People First
People First
I do not think it’s telling that my fourth post in this series of posts on Return Path’s core values (kickoff post, tag cloud) is something called People First. Ok, it probably should have been the first post in the series. To be fair, it is the first value on our list, but for whatever reason, the value about Ownership was top of mind when I decided to create this series.
Anyway, at Return Path,
We believe that people come first
And we aren’t shy about saying it publicly, either. This came up in a lengthy interview I did with Inc. Magazine last year when we were profiled for winning an award as one of the top 20 small- and mid-sized businesses to work for in America. After re-reading that article, I went back and tried to find the slide from our investor presentations that I referred to. I have a few versions of this slide from different points in time, including one that’s simpler (it only has employees, clients, and shareholder on it) but here’s a sample of it:
That pretty much says it all. We believe that if we have the best and most engaged workforce, we will do the best job at solving our clients’ problems, and if we do that well, our shareholders will win, too.
How does this “people first” mentality influence my/our day-to-day activities? Here are a few examples:
- We treat all employees well, regardless of level or department. All employees are important to us achieving our mission – otherwise, they wouldn’t be here. So we don’t do a lot of things that other companies do like send our top performing sales reps on a boondogle together while the engineers and accountants slave away in the office as second-class citizens. That would be something you might see in a “sales first” or “customer first” culture
- We fiercely defend the human capital of our organization. There are two examples I can think of around this point. First, we do not tolerate abusive clients. Fortunately, they are rare, but more than once over the years either I or a member of my senior team has had to get on the phone with a client and reprimand them, or even terminate their contract with us, for treating one of our employees poorly and unprofessionally. And along the same lines, when all economic hell broke loose in the fall of 2008, we immediately told employees that while we’d be in for a rough ride, our three top priorities were to keep everyone’s job, keep everyone’s compensation, and keep everyone’s health benefits. Fortunately, our business withstood the financial challenges and we were able to get through the financial crisis with those three things intact.
- We walk the walk with regard to employee feedback. Everyone does employee satisfaction surveys, but we are very rigorous about understanding what areas are making people relatively unhappy (for us, even our poor ratings are pretty good, but they’re poor relative to other ratings), and where in the employee population (office, department, level) those issues lie. We highlight them in an all-hands meeting or communication, we develop specific action plans around them, and we measure those same questions and responses the next time we do a survey to see how we’ve improved
- We invest in our people. We pay them fairly well, but that’s not what I’m talking about. We invest in their learning and growth, which is the lifeblood of knowledge workers. We do an enormous amount of internal training. We encourage, support, and pay for outside training and education. We are very generous with the things that allow our employees to be happy and healthy, from food to fitness to insurance to time off to a flexible environment to allowing them to work from another office, or even remotely, if their lives require them to move somewhere else
- I spend as little time as I possibly can managing my shareholders and as much time as I can with employees and prospective employees. That doesn’t mean I don’t interact with my Board members – I do that quite a bit. But it does mean that when I do interact with them, it’s more about what they can do for Return Path and less about reporting information to them. I do send them a lot of information, but the information flow works well for them and simultaneously minimizes my time commitment to the process: (1) reporting comes in a very consistent format so that investors know WHAT to expect and what they’re looking at, (2) reporting comes out with a consistently long lead time prior to a meeting so investors know WHEN to expect the information, (3) the format of the information is co-developed with investors so they are getting the material they WANT, and (4) we automate as much of the information production as possible and delegate it out across the organization as much as possible so there’s not a heavy burden on any one employee to produce it
- When we do spend time with customers (which is hopefully a lot as well), we try to spread that time out across a broad base of employees, not just salespeople and account managers, so that as many of our employees can develop a deep enough understanding of what our customers’ lives are like and how we impact them
There are plenty of companies out there who have a “shareholder first” or “customer first” philosophy. I’m not saying those are necessarily wrong – but at least in our industry, I’ll bet companies like that end up with significantly higher recruiting costs (we source almost half our new hires from existing employee referrals), higher employee churn, and therefore lower revenue and profit per employee metrics at a minimum. Those things must lead to less happy customers, especially in this day and age of transparency. And all of those things probably degrade shareholder value, at least over the long haul.
