I wanna tell you about one of the highest yield activities in my entire organization. I have almost a hundred employees. We're spread across the world, and it's really hard for any organization to build culture. It's exceptionally hard for an organization that has people of different cultures, different backgrounds, different time zones, different countries. Building a culture can be difficult, but if you're intentional and consistent I think it tends to fall into place. One, two, I think it's the most important thing you can do as a leader. one of the things we do is it's our all hands meeting. It happens every Friday morning, and that's by intention by the way, every Friday morning. I don't like all hands meetings that happen on Monday. A lot of organizations like to do their all hands on a Monday, and the problem with the Monday is everybody's stressed. It's like, dude, everything that came into the weekend to catch up on anything that was overfill from last week. I just started I'm still pissed that it's Monday. I have a case of the Mondays and you're gonna make me sit here and pretend to be happy and, you know, sit here and clap like a train seal. I don't wanna do any of that. Fridays are fun. Fridays are like, Hey, we're already halfway out the door. I have my weekend planned. Most people check out early on Fridays anyway. And if you're an employer and you don't. Number one, believe that, and number two, allow for a little bit of that. Then I think you're, Swimming against the current. So I like a Friday morning because I think this is the happiest that everybody's going to be. It's also a good opportunity. It's a good time to deliver bad news, which happens often in the all hands meetings. By the way. It's part of building cultures truth. And, you know, let's say we have a sales goal. We've missed our sales goal. Well, all right, Friday's a good day to celebrate, but it's also a good day to take a blow because we've got the weekend, we can go, we can recoup, and then we can come back next week refreshed. Weekly town hall every Friday morning. Do not make it Friday afternoon or late in the day. That's a sneaky, sneaky trick to try to keep people engaged throughout the entirety. That is Friday, they're going to check out no matter what, you know, 2, 3, 4 o'clock in the afternoon depending on where they're located geographically, but, you know, whatever the analogous time zone is for them cutting off a couple of hours. So I like Friday morning because it, It gives the opportunity for a little bit of that too. The very first thing we do is an icebreaker and we like to play games. Right now we're in the middle of who's that baby? we have three employees submit baby pictures every week. They submit 'em to Max who builds the slide deck, and We show a, a baby picture and then we make everybody guess to see who it is. And it's so much fun to be able to see people when they were babies because first of all, babies are cute and second of all, they're always like dressed, kind of fun and interesting way. And there's opportunities to talk about like different cultural norms and, cultural garbs and those types of things cuz we do have an international team and then it's so humanizing. It's so, you know, like, oh, you're not just this person that I have to get yelled at by every time the onboarding doesn't work, you're actually like, you know, I see you as a baby. and then we ask 'em about, the baby picture and the pose that they were currently in, you know, whatever stories. Connected with the baby picture that they shared. So before this we played two truths and a lie, which is also a ton of fun. We took, again, three team members and they had to tell us two things that were true, one thing that was a lie, and then everybody had to guess. And getting people involved in the guests and, getting to know people. it's five minutes to go through three people. but it's one of the most effective team building exercises that we have. and after, guess that baby, we're gonna have to come up with another one. But our team is really good at coming up with these So I think that's a really, really important five minutes. It also lets people trickle in. I can't imagine my team watches any videos, so I should be safe. They're sick of me. I like the icebreaker game on the front end because people are gonna be late, but you don't wanna wait to start a meeting because you know people are gonna be late because then people become later. So starting the game allows you to, have a bit of a buffer, but not. Yield to people that aren't gonna be there on time, or even be the taskmaster that's like clocking people in the thing they're missing is the most fun thing. So that's the first five minutes. The second five minutes. This is now into minute 10. First five minutes, icebreaker, second five minutes. We go over the important metrics and we report on our collective goals. I share revenue numbers, and a lot of business owners are like, I can't believe you do that, but my question is, why not? Like, our employees are gonna be able to see that anyway? Everything's managed inside of Airtable. You can see every client, what they pay us, how much they pay, how long