Asana tasks disappear at a fast clip as they’re completed. Our Slack #kudos channel is filled with compliments. Our internal calls, which only happen when necessary, are filled with laughter. We’re rolling out more varied and strategic work than ever before.
In short, we’re having fun at work.
As the founder of REACH Strategies, it’s a huge gift and pleasure to reflect on the ingredients that motivate a team to support each other while we complete important work serving others.
Here are some thoughts on what’s been happening at REACH.
Purpose means vision + mission + values
Being aligned on purpose makes everything possible.
I once eavesdropped on a bunch of older football coaches talking over breakfast. One of them said something that caught my attention: “What’s the word for multiple visions?” he asked in that perfect coach drawl. “Division. You have to have a single vision that guides your team.”
Having a single, guiding vision is especially important because we are a fully remote team. Our mission is to support organizations that are delivering world-changing technologies to all people everywhere. And our values guide us as we leverage our key expertise – smart, winning communications strategies and tactics.
The lessons we’ve learned as we have grown
A number of years ago, REACH was growing so fast that it outpaced our management capacity.
Folks who are a good fit for how we work really like it here. But our recruiting process wasn’t effectively surfacing whether job candidates were a good fit for the kind of work and the fast-paced work life we embrace at REACH. We needed to rethink our ways of recruiting and managing staff so we could support the right folks in the right places.
Here’s the kind of process changes we’ve made:
- We have strengthened our management capacity.
- Our managers receive executive coaching support.
- We strengthened our recruitment processes, inviting prospective employees to participate in group interviews with senior staff, read anything negative about us that they could find online, and participate in a skills assessment.
- During our internal one-on-one check-ins, our team members now have qualitative conversations about work life. We talk as much about how we feel about our work life as we do about our Asana tasks. And our management team is prepared to course-correct based on the feedback that comes up during those conversations.
- We’ve re-emphasized the “we” and “team” in our work. We’re all in this together.
How we work together now
When our team members say things like “I feel as if my voice counts here,” or “This is the first time I’ve felt a work-life balance in years,” it lets me know that all these internal changes are putting us on the right track.
Folks on our team don’t just knock out single widgets on an assembly line. They move dynamically between tasks that can range from external meetings, to producing agendas and follow-up notes, to crafting comms materials both large and small, to building new software and project management tools. We also make sure the tasks we take on make sense and help achieve real goals.
The common denominator in all our efforts: At REACH, we do what we say we are going to do, at a consistently high quality.
Plus, we’re having fun at work.
Until next time,
Kirk Brown,
Founder