Return Path Core Values, Part II
Return Path Core Values, Part II
As I said at the beginning of this series, I was excited to share the values that have made us successful with the world and to also articulate more for the company some of the thinking behind the statements.
You can click on the tag for all the posts on the 13 Return Path’s core values, but the full list of the values is below, with links to each individual post, for reference:
- We believe that people come first
- We believe in doing the right thing
- We solve problems together and always present problems with potential solutions or paths to solutions
- We believe in keeping the commitments we make, and communicate obsessively when we can’t
- We don’t want you to be embarrassed if you make a mistake; communicate about it and learn from it
- We believe in being transparent and direct
- We challenge complacency, mediocrity, and decisions that don’t make sense
- We believe that results and effort are both critical components of execution
- We are serious and passionate about our job and positive and light-hearted about our day
- We are obsessively kind to and respectful of each other
- We realize that people work to live, not live to work
- We are all owners in the business and think of our employment at the company as a two-way street
- We believe inboxes should only contain messages that are relevant, trusted, and safe
As I noted in my initial post, every employee as of August 2008 was involved in the drafting of these statements. That’s a long post for another time, but it’s an important part of the equation here. These were not top-down statements written by me or other executives or by our People team. Some are more aspirational than others, but they are the aspirations of the company, not of management!
It's Copyright Time
It’s Copyright Time
Brad must be off his game this year, so…time to update all those copyrights to say 2008. Or as Brad gently suggested last year, make that field variable so you never have to worry about it again! (Thanks to our CTO Andy Sautins for the reminder here.)
Please, Keep Not Calling (Thank You!)
Please, Keep Not Calling (Thank You!)
It’s been three years since the federal government passed one of its better pieces of legislation in recent memory, creating the Do Not Call Registry which is a free way of dramatically reducing junk phone solicitations. At the time, registrations were set to expire every three years. When I signed up my phone number, I stuck a note in my calendar for today (three years later) to renew my registration. I was planning on blogging about it to remind the rest of the world, too.
To my great surprise, when I went to the site today, I saw this note:
Your registration will not expire. Telephone numbers placed on the National Do Not Call Registry will remain on it permanently due to the Do-Not-Call Improvement Act of 2007, which became law in February 2008.
That’s two great pieces of legislation. What will they think of next?
The Gift of Feedback, Part II
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The Gift of Feedback, Part II
I’ve written a few times over the years about our 360 feedback process at Return Path. In Part I of this series in early 2008, I spelled out my development plan coming out of that year’s 360 live review process. I have my new plan now after this year’s process, and I thought I’d share it once again. This year I have four items to work on:
- Continue to develop the executive team. Manage the team more aggressively and intentionally. Upgrade existing people, push hard on next-level team development, and critically evaluate the organization every 3-6 months to see if the execs are scaling well enough or if they need to replaced or augmented
- Formalize junior staff interaction. Create more intentional feedback loops before/after meetings, including with the staff member if needed, and cultivate acceptance of transparency; get managers to do the same. Be extra skeptical about the feedback I’m getting, realizing that I may not get an accurate or complete picture
- Foster deeper engagement across the entire organization. Simplify/streamline company mission and balanced scorecard through a combination of deeper level maps/scorecards, maybe a higher level scorecard, and constant reinforcing communication. Drive multi-year planning process to be fun, touching the entire company, and culminating in a renewed enthusiasm
- Disrupt early and often, the right way. Introduce an element of productive disruption/creative destruction into the way I lead, noting item 2 around feedback loops
Thanks to everyone internally who contributed to this review. I appreciate your time and input. Onward!
State of Colorado COVID-19 Innovation Response Team, Part IV – Replacing Myself, Days 7-9
(This is the fourth post in a series documenting the work I did in Colorado on the Governor’s COVID-19 Innovation Response Team – IRT. Other posts in order are 1, 2, and 3.)
