How Wespire CEO Susan Hunt grew Wespire to $3.8M revenue and 35 customers in 2021.

thank you before I get started Whispers actually had a huge announcement that we made this morning that I wanted to share with all of you which is that we became a certified B Corporation it's been a very long process we had to convert to being a public benefit Corp and then go through a rigorous evaluation on environmental social and very apropos this week governance factors and how we manage if you don't know what it is and you're interested in learning more I'm around at lunch and can tell you because converting and becoming one is actually a great process but now let's talk about psychological safety over the next 20 minutes I am going to tell you what it is why it matters I'm going to share with you our own experience of measuring it which means you're going to get to see some gory details of what our employees said it made them feel safe or not in our workplace and then we'll share what we have learned when we've done this with two other technology companies who are our clients much bigger companies but still fascinating uh and things that you can take away from why you would want to start measuring this now to improve your culture and your performance so first of all just to give you a sense if you're about a 4 million ARR company we started measuring when they are about a two million dollar company it has been transformative in a lot of different ways so let's start with first what it is why it matters and how you measure it so Amy Edmondson is Professor from the Harvard Business School she actually wrote about this in the Fearless organization 20 plus years ago but it didn't gain traction until this other little technology company decided to research what made for high performing teams this was called project Aristotle it is probably the most rigorous research that's ever been done on what causes high performance and what they found across every hypothesis tested over 200 hypotheses thousands of people is those teams at the highest levels of psychological safety were the highest performing teams so it's not just something that is good for culture it is also so good for culture it's the most predictive of performance so what are the seven questions this is actually open sourced now and so these seven questions you could ask today and Survey your employees on today so the first one is people in this organization are able to bring up problems and tough issues the second is it is safe to take a risk in this organization the third is it's difficult to ask people for help in this organization you have to strongly agree or strongly disagree no one at the organization would deliberately act in a way that undermines my efforts working with members of this organization my unique skills and talents are valued and utilized if I make mistake it is often held against me or people in this organization sometimes reject others for being different and so you're asking people to agree or not on you can use a five-point likert scale or a 10-point microscale so I'm going to show you what happened when we did it so first of all the thing we're really strong on was not having people feel like they could bring their whole self to work and it didn't matter their background it didn't matter anything they felt welcomed and they didn't feel like they were rejected our biggest weakness was that it was difficult to ask people for help now what's most interesting about this is obviously what do you do when you get this data but it's really important important to also ask through the verb items around this because what I'm going to show you are some quotes so we did it on a 10-point scale so you see we had a little couple outliers who are neutral on this question but most people strongly agree that that they're not rejected for being different everyone is accepted I haven't been a scenario where I felt others rejected every single place but there are times I feel I don't fit in you know and so you can start to get this kind of information about and sometimes what you get back is a little eye-opening for example look at the difference in the array people are having a totally different experience depending on on this Factor around asking for help and what it was it's not difficult to ask for help it's difficult to get answers in a timely manner so it wasn't that people didn't ask it's just that everyone's too busy to actually help much sometimes everyone is so busy and I don't want to burden others and it's just and then it falls to sight so how do you then address and create what we realized as we needed to focus on creating a culture of more responsiveness that it's not enough to say we're helpful if we don't actually respond effectively so it started studying kpis around when somebody asked for help managing expectations for when they can get back to that it also we had to look at some really hard things about Staffing the reality is Nathan loves our Revenue per employee metric because it's off the charts but that's probably because we're a little understaffed and so we had to put more people in to be able to address some of these these questions particularly in customer success because you can look at this by team and it turned out that a lot of the folks who were not feeling supported were on the customer success team so what do we decide to do so in addition to what I just mentioned some other things that we did more broadly um I love that the prior speaker was talking about okrs because for us okrs was the best way to implement prioritization and I think that was the other thing we learned when things aren't prioritized enough Everything feels important and then nobody knows what to necessarily get back to so putting in the okr framework has really helped with prioritization and what it's a you know and putting requests in the context of okrs we actually um decided when we were small at this time we were about 25 people one of our members of Cs hand raised to say I'll be our first director of people culture and impact and so you know you don't normally have a full-time HR culture person in a company of 25. we decided to make that investment that it was that important to tackle these things um the other thing is that our team's really nice it's a great attribute but sometimes they're too nice and so one of the things that we had to teach people about is this concept called radical Candor and if you haven't done this training in your organization I are it's a four Box model and what I would tell you is that top left is where we were ruinous empathy and that is when you know you are are have a high relationship but not being honest with people when they've let you down or disappointed you or didn't get back to you or things like that and so trying to get folks to move over to the top box where you can say hey that really bummed me out when you get back to me on this that impacted my ability to do why and to be able to say that all right so then we did this with some others bigger companies um and so I'm going to give you an example of a tech services firm that we worked with so um and then I'll talk about the recommendations that have come out of working with ourselves and others about learning processes and habits and behavioral interventions and then what you can do to measure learn and take action so we did this at a tech services firm and I was blown away by some of the comments that came back and what we identified and the head of HR who's one of the most Progressive heads of HR on the planet said this is the most important work we've ever done in HR because of what we identified so we identified that there were habits and behaviors with how they socialize that dramatically hurt psychological safety about drinking smoking other things always after work when other people need to be home because they have commitments with family or kids or elders and so it was this culture of if you could drink smoke and hang out late then you fit in and if you didn't you didn't and they weren't offering any other paths towards that when we looked at it through a gender race income Etc lens women felt significantly less safe and there were a whole slew of comments of what was happening and it wasn't what I would call overt sexism it was all the micro inequities and the microaggressions and things like that there's an example quote right there this company had been refusing to share their dni metrics and that was raised just the fact that they wouldn't share and other tech companies were and so that was raised as something and then one of the most powerful things we were able to tell which teams had the highest scores and the lowest scores so we knew which which leaders to do interventions with so what Dr Edmondson recommends when we do this is you frame it all as a learning problem not an execution problem and to acknowledge we all make mistakes around psychologicals we all say stupid things that we wish we didn't in the moment of being frustrated or rushed or things like that that happens and so acknowledging as a leader your own fallibility in this issue is really important and then asking a lot of questions and modeling curiosity if you've not watched her Ted Talk on psychological safety I highly recommend it there's a link there but what I would tell you that I think we identified is there's a lot more around psychological safety that around practices and procedures in a culture and so you need to identify those practices policies or procedures that are impacting safety things like the informal socializing framework or even certain policies around or practices around what times meetings started and things like that um recognize it's a behavioral problem we all have to go back to kindergarten at some level for psychological safety it's...