Building a business from the relationships up

New faces of collaboration

From the ubiquitous Post-it® Super Sticky Notes to Post-it® Dry Erase Surface, Post-it® Brand offers a number of tools to bring out the very best collaborative experiences amongst your colleagues. However, we know that collaboration isn’t simply limited to tools — nor is it confined to a handful of techniques. To offer new perspectives on collaboration and its benefits, we partnered with The Motley Fool — a renowned leader in innovative collaborative experiences — to help understand their unique approach to make working together better.

Over the course of its 20+ year existence, The Motley Fool financial services company has tinkered, toyed and tooled with ways to build relationships amongst its current 350 person team through various collaboration methods. In fact, the company even has a Chief Collaboration Officer role whose responsibilities revolve around integrating employees and building relationships both within and outside of an individual’s expertise area.

Why? Studies show that organisations that invest in relationships tend to create more trusting environments — which helps spur both collaboration and innovation*.

While nearly all of their techniques started from small bets, the payoff has been enormous. The company has been hailed as one of the most collaborative companies in the U.S. and the company believes that it’s approach to facilitating relationships through collaborative actions has had a concrete business impact.

As Alison Southwick, Poobah of PR at The Motley Fool notes “Our organisation boasts less than 4% voluntary turnover —compared to the national average of 12% — which we take tremendous pride in.”

To help establish collaborative relationships, the company starts getting new employees acquainted with the staff from Day 1…but uses a rather unique approach.

“Every new employee starts on a Friday,” notes Todd Etter, Chief Collaboration Officer at The Motley Fool. “It’s all about helping get them familiar with the culture, people and environment first. Towards the end of the day, we’ll have them push around a Fool Cart stocked with drinks and snacks — alongside the person who hired them — so they can start meeting a variety of people right away. Once that first face-to-face interaction is out of the way, so is a lot of the awkwardness that many companies face when putting together teams together for the first time.”

In fact, the company uses a wealth of methods to ensure that their staff is never “siloed but rather gets exposure to various talents and skills across the entire company.” New hires are also grouped together into a “cohort” — a small group of 7-10 people formed around a variety of skills — and given a collaborative problem to solve for the entire organisation.

While brainstorming and developing solutions, individuals within the team quickly learn each other’s passions and areas of expertise, which have long-term benefits.

My cohort developed a smoothie for the entire organisation,” says Johnnie Weathersby — a business intelligence expert who has been with the company for a year and a half. “The project was great…but what’s even better is that when I have a question that’s outside my area of expertise, I can go back to any member of the cohort group who might have some knowledge in that particular area. It’s empowering for everybody versus spending days trying to ask around the office, looking for that special person. I think that we’re kind of unique in that collaboration is encouraged outside of your immediate team as well.”

This approach helps translate to greater product development efficiencies as well. Because The Motley Fool’s products are time-released and limited for a short amount of time, the company requires its employees to be incredibly agile in responding to product feedback but also developing new products.

The company continuously seeks to introduce new areas of expertise to each other — regardless of how long one has been at The Motley Fool —through a constant flow of new projects/initiatives. And sometimes the company will even introduce a new person to a team based on an intangible.

As Chief Collaboration Officer, Etter’s primary role is to help ensure that the company’s staff is never “siloed but rather gets exposure to various talents and skills across the entire company.” New hires are also grouped together into a “cohort” — a small group of 7-10 people formed around a variety of skills — and given a collaborative problem to solve for the entire organisation.

“The results have been tremendous. The team is thinking in new ways and opening up their playbooks to different approaches.We’re simply not afraid to move people to where their passions and skills make sense.”

Identifying passion areas is another area where The Motley Fool excels. Outside of the day-to-day, the organisation offers several extracurricular collaborative activities ranging from sports clubs to a weekly board game get-together. The benefit: colleagues may recognize areas of skill in one another that may not surface during on-the-job situations.

“Ideas can come from anywhere,” says Burbage. “Most companies completely sleep on the diversity of talents within their business. If someone is absolutely passionate about something, why wouldn’t you want to harness that passion and put it to work for you in a way that everyone benefits? It not only helps motivate more people, but also dramatically improves the speed and efficiencies of exploring new ideas and innovations.”

Building on this approach, Nate McMahon — Senior VP of People & Technology at The Motley Fool —  notes, “When people go outside of their traditional roles, magic happens.”

“You can’t force innovation, but if you cater to its  development by colliding roles and responsibilities in a  way that your talent can rally behind, big things happen.”

“We’re not interested in ‘best practices’ — we want to develop the ‘next practices’. And we do that by giving people the freedom to work together in a way that doesn’t feel like ‘work’.”

Outside of the benefits of exposing team members to new talents and approaches, however, comes a very real benefit to forging relationships: lasting friendships. Studies have shown that employees who have a best friend at work tend to be more productive, passionate and loyal to their organisations.

“Ultimately, we want to create an environment where people love coming to work,” notes Etter. “When you create opportunities for people to meet more people, you create more opportunities for people to create lasting relationships. According to an internal survey, 77% of our employees say they work with a close friend and we couldn’t be happier to have helped bring those people together.”

* http://www.worldwork.biz/legacy/www/downloads/role_of_trust.pdf