All in Culture

Creating Different Opportunities for People to Mix

When Squarespace first started, we would gather our whole team together at one table in a cafe after work. As we grew we introduced First Tuesdays, our monthly company-wide happy hour. With the company now even larger–we are currently 360 employees and growing–we want to be more creative in the opportunities we provide for people to mix. 

This year, our Experience Team organized the first Squarespace Friends & Family Day.

A 10 second change that improves your team meeting 10x

Running a productive team meeting isn't easy.

Often, people complain that team meetings are boring and a waste of time; the topics may not be of interest to everyone in the team; some people feel excluded.

It's strange that organizations capable of measuring, monitoring and continuously improving all sorts of processes in their business, let weekly team meetings drift along without adjustments and direction and little effort to adjust and improve its effectiveness over time.  

The Power of Software

Just before I left Atlassian to start my new adventure with Squarespace in NYC, I was asked to help develop a short video that explained the role that software plays in our daily lives. The video was showed during the annual Atlassian Summit.

Common language

Jenny, my recruitment manager, has just sent out a brochure to candidates without my input. The content was good, but the brochure looked crap. This hath made me mad - not so much because of the brochure's quality, but because (if Jenny had come to see me first) we could've produced a better outcome. But she didn't! When I tell her this, Jenny is equally frustrated. I never check the communication we send out to candidates, she replies. Which is, of course, true - yet it felt like common sense (at least to me) to show me the brochure before sending it out.

Familiar story, right? Regardless of what department you're working in, it's hard to determine what your employees do or don’t have the authority to do. But the solution is (or at least sounds) profoundly simple:

How organisation size crushes innovation - and what to do about it!

Remember working for that start-up? Things were good. You responded quickly to change. You could, and often did, roll out new programs within weeks or days. Your boss approved quick changes with a simple nod. And you got results - fast.   

Then you switched your start-up gig for an important role at a big enterprise. Things were different - slower, costlier, stuck in red tape, less tangible, less experimental. That's because big organisations are complex. And when humans get accosted by complexity, we get anxious. We need certainty and coordination - in the form of structures, policies, responsibilities and rules - to push that fear away.

What's the obvious issue with performance reviews staring us right in the face

They are demotivating. They are anxiety provoking. They are disruptive. What is the obvious issue that is stopping performance reviews from achieving what they are supposed to achieve? Let's have a look at the research and the science of motivation and engagement. One thing is clear, it's good to provide people with honest feedback and encourage managers to coach people to achieve (even) higher performance.

The simple question that will increase meeting effectiveness

I was walking past a meeting room the other day and looked in. A few people looked rather bored. Of the 10 people inside, only 6 look engaged. That’s a load of wasted time. As mentioned in this great adaptive path blog, not only do we waste too much time in meetings. It also affects the rhythm of your day.

It made me remember a seminar I attended a while back on running effective meetings. (Ironically, the one-day training felt like a long and boring meeting, but it did leave me with one key insight I really found very valuable).

3 tips to boost staff recognition programs

Peer recognition is probably the most rewarding and most essential way to reinforce excellence. Often traditional recognition models may have been developed to do so, but they sink in it's own heavy weight.  The practise of allowing people to nominate someone for a quarterly award just didn't catch on. Instead of having a heavyweight program, we introduced a lightweight 'Kudos' model which constantly reinforces great work and awesome behaviours without needing explicit direction or acknowledgement from the top. Something to consider it to simplify the process to boost peer to peer recognition.

Re-thinking Performance Reviews

Do you ever wonder if and how you could call a halt to your performance review process? Do you think traditional processes are marred by the distribution curve (and forced rankings), huge time investments and low impact on performance improvements?. Keep reading... Let us be your guinea pig! Our organisation has conducted an open review of our new performance review model for everyone to see.