Welcome to this next episode of the artisan podcast. My name is Katty Douraghy. I'm the president of Artisan Creative and your host for the artisan podcast.
Today we're welcoming Allen Hardin, the co-founder and partner at Joyful agency out of Portland and one who works with clients nationally and internationally to bring joy and make work more joyful. Joyful is a culture agency. They design and activate company culture for Fortune 500 companies and high-growth startups.
In this profound shift that we've had lately in the world of work, the rise of stress and burnout across leaders and employees and finding this need for best-in-class companies to re-recruit their talent and welcome them to a better future. Joyful saw this opportunity to focus their unique skill sets on this vital lever of growth, which is culture.
And that is what has brought us here to this conversation to talk about company culture employee retention, and bringing more joy to work. So with that, please welcome Allen and so happy to have you.
Let's welcome Allen Hardin to the podcast. Allen and I are both part of an organization called EO, The Entrepreneurs Organization, and I was fortunate enough to visit his offices a few weeks back I just loved what I saw there. I saw all the joy that was there with everything that they have created for clients and that’s what has brought us to this conversation.
Katty I was really curious about the genesis of Joyful and your background, Alan, and have an opportunity for us to just really connect and chat.
Allen: Thank you so much for having me. Katty. I really appreciate the opportunity.
Katty: I think with everything that's happened through COVID, with everybody being remote and now people being hybrid and some people not even knowing yet what their company culture and or their org is going to be like. Whether they're gonna bring everybody back or not or stay hybrid thing, it's just a really important topic to talk about, you know? Build and maintain culture through this. Craziness. This new work place that we're in.
Allen: So there's a number of milestone moments that have happened over the last few years that everybody reset or refocused on it, but it's continuing to change as well. So that's the important thing to recognize is that you're never quite done working on your company culture. It's something that always needs a little bit of attention.
Katty: Absolutely. Tell me a little bit about you and kind of how you started in the space and what kind of was the impetus to start Joyful?
Allen: Yeah, absolutely. My background really stems from live event production. So in the early years of our company, that's what we really focused on. We originally started in 2015. And we're producing big events for ourselves, public events, ticketed events in the Portland area, but also producing big events for clients.
And one of our colleagues has said in the past that any live event any live experience is inherently a cultural experience. And I think that that is what really helped us focus and refocus on the path that we're on now. Focusing on company culture.
Live events in that world require a number of different mindsets if you will. And I like to say that you have to be one part visionary, right, really seeing the big picture and being optimistic of what could be and creating this emotive thing that really makes people feel something at an event or an experience that they have. But you also have to be very pragmatic, but you have to be able to execute those things on the ground and deliver on that promise because people will know, in real-time, whether you're telling a story or whether you're actually able to deliver on that on that vision that you cast.
And so that's how I frame the work of live events and it’s that same perspective that we apply to company culture. So you would need to have that optimism and vision for what your company can be like, what it's actually like to work there or experience.
But we need to be able to make it happen to, actually be able to activate on those needs. So my background really comes from live event production. And I think I blend that a little bit with, you know, how I want to spend my time and, you know, casting a little bit on, you know, just the purpose of Joyful if you will.
Our belief really is that life is short, and one of the biggest places people spend time in their life is work. So… it shouldn't suck.
It's if it's so much of your life, how can we help people enjoy what they do a little bit more, and be more engaged? It's got a very, very clear tie to productivity and efficiency and just a lot of long-term value metrics for organizations. So that's my story. I grew up we grew up on the West Coast and a lot of time outdoors spent a lot of time in various activities, but my professional career has been around live event production and a few other things.
Katty: Thank you for that. And you're right, the two prongs that you talked about are those having a vision as well as being able to execute. I can see that all the way is going to manifest itself in a company's employer brand… like how are you like what's the vision you're putting out there to attract new talent to your doorstep, and how do you execute on that and how do you make sure that there's a through line and everything that you're doing to message that out accurately.
So when you guys start collaborating with clients and you know, just really this emphasis on, you're here to make work more joyful. Do you sit through a discovery session? And is that do you bring joy primarily through live events? Or how do you get involved in expanding company culture?
Allen: All over the map in terms of what those tactics are, if you will. So on one end of the spectrum is the big picture thinking, that strategy session, the discovery strategy, you're really uncovering the current state and figuring out what the future state is and basically, creating a map of how to get there, right?