they've been with us. Math is easy to do. These aren't dumb people. And the benefit I have is I pay more than the high watermark. as a rule, I try to pay people as much as we possibly can, as much as we can afford. And in so doing it puts me in a position to be able to share, Hey, here's where we are from a revenue perspective. Here are our revenue goals. This is what we're trying to get to at the end of the year. We're 20% of the way to our goal and we're 25% into the year. So you think to yourself like, oh goodness, we're behind. But not really, because our growth trajectory the last quarter of every year has been something like 50% of the revenue of the entire year. we keep hitting these hockey sticks, which is amazing. I'm not too worried, but I also want people to know this is our goal we have a collective, bonus at the end of the year if we hit our goal. If we hit our goal, there's a great big bag of money. And everybody gets to share in this great big bag of money, which is fun, right? Like it's fun for me, it's fun for everybody. We did this last year and, some folks walked away with sums of money that were. Close to or in excess of their annual income. And we have the same opportunity here. And we do, we tie those to the goals but it's a collective goal. It's not like individual, each person is benefiting on their own kind of little sales commission piece. Cuz I think that gets really combative. five minutes for goals and then we spend five minutes on wins. And kudos and kudos I think are so, so, so important, especially for remote, remote organizations. We have a Slack channel that is nothing but kudos. what I tell people is, catch people doing things right. You're at work, work sucks. You're gonna get caught doing things wrong all the time. That's what work is. So let's catch people doing things right too. Let's overcorrect in that direction so that when somebody does get a little slap on the wrist for doing something that they weren't supposed to do, or they have a correction or an improvement opportunity or whatever they, we filled up the bank account with, Hey, by the way, you're awesome too. You did these 99 things, right? And then you did this thing that we just needed to talk about and it's no big deal, but it can only be no big deal if I told you about the 99 things you did right first. So catch people doing things right and bring it up, make it public. Tell people about it. And so, you know, not only do we reward the people who receive the kudos, we also reward the people who give the kudos. Cuz that's hard to step out on a limb and say, you know, I'm gonna put myself in the position of a leader. Now I'm gonna say something positive about somebody. And I mean, you're putting yourself out there. So we look over the wins, we look over the kudos that we're 15 minutes into it now. And at this point we go into our department head presentations. So this takes 15 to 20 minutes in every department head. I think we have. Nine departments. Every department heads, I say 62nd presentation. I say, gimme, gimme the update on your department for 60 seconds. Now it's generally a little bit more than that, depending on what's going on. Sometimes they're shorter. Sometimes, you know, they, they'll chime in and be, oh yeah, you know, my sales team nothing going on this week. Pipeline looks good next. And then we move on. But what I like is I want everybody to know what each department is doing, because very often you hear things where you're like, oh, wait a minute. The onboarding department is changing the agreement. Call tracking metrics had a term of service change. We're gonna need to change the quality assurance department. They need to know about, you know what I mean? Like there are things that happen that it's really hard to coordinate a hundred person organization. I say that like it's big. I know that's small, but it's big for me. It's the biggest organization I've ever had. these department check-ins give people the opportunity to let everybody else know what's going on, allow for a little reconciliation and just let people know what else is going on in the organization. It's like, oh, that's cool. I didn't even know we had a quality assurance department. That's great. And then we have another five minutes where we introduce any new employees invite them to the group, and then we ask them I always like to ask three questions. I'm like tell us a little about yourself, what you were doing before solutions eight, and what you do for fun. Oh, and if you were a superhero, Who'd you be? And then you'll notice if you go to the solution date About Us Page, we've turned everybody into Solu Superhero. Everybody got a superhero avatar, everybody always wants like Batman or Ironman. We're running out of superheroes. So we've actually gone pretty obscure, which is fun to see how creative people get. But introducing new employees, I think it is so, so important because when you start a new job, it's already daunting and overwhelming. When you start a new job and it's 100% remote, you feel so alone. Right. It's just you in a room by yourself and you're not connected to the culture of this company yet. And so having the opportunity to