Monday, March 23, Day 7
- Wellness screening – put hot cup of coffee against my temples – now finally the thermometer works (although I can’t say that it gives me a high degree of comfort that I have figured out a workaround!)
- Furious execution and still backlog is growing no matter how much I do – thank goodness team is growing. Never seen this before – work coming in faster than I can process it, and I am a fast processer. Inbox clean when I go to bed, up to 75 when I wake up, never slows down
- Private sector explosion – this guy can print 3D swabs – but are they compliant? This guy has an idea for cleansing PPE, this guy can do 3D printing of Ventilator replacement parts, etc. How to corral?
- Corporate Volunteer form is up – 225 entries in the first 12 hours – WOW
- Congressmen and Senators – people contact them, so they want to help, they want to make news, not coordinated enough with state efforts
- Jay Want – early diagnosis losing sense of smell – low tech way to New Normal
- Coordination continues to be key – multiple cabinet level agencies doing their own thing while multiple private sector groups are doing their own thing (e.g. App – “everyone thinks they’re the only people who have this idea”)
- Mayor of Denver just announced lockdown, I guess that trumps the state solution in town, maybe it’s ok since that just leaves rural areas a bit fuzzier
- Need to revise OS – team is about to go from 3 to 9, private sector spinning up
- Brad OS and State employee OS are different – Slack/Trello/Zoom are not tools state employees are familiar with or can even access. Now what?
- Kacey insists the team works remotely other than leaders and critical meetings so we can role model social distancing. GOOD CALL
- One of our private sector guys goes rogue on PR, total bummer – this part (comms) about what we are doing could be more coordinated for sure, but not a priority
- Lots of texts/call with Jared, such a smart and thoughtful guy, really interesting
Tuesday, March 24, Day 8
- Been a week, feels like a month
- Fluid changes to both OS for team and OS for private sector group
- Zoom licenses – state will take a couple weeks to procure them, gotta work around it with Brad
- Slack app won’t get through the firewall. Maybe IT’s supervisor can do us a favor?
- Comp – interesting expedited process – normally takes 65 days to get approval for temps, today we got it done in an hour! Comp levels seem incredibly low. But we got done what we needed to get done
- Some minor territorial conflicts with state tech team and our private sector tech team. Will have to resolve. Surprising how few of these there have been so far given that our team is new and shiny and breaking rules
- Big new Team meeting for first time with Sarah in lead, Red/Yellow/Green check-in (I like that – may have to borrow it!)
- Starting to feel obsolete – love that! Sarah crushing it, totally feels like the right leader, need to make sure she has enough support (might need an admin?)
- Also…maybe I’m not feeling well? A little worried I am getting sick. Hope that’s not true, or if it is, hope it’s not the BAD kind of sick. Going to go work from hotel rest of afternoon
- Call with Jared – concern about managing state’s psychology – testing and isolation services
- Prep for press conference tomorrow
Wednesday, March 25, Day 9
- Woke up feeling awesome – phew – hopefully that was just fatigue or stress induced
- Sarah drowning a bit, feels like me on my 3rd day so makes sense
- Reigning in and organizing private sector seems like a full time job. We are going to recruit my friend Michelle (ex-RP) to come work with Brad on volunteer management. HALLELUJAH!
- Whiteboard meeting with Kacey holding up her laptop so they can see it on Zoom – hilarious – technology not really working, but we are making the best of it
- State role – facilitate alt supply chain to hospitals since normal chain is broken…also maintain emergency state cache – complex but makes more sense now
- More territorial things starting to pop up with state government…processing volunteers
- Comms overload – here comes the text to alert you to the email to alert you to the phone call
- This team/project is clearly a case of finite resources meets infinite scope and infinite volunteer hand-raising
- Gov press conference – issues Stay at Home order through April 11 (interesting, that wasn’t in the version of the talking points I saw several hours before)
- Meeting some of our new team members. I can’t even keep up with them, I think we’re up to 15+ now. Kacey and Kyle are recruiting machines and all these people’s managers are just loaning to us immediately. Love that.