So we focus a lot on the strategy of how to accomplish what our goals are, and what that client's goals are. But we also focus on those tactics or activations as we call them. So, we found that, you know, in the marketplace, there's a lot of groups on either end of that spectrum, right? There's some that do culture strategy or organizational psychologists or, you know, folks that have come up through HR, learning and development, things like that, and they'll work with you to help make that map, but then they hand the map to the company and say okay, this is what you have to do.
And a lot of those, those, our clients find themselves in a spot where like, it's great, I know where I'm going. I don't have the capacity or the experience or the tools or whatever it is to actually bring this to life now. The other end of that spectrum is, you know, a more standard creative agency, right, where if you give them a very specific brief from saying, hey, I'm looking for this video product or this event or this experience or whatever it is, they can execute on that. But again, a lot of our clients didn't have that vision or that articulation to give that kind of correct brief to that group. So, we tie those two things together.
I invite clients to join us anywhere in that spectrum, right? So sometimes people just need a tactic and they need some help producing something. And we have the capability to do that in-house.
But our most successful work, I would say is the work that starts on that strategy side of things. So, I typically say the best tactics are built from great strategy. The tactics are what people see and they get attention and people get excited about that. Oh, we should do that at our organization. Those were built based on a strategy for a specific client for a specific reason.
So it's, it's good to reset and refocus on why are we doing something What's the objective with this and what's the best way to go about it? And, then build the tactics from there. So that kind of extends from our origin story a little bit too, where events were more of the tactic, right, but the why and the how was really what we were skilled at.
And so, we really transitioned during that COVID era, from just focusing on events to zooming out again and saying, what's the real purpose of this? What are we trying to achieve for these events for our clients, and it was to bring that authentic cultural experience for them. So anytime you can zoom out and start with strategy, that's when we see the highest success, if you will, for work that we do.
Katty: The COVID era was a shift in what you were doing a Joyful or did it just amplify what you were already doing, and you just put more emphasis on it.
Allen: A little bit of both. So, we were heavily focused on live events, and that that period, you know, live events basically went away. Our company story was one that we had a large amount of work planned for 2020. And we were building the plans and the tactics to execute on that level of work, and it all went away.
It so it just in the beginning of March, I think it was you know, basically all of that work went zero. Then we had to refocus, now the clients that we were working with the same situation that we were in, they used to rely on these live events to motivate employees, to celebrate employees, to enjoy time together. They used to rely on in-person in the office or, or, you know, kind of camaraderie building and trust building and all of those other collaboration aspects as well. So you were relying on these things that have existed for so long and all of a sudden that goes away.
You have to rethink how you're going to do that, so, that was a big refocus for us where we were really doing a lot of that same tactic of live event experience. But the skills were the same to refocus on instead of saying how can we impact this small group, this one day this one time, to how do we impact instead, the whole company, all year, from anywhere, right?
So your audience grows quite a bit. And so, in that year through that COVID kind of switch, if you will, we had a big swing from having a lot of work planned, to go into 0, to back to our biggest year again, because a lot of businesses were in the same spot that they needed to focus on company culture now more than ever to make sure that they were resilient enough to withstand those factors.
Katty: Absolutely, gosh, my mind goes to seems like a long time ago now…but my mind goes to certainly March 2020 when the whole world just got upended. That must have been a pretty as frightening business owner, a really frightening time to just be there.
Allen: Yeah. I mean, you just kind of go along the same lines as some of our other perspectives, but as a culture company, that helps our clients with their company culture., it can’t suck to work here. Right? So it's got to be a good place to work.
So during that time, we're not only focused on our people, that's kind of number one is taking care of our folks, making sure our team is healthy and has what they need to survive and thrive and do everything on that human level.
But then also from the perspective of business, we had to change our product offerings, change our messaging, change the way we talked about what we do to meet the new needs of that time. So, both have to look internally at our team, but also externally at what our product is and how we support our clients at that time. It was a crazy time for sure. Yeah, for sure.
Katty: A little bit of a segue to kind of what we're talking about, but as you're talking about just what you needed to do, the word that pops into my mind is ….resilience. And I know that we work with candidates all the time who may have lost their jobs, or their interview didn’t happen, or their work is shifting, whether it be because of AI or because of whatever it may be. Where did you go to for strength for yourself? Where did resilience come from for you?
Allen: Oh, all over the place. I mean, I talk about resilience a lot, especially with company culture, right? I make the case that that's really what we do, is if you have that strong company culture, your team is inherently more resilient and that helps in good times and bad. So, it's a mitigator of two things, right? So if you're growing very fast, the team is going to need to be resilient to take on that changing world. Right?
