 20 years, and you can come and learn what does it take to build an intentionally joyful culture. And then take our ideas, whichever ones work for you, adapt the ones that you’d like, change the ones that you think need to be different for your organization, but get to work on it.

Bryan Powrozek:

Exactly. Well, Rich, thank you again for your time. Really appreciate you coming on. And as I said, if anybody is interested in those tours, please check out Menlo Innovations website and sign up today.

Outro:

Thank you for tuning in. Don’t forget to like us, subscribe and share on social. To learn more about Clayton & McKervey, visit us@claytonmckervey.com. That’s C-L-A-Y-T-O-N, M-C-K-E-R-V-E-Y, dot com. We thrive on finding the solutions for you.