- Amazingly talented and dedicated state employees – seem young, probably not paid well, but superior to private sector comprables in some waysÂ
- Talk with Kacey and Sarah about staff/not drowning
- Kacey feels like Sarah is doing a great job, so she cleared me to go home (wouldn’t have gone without her saying ok, she understands how this whole thing is working way better than I do – I guess that’s what a good chief of staff does!)
Stay tuned for more tomorrow…
Everything is Data, Part II – Get Those Expenses In
Everything is Data, Part II – Get Those Expenses In
My friend and former colleague Angela Baldonero (used to run our People Team at Return Path, now is COO of super cool startup Procurify), used to say about her job as head of HR, “Everything is Data.” She guest blogged about that principle on OnlyOnce years ago here , and she particularly cited this theory when talking about the recruiting and hiring process.
I’ve thought about this principle a lot over the years, and I’ve occasionally come up with other examples where I think peripheral data can inform whether or not an employee will succeed, at least in my world. I don’t know how many of these can be caught in an interview process, but that’s worth thinking about. Here’s one for today’s post: I’ve noticed a very high correlation over the years between poor performance and being late turning in expenses.
I know, it sounds silly. But think about it. Most of the work we do involves some level of being organized, being on time, prioritizing work and working efficiently, and caring about money (whether the company’s money or our own money). Someone who can’t bother to fill out a quick expense report following a business trip is demonstrating an absence of all of those traits. The most glaring example of it we ever had here involved a fairly senior sales executive years ago who was delinquent in his expenses to the tune of over $40,000. That’s right, $40,000. It was so bad that our auditors made us footnote it in our annual audit. We begged him to turn in his expenses. We even offered to have him send a pile of all the receipts to us and have someone in Accounting help him out. But he was always too busy, made too many excuses for why he couldn’t get them done. I think it ended up taking us firing him for him to actually clean them up and get paid back. Why did we fire him? He was ineffective in his role, unresponsive to colleagues, unable to prioritize his work, and sloppy in his deliverables.
By the way, the opposite is not true – someone who is incredibly punctual about getting expenses in is not guaranteed to be a high performer, although they are usually guaranteed to at least be organized (which for some roles may be a critical success factor).
I suppose ultimately this is just another example of Broken Windows, which I blogged about in two different places, here and here.
A New Path Forward
A New Path Forward
Welcome to the world, Path Forward, Inc.!
I’m thrilled to announce the launch today of Path Forward, a new non-profit with a goal of empowering millions of women to rejoin the workforce after taking time out for childcare. We are launching today with a Crowdrise campaign.   See more about that below. And we launched with a bang, too – the organization is featured in this really amazing story on Fortune.
The concept started at Return Path two years ago, as I wrote about here and again here, when our CTO Andy Sautins came to me with a simple but powerful idea of creating a structured program of paid fellowships with training for women who want to reenter the workforce but find it difficult to do so because of rusty skills, lapsed networks, or societal bias. We expanded the program later that year with partner companies ReadyTalk, SendGrid, MWH Global, SpotX, and Moz, as I wrote about here. The response from both participants and companies has been nothing short of amazing.
The day after I put up that last post about v2 of the program, a human resources leader at PayPal gave me a call and asked if we could help them structure a program for their engineering organization, too.  That’s when it struck me that the idea of midcareer internships as one means of providing an on-ramp to the paid workforce for people who’d been focused on caregiving could work for many companies, and also that for this program to work and scale up, it couldn’t be an “off the side of the desk” project for the People Team at Return Path.  So we decided to create a new company separate from Return Path to carry out this important work. And we decided that with a practical, but social mission, it should be a non-profit, dedicated to creating and managing networks of companies offering opportunities to many more people.
To date, the program has served nearly 50 participants (mostly women, but a couple of stay-at-home dads, too!) and 7 companies in 6 cities around the world, producing an impressive 80% hire rate. The participants who have been hired by us and our partner organizations have made impressive contributions to their companies’ businesses and cultures. The companies have benefitted from their experience and passion. That’s what I call product-market fit. Now it’s time to officially launch the new organization, and scale it up! Our BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal, in the language of Jim Collins) is that within 10 years, we want to serve 10,000 companies and 1 million women and men. We want to reduce the penalty that caregivers face when they take time away from paid work. We want to transform lives by getting people who want to work, back to work in jobs that leverage all their many skills and talents. We want to help companies tap into an incredibly important but overlooked part of the talent pool to grow their workforces. We want to change the world.
