Developing great company culture isn’t all just fun and games. Here at Wistia, we’ve been working hard to create an environment that brings out the best in every member of our team. In order to keep improving our game, we’ve been visiting companies we respect to learn how they work and what makes their culture unique. We’ll be sharing everything we learn though our favorite medium (video!) in an experiment we’re calling How They Work.
For this installment, we visited Care.com, an online service that helps families find caregivers. They pride themselves on a transparent and fun culture, one that’s helped them double their venture-funded business every year. They’ve had to fight to be in the position that they’re in, working to achieve organic fun with more unstructured things and breaking down barriers.
Here are a few ways that Care.com has worked to create a rich company culture:
- One of the things that was important from the beginning was fun, but as the company became bigger, they couldn’t just create structured fun events for people — it didn’t solve the problems they wanted to solve. The more they allowed and focused on opportunities for organic fun, the more benefits they saw — more creativity and productivity, more willingness to take on their own problems, and more willingness to intermingle with other people on the team.
- Transparency is huge, and they hold an all-hands meeting on a weekly basis to help everyone connect their day-to-day job with the overall vision of the company and how the company is doing. They also switch around where people sit regularly to keep the team cross-pollinating. All of these things help the team make better decisions to get things done efficiently.
- As the culture grows, they focus on people who are new, having an informal gathering at least once a month to make sure everyone is infused into the culture — fun has to be owned by everybody. It’s important to people to get away from their computers once in a while and connect as people.
