A longtime client asked recently, “What’s EDO’s secret to hiring people who are so consistently excellent?” My answer was one word: “Culture.”
There are many things I’d have done differently over the past 10 years building and growing EDO with my teammates. But if there’s one thing we’ve gotten mostly right on our path to impact and profitability, it’s our team culture. Every time I sign another order with a longtime client – just did the 22nd one with our earliest client, with whom we’ve worked continuously across multiple business units for over 10 years – I’m proud of and grateful for the power of our culture.
To riff on the misattributed Drucker aphorism, culture doesn’t just eat strategy for breakfast – culture eats everything. At EDO we’ve devoted serious time to defining, sharing, and nurturing our culture and that investment has paid for itself many times over.
Here’s what I’ve learned about a winning team culture over the past 10+ years.
In the spring of 2019, our fourth year as a business, we realized that over half of our 40 or so team members had been at EDO for less than a year and the rest had been around for an average of 3 years. That’s an exciting but also risky moment for a company’s culture. All those fresh teammates are bringing new energy and diverse experiences with them, but they haven’t shaped and lived the culture like the early team (the majority of whom were college roommates!).
So we decided to gather the team together from around the country and spend nearly two full days codifying the culture. It was hard work, with all these old and new teammates chiseling out the precise words that guide our culture in a group editing process that took hours.
But it’s more than paid off.
“We are partners.”
“Find a right way or make one.”
“Own our excellence.”
“Cultivate curiosity.”
“Foster an environment of trust.”
These core values are an internal shorthand — mantras to urge us to deliver fast, accurate, and actionable value in every situation — especially when it’s hardest. We wrangle unruly datasets no one else would touch. Build models that have never been tried. Dig deeper for true insights. Take responsibility for problems when we find them. Respond with quick and helpful answers from real people that our clients actually know (and really like, based on our CSAT surveys!).
Because we put the time in early, these values haven’t changed since we first wrote them down over 6 years ago. And we consistently dedicate time to nurturing them, from how we hire and do performance evaluations to how we end every town hall with peer-to-peer appreciations and give out quarterly Culture Hero awards.
The less appreciated underbelly of every organization’s culture are unwritten rules about how stuff actually gets done. If an organization’s core values are its north star, the unwritten rules describe the slow, grinding work that makes you effective as a team.
But once your company scales to a certain size, it’s easy for these unwritten rules to get muddled or diluted. Worse, your organization could fall into tribalism, with different factions operating by their own sets of rules.
That’s why we thought it was so important, as we were hitting another growth spurt, to codify our Unwritten Rules. We devoted a big chunk of another All Hands agenda to gathering up the rules from the team and consolidating them into a cohesive top 10 list.
A sample of them ranges from the profound to the practical:
These rules are shared with every new hire to give them real insight into how EDO works. Each team member hits the ground running, with a deeper understanding of how to make an impact from Day 1.
When you’re building a new company — especially one trying to create its own category — there are so many obstacles and naysayers that you can develop a sense of defiant determination that borders on the pathological. An important check is a sense of perspective about where work fits in the grand scheme of things.
I came to EDO in my early 40s, already running a non-profit startup with my wife. We had two young kids with another on the way and a NYC apartment we could just barely afford. A few years earlier, we had survived the worst imaginable tragedy with our creative confidence and a lot of support. It gave us a lot of perspective on what mattered.
That hard-earned perspective helps me to not over- or under-react to the rollercoaster ride. I still get intensely competitive and take our wins and losses personally. But remembering the broader context helps me stay calm and optimistic, even when things aren’t going as expected. I like to think this balance of passion and confidence permeates our organization. Our team members are conscientious and driven, and face challenges and opportunities with equal poise. That’s a key part of the culture too.
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In the 10 years since we started EDO with a handful of people sharing desks in NYC, LA and SF, our company has grown to have a major positive impact on Media & Entertainment’s transition to ad-supported streaming, supporting all the great TV and movies and advertising we love. Over that decade, I’m most proud of the hundreds of teammates who have built their lives and careers along the way.
And none of it would have been possible if we hadn’t invested early and often in a culture where people have the confidence to learn, grow, and get good stuff done.