We’ve been able to assemble a strong Board of Directors to lead this effort.  Joanne Wilson, often better known as Gotham Gal and the founder of the Women’s Entrepreneur Festival, is joining me as Board Co-chair. Joanne is a force to be reckoned with in championing women founders in tech.  Brad Feld joins our Board with great credentials as an early-stage investor, but more importantly he’s served for more than 10 years as Board Chair of the National Center for Women and Technology.  Media luminary and investor Cathie Black was most recently the President of Hearst Magazines having previously served as President and Publisher of USA Today.  Cathie has been the “first” woman many times and has broken her share of glass ceilings.  Rajiv Vinnakota is the Executive Vice President of the Youth & Engagement division at the Aspen Institute and prior to that was the co-founder and CEO of The SEED Foundation, a non-profit managing the nation’s first network of public, college-preparatory boarding schools for underserved children which he started and successfully scaled up for more than 17 years.  Cathy Hawley, our long-time VP of People at Return Path, gets (though often deflects) the lion’s share of the credit for conceiving and championing the original return to work program at Return Path.  It is, truly, an embarrassment of riches. We are so thrilled to have them all on board Path Forward’s Board.
On the staff side I’m also pleased to announce that one of my long-time executive lieutenants at Return Path, Tami Forman, has accepted the role of Executive Director of Path Forward. I can’t think of anyone better for this role. Tami is the consummate storyteller, which every good founder and Startup CEO needs to be! More importantly she has been living and breathing work/life integration for eight years since the birth of her daughter (followed by a son). She is absolutely passionate about the idea that women can have jobs and families and live big lives. And, more importantly, she’s dedicated to the idea that taking a “break” (she and I agree it’s not a break!) to care for a loved one shouldn’t sideline anyone’s career dreams.
I can’t wait to see how far this idea can go. I truly believe this program can have a measurable, positive impact on thousands of companies across the country and the world.
Please join me and Tami and our talented Board on this journey. Help us change the world. There are three ways to participate:
- Click here if your company would like to learn more about having the Path Forward program in the future
- Click here if you would like to return to the workforce after a break and think a Path Forward fellowship might be a good, well, path forward for you
- And as a non-profit, we need financial help! Click here to contribute to our Crowdrise campaign, the goal of which is essentially a $500k “Series A” round (although it’s a non-profit, so this is a purchase of emotional equity, not actual equity) to move from product-market fit to a proven business model!
(Please note – we haven’t yet received word of our non-profit status yet from the IRS, though we expect it in the next couple of months. As such, any donation now is not tax deductible until after the certification comes through. While there’s some risk that we don’t gain non-profit status…we don’t think the risk is large.)
Pret a Manager
Pret a Manager
My friend James is the GM of the Pret a Manger (a chain of about 250 “everyday luxury” quick service restaurants in the UK and US) at 36th and 5th in Manhattan. James recently won the President’s Award at Pret for doing an outstanding job opening up a new restaurant. As part of my ongoing effort to learn and grow as a manager, I thought it would be interesting to spend a day shadowing James and seeing what his operation and management style looked like for a team of two dozen colleagues in a completely different environment than Return Path. That day was today. I’ll try to write up the day as combination of observations and learnings applied to our business. This will be a much longer post than usual. The title of this post is not a typo – James is “ready to manage.”
1. Team meeting. The day started at 6:45 a.m. pre-opening with a “team brief” meeting. The meeting only included half a dozen colleagues who were on hand for the opening, it was a mix of fun and serious, and it ended with three succinct points to remember for the day. I haven’t done a daily huddle with my team in years, but we do daily stand-ups all across the company in different teams. The interesting learning, though, is that James leaves the meeting and writes the three points on a whiteboard downstairs near the staff room. All staff members who come in after the meeting are expected to read the board and internalize the three points (even though they missed the meeting) and are quizzed on them spontaneously during the day. Key learning: missing a meeting doesn’t have to mean missing the content of the meeting.
