Context and Stories: Culture at Enwoven
1,479 Zoom calls, 3,387 emails, 131,984 Slack messages, and nevermind how many JIRA pings or Trello comments. Numbers that tell you how a startup company communicates in the age of the distributed team and Work-from-Home, but not how we actually connect and build trust as human beings (arguably, the best free productivity app on the market).
One of Enwoven’s core values - Tell Your Story - is the very embodiment of how we connect and build trust in this remote world. This is something unique to Enwoven’s culture, even if it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Not everyone values storytelling and I get that, but I don’t believe a company’s culture is about attracting everyone either. Our Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) is in good times and bad, in celebration and in conflict, we share our story (perspectives) knowing that other people will bring their own stories to the table.
We’ve remained faithful to this value, even after going remote - or maybe, especially after going remote. Taking a page from good ol’ Agile methodology, we hold company-wide retrospectives where we make sense of the week as a group with dissections of what went well and what could have gone better (and how we’ll make it so next time). We follow up the traditional Apples/Onions questions with a third wildcard question to round off each retrospective.
Questions like: What’s a favorite recipe on a $5 budget? (canned tuna, no-broth instant ramen, and a packet of soy sauce!) What are you doing in a parallel universe right now? (A business team lead is tending to their hives as a beekeeper!). And in fact, the question “How would you improve Retro” was the point of conception for the very feature in how we document our Weekly Retros today and a core feature of our product. I don’t think I’m alone in admitting that the wildcard question is what I look forward to the most each week during retro as I sit back and marvel at each person’s storytelling prowess; and also at the same time, get a peek of something creative, bite-sized, and intimate behind the team’s professional Zoom personae. I learned one engineer can quote Hamlet from memory, our Designer makes an amazing garlic naan (it involves cilantro!), and I shared that if I had to be a bug, I would like to be reincarnated as the Madagascar Hissing Cockroach. Well, for obvious reasons.
Week over week, month over month, as we gather as a company around the Zoom campfire to reflect on our wins and losses, the wildcard question offers up a small slice of the personal from each of us. While we have full agency over what we share and how much we share, there is usually some small amount of vulnerability, a good dose of honesty, and a huge serving of humor. Add in Consistency and Time, and we have the base alchemy for trust and connection, even for a team that’s never met in person.
“Cultural fit” can mean so many things and can be used as a shorthand for groupthink and exclusion. At Enwoven, a cultural add and values fit simply means a willingness to share and listen to each other’s stories and perspectives. This extends beyond our team to how we engage with our customers, service providers, and business partners. We want to understand our customers’ perspectives and hear their stories - it’s super enjoyable when things are going smoothly, but when conflict or misunderstanding arises, having a really good understanding of the other’s worldview through stories can often shorten the angst and time to arrive at an acceptable resolution. I’ll give a brief example: We were running two days behind on a feature release that a particular customer was counting on... And through our understanding of her POV from the stories that she shared, we understood that what was more critical than the missed deadline for this executive was her reputation and her word. So as soon as we knew delivery was running behind, we drafted an email with an explanation for this executive to send to her team, laying out the reasons for the delay and how the extra time would allow us to deliver additional functionalities that would better support her team’s needs and vision. Her past stories helped us serve her better and produce a better outcome. I also have an example where we deviated from our SOP and whew, I learned a costly lesson there.
Some academics have theorized that Homo sapiens may have dominated and beat out other early humanoids in large part to a collective ability to imagine and tell stories around the campfire (stories about deathly mushrooms, ancient myths, unruly gods, religion, paper money, nation-states, etc). Here at Enwoven, we carry on that tradition every Thursday on Zoom with the same intention - sharing what we should avoid, what to celebrate, and something that makes us uniquely us, our own story.