Or if you're in a really tough time, whether that's a macroeconomic thing or just a specific thing, you need to be really resilient to be able to handle that too. So I think company culture is what helps people with high-growth situations or really tough situations.
For me personally, I mean, in that timeframe, I'll start giving the Entrepreneurs Organization a plug, where, you know, being a part of that organization was incredibly helpful because I could connect with fellow entrepreneurs that were going through some more things all over different industries or different sized businesses or different locations, all you know, a lot of the details are a little bit different, but the same macro situation where we're trying to figure it out and survive, you know.
So just being in a room full of people that you know, you're all in it together, and we're all rooting for each other and trying to support each other was a huge, huge part of my resilience at that moment.
I owe a lot to the EO group, especially during that time. I had just joined I think maybe the year before, so what a fortunate circumstance to have recently joined that group and then, you know, be thrust right into such a situation where it became so beneficial.
Katty Is that just the importance of community I think it's so impactful right? And absolutely, we feel we’re the only ones going through something, and yeah, the to support that. So impactful.
Allen: Absolutely. Yeah, that perspective is going to give you do feel that way sometimes, but when you get back in that room of other folks you know, like-minded folks, you realize, you know, a lot of other people are dealing with a lot of stuff too. And you know, we're not we're not in it on our own.
Katty: So going back to the other point you were talking about and before I had this little segue question for you, this shift of shifting from singular events, that was the big crescendo of kind of building culture, to this mindset shift I would imagine for not only for Joyful but for the clients who are used to these big, singular events of company culture is really this constant thing. It's not a big wave that crashes through but it's a stream that continually is running. How were you able to shift that mindset? For a hiring manager listening in, for example, or somebody who's trying to build their company culture, where would be the starting point for them?
Allen: Yeah, I think the starting point is today, right? The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, and the second best time is today.
That would be my advice to hiring managers in a similar situation where it's, it's every day we refer to culture as a ground game. It's every interaction. It's every exchange that employees have on a day-to-day basis. It's not these big shiny moments that happen quarterly, or whatever cadence you choose. But it's really what they experience every day when they go to work and are they able to feel productive and motivated and safe and all of those things that go around with a good experience.
You know, what we typically do is focus a lot on a roadmap or a framework and we map out your year. I like to use the analogy of a beach ball.So you think of a beach ball at a fun concert, right, so somebody has a beach ball and puts it up into the air to concert, think of that as your company culture, right? That can stay up in the air as long as everybody in that crowd is contributing to bouncing it up a little bit higher, right, and it keeps going, but as soon as somebody takes their eye off the ball or they're not paying attention or get out too far out in front of them, or too far to the side or something like that, that's when it can really fall.
Culture just like the gravity will kind of find its way back down unless people are actively contributing to it on a daily basis. So you're never done working on that. Right?
So, it's a combination of the everyday moments, your peers, your managers and your leaders, to those big events from time to time, better, maybe the bigger hit that pushed the ball up a little bit higher in the air. It's a combination of all those things.
So I don't think you can focus just on one or just on the other. But being able to visualize and kind of a roadmap if you will, and look at 12 months, okay, what are these quarterly things that are inspiring moments for our team? Okay, what are these things have happened monthly, where they're kind of dry right now, but maybe we have an opportunity to make them a little more engaging or give our employees a little bit more something that they're looking for during those times. Okay, well, well then what about our one-on-ones? And then what about when he walked through the door? Right? What about how we send emails or how we have meetings all the way to the most minute things?
So being able to have that perspective of kind of 30,000 feet, the big you know, Vision stuff, but all the way down to on the ground is each day like you know, what, what is the technical hurdle that I run into every day that is just really frustrating to me, that just should be way easier? You know, those ways of working. It's all of that, right? So you can't think it's just the one big thing and the big shiny thing. You can’t think it's just the small tactical stuff, but it's, I would say it's a sum of all of those things that really contribute to their culture.
Katty How does that tie back to a company's core values?
Allen: I think it all starts there. I think we really try to frame our work on the purpose of the organization. So, we start with the purpose of the organization and what are your core values, beliefs, and behaviors. If you start your work there and work on your employee experience, we feel that's the strongest way to do it. You know a lot of the work we do has to do with communicating and letting values, and purpose, live every day. Right?
Because for so many organizations, you develop something maybe you share. Maybe you put it on a poster, but what are the ways that those come to life every day?
You know, employee recognition or in the way that you hold your meetings or in the way that you organize your events or whatever that is, that's where those should shine.