2. Individual 1:1 meeting. I saw one of these, and it was a mix of a performance review and a development planning session. It was a little more one-way in communication than ours are, but it did end up having a bunch of back-and-forth. James’s approach to management is a lot of informal feedback “in the moment,” so this formal check-in contained no surprises for the employee. The environment was a little challenging for the meeting, since it was in the restaurant (there’s no closed office, and all meetings are done on-site). The centerpiece of the meeting was a “Start-Stop-Continue” form. Key learning: Start-Stop-Continue is a good succinct check-in format.
3. Importance of values. There were two forms of this that I saw today. One was a list of 13 key behaviors with an explanation next to each of specific good and bad examples of the behavior. The behaviors were very clear and were “escalating,” meaning Team Members were expected to practice the first 5-6 of them, Team Leads the first 7-8, Managers the first 10, Head Office staff the first 12, Executives all 13 (roughly). The second was this “Pret Recipe,” as posted on the public message board (see picture below). Note – just like our values at Return Path, it all starts with the employee. One interesting nugget I got from speaking to a relatively new employee who had just joined at the entry level after being recruited from a prominent fast food chain where he had been a store general manager was “Pret really believes this stuff — no lip service.”
I saw the values in action in two different ways. The first was on the message board, where each element of the Pret Recipe was broken out with a list of supporting documents below it, per the below photo. Very visual, very clear.
The second was that in James’s team meeting and in his 1:1 meeting, he consistently referenced the behaviors. Key learning: having values is great, making them come to life and be relevant for a team day-in, day-out is a lot harder but quite powerful when you get it right.
4. Managing by checklist. I wrote about this topic a while ago here, but there is nothing like food service retail to demand this kind of attention to detail. Wow. They have checklists and standards for everything. Adherence to standards is what keeps the place humming. Key learning: it feels like we have ~1% of the documentation of job processes that Pret does, and I’m thinking that as we get bigger and have people in more and more locations doing the same job, a little more documentation is probably in order to ensure consistency of delivery.
5. Extreme team-based and individual incentive compensation. Team members start at $9/hour (22% above minimum wage that most competitors offer). However, any week in which any individual store passes a Mystery Shopper test, the entire staff receives an incremental $2/hour for the whole week. Any particular employee who is called out for outstanding service during a Mystery Shop receives a $100 bonus, or a $200 bonus if the store also passes the test. The way the math works out, an entry level employee who gets the maximum bonus earns a 100% bonus for that week. But the extra $2/hour per team member for a week seemed to be a powerful incentive across the board. Key learning: team-based incentive comp is something we use here for executives, but maybe it’s worth considering for other teams as well.
6. Integrated systems. Pret has basically one single software system that runs the whole business from inventory to labor scheduling to finances. All data flows through it directly from point of sale or via manager single-entry. All reports are available on demand. The system is pretty slick. There doesn’t seem to be much use of side systems and side spreadsheets, though I’m sure there are some. Key learning: there’s a lot to be said for having a little more information standardized across the business, though the flip side is that this system is a single point of failure and also much less flexible than what we have.
7. Think time. I’ve written a little about working “on the business, not in the business,” or what I call OTB time, once before, and I have another post queued up for later this summer about the same. Brad Feld also very kindly wrote about it in reference to Return Path last week. Working in retail means that time to work on IMPORTANT BUT NOT URGENT issues is extremely hard to come by and fragmented. I suspect that it comes more at the end of the day for James, and it probably comes a lot more when he doesn’t have someone like me observing him and asking him questions. But his “office” (below), exposed to the loud music and sounds and smells of the kitchen, certainly doesn’t lend itself to think time! Key learning: of course customers come first, but boy is it critical to make space to work OTB, not just ITB. Oh, and James needs a new chair that’s more ergonomically compatible with his high countertop desk.
