Building Team Cohesion in a Remote Company with Ben Anderson

Speaker 1: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, Co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and I'm here today with Ben Anderson. Ben is the Co- founder and CEO of Luna Park. Luna Park is a comprehensive engagement platform that helps connect hybrid, remote, and distributed teams and employees together. Ben, welcome to The Daily Bolster.

Ben Anderson: Thanks, Matt. I'm really glad to be here.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. So I will start by saying I'm a huge fan of Luna Park. We've used you several times at Bolster over the years.

Ben Anderson: Thank you.

Matt Blumberg: Incredibly fun, interactive games. We've probably only scratched the surface of what you offer, but everyone on the team here always looks forward to doing sort of our virtual all hands fun event once in a while hosted by Luna Park. So my question to you-

Ben Anderson: Awesome, thank you for saying that.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, no, it's great. So my question to you is you play in this space of the world post Covid, and we're all dealing with remote and hybrid and distributed, and lots of CEOs who manage organizations like that really struggle to maintain culture, maintain the cohesive company. So if you're a CEO that has a company like that, which is most of us now, what are some innovative ways to cultivate team cohesion and camaraderie when your employees are all over the place? So obviously Luna Park is one of them. I'm sure you can talk about that at the end, but you're super thoughtful about how this works in general. So what are strategies to deal with cohesion and culture in a distributed world?

Ben Anderson: Cool. Yeah. Matt, first off, I think this is a question that a lot of leaders are still thinking a lot about. I don't know if you remember at the USV CEO summit few months ago, there were so many CEOs who requested this as a topic that they actually made it available during all three breakout sessions to accommodate the demand.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah.

Ben Anderson: So if you're thinking about this, you're certainly not alone, and it's not surprising because team connection and cohesion are such critical drivers to increasing productivity, which is what a lot of CEOs are thinking about. I've personally been thinking a lot about this for a long time as my previous startup I built for just under a decade was distributed, and my current startup, Luna Park, is fully remote. But I've also had the great privilege of talking to leaders from thousands of other companies to help them chip away at this exact challenge. It's incredibly difficult to compete against sitting next to each other in the same room five days a week. The biggest difference is that team connections just happen pretty naturally without much leadership involvement when you're in the office together, it just kind of happens through osmosis. The harsh reality for these modern teams who are distributed or hybrid or remote is that you have to be highly intentional to make those same connections happen. So if I can maybe get a little tactical here for a minute, Matt, I'll share what I've seen the best in class companies implement to help drive this type of connected culture.

Matt Blumberg: Great.

Ben Anderson: First off, it's kind of funny, but getting together in person once, twice, three times per year. Very expensive of course, especially if you need to fly people in, but so worth it. We'll pay dividends throughout the whole year. The second-

Matt Blumberg: Totally, totally, totally agree.

Ben Anderson: Yeah.

Matt Blumberg: I think once a year is the minimum if you're a remote or largely remote workforce. It costs money, but guess what? So does office space, and you don't have any office space.

Ben Anderson: Absolutely.

Matt Blumberg: And I always, I always-

Ben Anderson: Absolutely. We just came off our offsite and we're all fired up afterwards. And so-

Matt Blumberg: Yeah.

Ben Anderson: And that was months ago. So yeah, it's a huge difference.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. It's huge. I always call that putting gas in the tank for the year.

Ben Anderson: Exactly. The second is to put on quarterly or monthly virtual events. These are high impact moments where you encourage your whole team to get together synchronously, and it's really important that leadership actually shows up to these and encourages others too. And it's critical that you choose an activity that's going to feel special to your team and drive meaningful memories and connection. The third thing I'd say is to empower your managers to have their own special hangouts, whether it's providing them a budget or a list of ideas of activities that they can do with their team. You want to encourage managers to assist in this effort to drive connection at greater frequency than what you can do with your entire company. And then the fourth tactic I'd say is, start off some sort of random pairing. This is often facilitated on Slack or Teams where two people from different departments are selected at random to find 30 minutes to hang out with each other. It's a really valuable way to help kind of bridge the gap between departments and break down those silos that just kind of naturally occur on remote and hybrid teams. And then I think to layer on top of that,

Matt Blumberg: We do that one for whatever it's worth. There's an app or plugin or whatever for Slack called Donut.

Ben Anderson: Donut. Yeah, that's a great, great inaudible.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. Anyone who signs up for it is randomly paired. And I think the HR team can set the frequency of it or whatever.

Ben Anderson: Yeah, that's a great tool inaudible.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah.

Ben Anderson: Yeah. With Luna Park, we have a random pairing solution as well where in addition to randomly pairing you with someone, you actually go and play a game challenge and you're competing against thousands of other people from all these different companies. So you actually have something to do while you're there connecting with this person who you may not actually know that well, depending on the size your company. So that's a really great tactic. And then I think the other key thing is layering on top of this, those were all synchronous strategies. So layering on top of that, an asynchronous engagement strategy, and this is especially important if you have a global team across all different time zones. So this includes things like banter on Slack or Teams, kind of wishing people happy birthday or happy work anniversary, throwing out thought- provoking or even just silly discussion topics. And also cultivating a culture of recognition, encouraging the team to shout each other out for doing great work. These are the types of things that can form connection asynchronously on platforms like Slack and Teams. And then the last thing I would just say here is, you need to measure all of this. Anything you want to do intentionally, it's critical that you're kind of looking at the analytics and measuring all these efforts that are happening, and iterating based on what's working and what's not. So this is kind of a layer cake. And the best companies that I've seen are layering on many, if not all of these things together to drive ongoing connection amongst their teams.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. And certainly the measurement piece is important no matter what you're doing because, otherwise, you have no idea if what you're doing works, so.

Ben Anderson: Exactly.

Matt Blumberg: I love it. So Ben, before we close, if A CEO listening to this or a CXO listening to this, or a VC listening to this wants to try Luna Park with their team, what should they do?

Ben Anderson: Yeah, so thanks for sharing the great words about your experience on Luna Park, Matt. We would love to actually extend an offer to all of your listeners who want to give it a shot and try out Luna Park with their team. We'll put on a free live hosted virtual event for them. Just shoot me a quick email at ben @ lunapark. com, mention the Bolster podcast and we'll be sure to hook them up.

Matt Blumberg: Great. Well Ben, thank you so much. It was good to see you as always, and I appreciate you joining The Daily Bolster.

Ben Anderson: Likewise. Thanks Matt. This was fun.