More, as a throughline as you said earlier, you know, they should be there every day.
So we start there. You know, we've looked like a creative agency or organization looks like a creative agency. We just choose to focus our efforts on company culture, and employee experience. So we do a lot of communications, we do a lot of marketing about an organization's purpose and values for internal purposes. Not to sell something to a customer, but to share that message internally with the employees so that everybody is kind of re-recruited to that same purpose on a regular basis. We produce a lot of videos, we do a lot of newsletters, communications, all that type of stuff to really reframe the conversation about that. To put it simply Katty, it's constant, and essential to focus on that.
Katty: And this is all internal communication that you're producing. You're producing that for the organization and its employees.
Allen: Exactly. So, it's, instead of, you know, us making ads for promotions, for a company to sell to a customer. We're using those same skills to share messages from a company to its employees.
Katty: And I and I would imagine, I think I mentioned to you that I’ve spoken about this before, believe that company culture comes through even before that candidate is hired, how that candidate is interacted with all the way from the date, the time they apply to that job or what how that job description is written, like all of those have to be connected, right, that that message has to come through on those too
Allen: Absolutely. I mean it starts very early on and then it continues even with your most seasoned employees, right, because the way I like that you mentioned that, the way the job description is written, where they find that post, you know, what their first interview is like, and are they made to feel as part of the team or as an outsider, and, you know, you can't, in my opinion, you can't run onboarding or an interview or an application process one way and then give them a different experience on day one. Right?
And that's kind of a shift that, you know, are you being authentic in that interview to what it's actually like to work there. And, it goes two ways, right? So, we often can make this interview look good and shiny and say, hey, it is amazing to work here and it’s awesome. And then they get to work the first day and nobody says hi to them or no, you know, it's a different experience that way. So it goes both sides. You know, you might have a really hard interview and then it's amazing to work there. Have a great interview and it's not amazing to work there.
Having alignment and intentionality through that whole timing is critical. And I mentioned seasoned employees too, we talk about re-recruiting your employees every day, right, to reset really what the company stands for and is about and what the values and behaviors are for that organization. You can't just stop after their onboarding, right, and pretend that they've been there 10 years. You need to be intentional with it on an ongoing basis regardless of whether that employee has been there for one day or 10 years or anywhere in between.
Katty: I like that mindset of re-recruiting your employees every day. It's really important not to make assumptions that we just need to look at external or new employees and forget about people who are already here. I think we saw that during COVID with a great resignation.
Allen: Absolutely lots of people's priorities shifted. Yeah. And they realized hey, you know, how I'm spending every day is not how I want to be spending every day. And it's their decision to make as to what they want their day-to-day to look like. And so it's important not to forget that you have great people already, and they may need some attention just as much as you focus on your onboarding program. So I think that's another kind of differentiator of how we focus on the work. We're not focused just on one part of that lifecycle, not just the onboarding experience or just your holiday party or something like that, right but it's everything in between for the whole organization.
Katty: How would you emphasize culture building and just employee experience and employee engagement through this hybrid space that we're in now? There are some people in the office others never come in, and kind of how you build culture in these two diverse groups of people that are maybe geographically separated from each other.
Allen: Yeah, the simplest way I would say it is intentionality, the more complex way is that it's different for every organization, right? I'll speak about our organization, right? So we're a midsize company here in Portland, and we have a physical office. But our policy is to work from wherever you're most productive. So, we don't have a requirement, of how many days to be in, or which days to be in or anything like that, but we’ve tried to build our location such that people will feel like they can come here and be productive and be a little bit social.
So a lot of the folks on our team can do more work in their day if they stay at home. They can be more productive with their tasks and their workload when they're not bumping into colleagues and having side conversations and things like that. They can just stay focused and get their work done. However, I'm a strong believer that trust, collaboration, respect, and a lot of those things are really built the more in-person time you spend with each other. So, we tried to build our situation such that people want to come in, and people enjoy coming in and spending time with each other. But it's not coming in and realizing hey, I would have gotten more work done at home. The space is such that you can be productive and you can connect with your colleagues simultaneously, and we let people self-select.
Now will that work for every organization, will that work for us forever, no. It’s gonna be different all over the board, but I think being intentional with why you're asking people to do something, is really important. And a lot of folks will make a decision because that's the way they used to do it, right? Or we used to do it this way. And I think that's another perspective that deserves to be looked at again, too, right? Because things are constantly evolving and, you know, the way people work will ebb and flow forever, so we need to adapt.