Years ago, I spent a few weekends working in my cousin Michael’s wine store in Hudson, NY, and I wrote up the experience in two different posts on this blog, the first one about the similarities between running a 2-person company and a 200-person company, and the second one about how in a small business, you have to wear one of every kind of hat there is. My conclusion then was that there are more similarities than differences when it comes to running businesses of different types. My conclusion from today is exactly the same, though the focus on management made for a very different experience.
Thanks to James, Gustavo, Orlanda, Shawona, and the rest of the team at the 36th & 5th Pret for putting up with the distraction of me for the bulk of the day today — I learned a lot (and particularly enjoyed the NYC Meatball Hot Wrap) and now have to figure out how to return the favor to you!
How to Get Laid Off
How to Get Laid Off – an Employee’s Perspective
One of my colleagues at Return Path  saw my post about How to Quit Your Job about 5 years ago and was inspired to share this story with me. Don’t read anything into this post, team! There is no other meaning behind my posting it at this time, or any time, other than thinking it’s a very good way of approaching a very difficult situation, especially coming from an employee.
In 2009 I was working at a software security start up in the Silicon Valley. Times were exceedingly tough, there were several rounds of layoffs that year, and in May I was finally on the list. I was informed on a Tuesday that my last day was that Friday. It was a horrible time to be without a job (and benefits), there was almost no hiring at all that year, one of the worst economic down turns on record. While it was a hard message,  I knew that it was not personal, I was just caught up on a bad math problem.
After calling home to share the bad news, I went back to my desk and kept working. I had never been laid off and was not sure what to do, but I was pretty sure I would have plenty of free time in the short term, so I set about figuring out how to wrap things up there. Later that day the founder of the company came by, asked why I had not gone home, and I replied that I would be fine with working till the end of the week if he was okay with it. He thanked me.
Later that week, in a meeting where we reviewed and prioritized the projects I was working on, we discussed who would take on the top three that were quite important to the future of the company. A few names were mentioned of who could keep them alive, but they were people who I knew would not focus on them at all. So I suggested they have me continue to work on them, that got an funny look but when he thought about it , it made sense, they could 1099 me one day a week. The next day we set it up. I made more money than I could of on unemployment, but even better I kept my laptop and work email, so I looked employed which paid off later.Â
That one day later became two days and then three, however, I eventually found other full time work in 2010. Layoffs are hard, but it is not a time to burn bridges.  In fact  one of the execs of that company is a reference and has offered me other opportunities for employment.
A Community of Employees
A Community of Employees
One of the most memorable moments in a valedictorian speech that I’ve heard or read was at my sister-in-law’s graduation from Northwestern about 10 years ago. The speaker’s closing line was something like “Most of all, when you go out into the world, remember to be kind to other people. Â It’s one of the best things you can do for the world.”
It’s not as if people are generally trained or predisposed to be UNkind to each other. But respecting other people and being kind to them is sometimes elusive in our busy lives. I think one of the things that makes Return Path more of a community and less of just a “place of work” is this one of our 13 core values:
We are obsessively kind to and respectful of each other
Kindness and respect in the workplace start with the seemingly trivial. Holding doors open for colleagues, cleaning the coffee machine, helping someone lug a big jug of water and lift it onto the dispenser, and saying a simple “thank you” or “well done” here and there are all acts of kindness and respect. These might seem trivial, but don’t discount the trivial in life.  Being vigilant about the small things sets the right tone for the big things, sort of like the “broken windows” theory of policing says about crime. An atmosphere where people seek out opportunities to help with things like the coffee machine is likely an atmosphere where people seek out opportunities to collaborate on solving problems or cover for a vacationing colleague.
The small things lead to the big things. We take fit incredibly seriously here. Fit doesn’t mean that we all have to be the same type of person, or that we all have to like the same kinds of food. But it means that you have to be kind. You can be totally frank and direct and challenge authority (more about that in a future post) and still be kind and respectful. Being a Bull in a China Shop doesn’t work here.
And that’s the difference between a pace to work and a community.