come, it's a little, it's a little daunting. I know, but I do that honestly by, on purpose too. It's like, Hey, you gotta come outta your, shell just a little bit. And then, hopefully other people are gonna reach out and connect and have virtual coffee dates. And we have a ton of that. We have people that just get together and play. There's a game, I forget, it's a shoot 'em up game, but they all, they think, I don't know, but I know they all get together and they play the shoot 'em up game and what an awesome culture that is. We have 20 employees that have all decided to get together in Mexico to do a working vacation where they've rented this really big, beautiful home and it's because they all got to know each other and they're all friends. It's so, so cool. building that comradery into the culture can be intentional. And then we've got five minutes of, of open forum, and this is where we say you can talk about anything. bring it up. One time we had Glenn, who's the head of our specialist team, one of the brightest guys I've ever known. He just started talking about AI and he's done this deep, deep, deep dive on ai and he knows all these things about AI and he has all these thought leaders that he follows and he has these really unique and interesting opinions. It was so productive and so valuable. And sometimes people bring up things that are like cash. The economy's kind of softening and I'm worried those are good conversations to get out with the group. Cuz here's the thing, the group's gonna have those conversations with or without you. but you wanna make sure that it's with you there instead of like behind the scenes where you can't necessarily influence the narrative because you wanna be able to pipe in too and say, Hey y'all, here's why maybe you shouldn't be worried. Or here's some of the precautions we're taking here. Or, gosh, I didn't even realize this was a concern. Thank you so much for telling me. Now I know. So I really like open forum. They don't capitalize on it as much as I'd like to. Very often. We just sit there staring at each other awkwardly. But it has yielded some really good conversations. And then, Comes my favorite part of the entire thing. And we call it open mic. So right after open forum, we save 10 minutes for open mic. And what we do is we choose one employee. and what we've decided to do is we're just going in chronological order. So we started with our, most tenured employee and then worked we're, working toward our most recent employees. And they present on any topic of their choice. Any topic. And so like we had a gal do an entire 10 minute presentation on succulents. She has this massive collection of succulents and they're all over her house. she shared like different types of succulents and what they are and why they're important and how hard they're, a ton of people have done their town. and I've noticed how important that is to everybody. It's like, Hey, this is where I live. This is where I'm from. We had a young man do a guitar solo, which was really cool. We've actually had a couple of musicians play music for us. We had somebody who's a painter share their paintings with us, like it's just 10 minutes of whatever they want. And, and it's so fun to see how dynamic these people are. One of the gals that just presented, she was Overwhelmingly impressive. She speaks like 19 languages and she's traveled to all these countries and she can do all these things and she can paint and she can dance, and she can, like, it was just like, oh my goodness. Like what an amazing human you are. And I would never would've known that. I never would've known that. I would not given her the opportunity to step up and be like, Hey, this is who I am. This is what's important to me. So the open mic is so cool. I get so much out of it every week. It's a thing that I look forward to most. And it's a great time, a great place to let people shine, which is really what you wanna do in a remote culture. And then we close we have the last five minutes. if there's time left. And, at this point I'm offering these timetables as though they're rigid. They're not, but they're roughly about how long these things take. And we like to ask people questions that have presented for the open mic, thank them for their time. And then we've got kind of just a quick like wrap up. And if we end early, we end early and it's like, Hey, everybody, get out. God bless you. We love you. Take care. See you next week. But it's the most expensive call we have at Solutions Aid. Every single employee we have is on this thing for an hour, so you take whatever people's hourly bill, not that we pay by the hour, we're salaried, all of us. But if you were to take what they cost an hour and then multiply that by every employee we have, and then, that's an expensive call, but it's so worth it. It's so worth the investment. I'd be really interested if anybody else runs something like an all hands meeting, what you do. What pro tips you'd offer me, what improvement opportunities you see with what it is that I presented, and whether or not you're gonna start one yourself. I'd love to hear about it. And I hope this was helpful and I'll see you tomorrow.