So there's lots of details in there from technology to collaboration. That's what we're doing for our for our organization. For now, it's working, but I don't pretend that that's the answer forever.
Katty: We've been remote for 12 years now, long before I think it was the thing to do. And the minute the systems we were using went cloud base we were like, Oh, we don't need to have this physical office here anymore. And I have to say, in the beginning, there was we had to work a lot harder for engagement, right? We had to work harder to make sure we were communicating more, to do everything more.
And I still find that that has to be done. Like some of those assumptions or conversations that are water cooler conversations or the spontaneity of just going to lunch together. That just doesn't really happen anymore. Everything has to be, as you were saying, intentional, planned, that needs to be you know, a path towards It's continuing with that. So that's been an interesting thing. And when COVID happened, everybody's asking, so how do you… how did you do it? It was something I hadn't even thought about.
Right. Yeah. We didn't necessarily have an SOP around that. We had to step into this and share with others how we had done it.
If there are companies whose culture you really admire, what are some of the common denominators? First of all, who are they? And what are some common denominators that you see that are just telltale signs that they got it right.
Allen: That's a great question. I think there are a lot of points in time, and answers I would give, and I think that, again, culture is dynamic, right? And it's constantly evolving within an organization. And so there are peaks and valleys for the company. Personally, I would say, that organizations that value the whole employee, where people can really bring their best selves to work, and be productive and operate at a high level, really execute great work product, and have time, make time for their personal pursuits.
Often it feels like organizations are one or the other, where you're either in this high-performing situation that that's all you do, right, you're really in a grind on that you're delivering great work, but it's all-consuming, or it's a little more casual, and you have time for everything, but you know, it's not operating that same kind of performance level.
So the organizations or the kind of situations that come to mind are ones that balance both. So my personal view on it, you know, is where people can bring their, their whole selves. But I think the broader answer I would say is that it's different for every person.
We don't really believe that there is good culture and bad culture, we more believe that every culture is a little bit different. Let's be authentic and genuine with what ours is, and then let's promote that and communicate that and let people self-select in or out, to that. So we more subscribe to that kind of wrong fit- right fit, if you will. A colleague has authored a book by that title where let's just be transparent about what our culture is, and there are people that want to fit that, and let's recruit them.
Rather than, let's pretend that our culture is something different than it is people in the door. And then they later realize that it's not the right fit.
The book is called Wrong Fit, Right Fit. By Dr. Andre Martin, that's a plug of a colleague, if you will, but it's a shared belief with our organization, for sure.
Katty: It reminds me of many years ago, many, many years ago, actually through EO I got a chance to hear at the time the President of Trader Joe's. One of the things he said that always stuck with me was he would walk up and down or grocery aisle and see if there were people were smiling, and if they were engaging with customers, and he just really, really wanted people, people.
And if somebody was just really focused on putting the items on the shelf the right way, and just not engaging with what was happening, what was happening there in the store, he would go up to them and say, you know what, you're doing such a beautiful job here with the aisle. But that's not what we need. There's probably another company out there looking for you to be that perfect person who's stocking the shelves perfectly. That’s not who we are, we'd rather have that be messy, but you are engaging with whoever's walking in. That has stayed with me in terms of culture.
Allen: I mean, that makes me think of values and behaviors. Right. So when you I don't know their values offhand, but it feels like they have, you know, a defined behavior that associates with a certain value, right, where it's being personable and engaging over being so focused on the little details of stocking the shelves because of that customer isn’t excited to be there. It doesn't matter if the shelves are organized well, alright. I think that's a great example. I'm not familiar with all their details, but I think that's a great example.
Katty: So where can people find you? If they're looking to engage with you're just learning about Joyful a little bit more.
Allen: Yeah, I would push folks to either our website or LinkedIn, our website is Joyful.co
Or you can find us on LinkedIn company name is Joyful. That's the best way to find us.
So we'll be around that a number of HR / culture focused conferences here too. So you'll see us out and about, if you're part of that community, we'll see you there. But yeah, please find us online and, and reach out we'd love to connect with you.
Katty: I just want to clarify that even though you're Portland-based, the clients that you service are nationally and internationally located.
Allen: Our office is in Portland, our team works all over. And, yeah, our client base right now some are based in Portland, but most if not all, have international presence. So we work with teams all over the world on that type of work.
Katty: And as a final statement, if there's one takeaway that you want people to have some this conversation, what would that be.
Allen: Life is short, let’s make work more joyful.
