How WeSpire Reached $4M ARR with 30 People by Measuring Psychological Safety (Talk by CEO Susan Hunt Stevens)

B Corp Certification Announcement

Nathan Latka

00:00Thank you. Before I get started, WeSpire has 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 B Wingard 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

Talk Overview: Psychological Safety

Nathan Latka

00:24and 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 twenty minutes, I am gonna tell you what it is, why it matters. I'm gonna share with you our own experience in measuring it, which means you're gonna get to see some gory details of what our employees said that made them feel safe or not

WeSpire Company Snapshot and Why They Measured

Nathan Latka

00:45in 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, 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, we're about a 4,000,000 ARR company. We started measuring when we were about a $2,000,000 company.

Amy Edmondson and Project Aristotle Research

Nathan Latka

01:11It 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 a professor from the Harvard Business School. She actually wrote about this in the fearless organization twenty 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 This was called Project Aristotle. It is probably the

01:40most 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 most predictive of performance. So what are the seven questions? This is actually open sourced now. And so these seven questions

The Seven Psychological Safety Questions

Nathan Latka

02:10you 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

02:37of this organization, my unique skills and talents are valued and utilized. If I make a 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 Likert scale. So I'm gonna show you what happened when we did it. So first of all, the thing we were really strong on was

WeSpire's Own Survey Results: Strengths and Weaknesses

Nathan Latka

03:03not 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 to also ask for the verbatims around this. Because what I'm gonna

03:28show you are some quotes. So we did it on a 10 scale. So you see we had a little couple outliers who were neutral on this question, but most people strongly agree that they're not rejected for being different. Everyone is accepted. I haven't been in a scenario where I felt others rejected. Every single person. But there are times I feel I don't fit in. You know, and so you can start to get this kind of information

03:54about And sometimes what you get back is a little eye opening.

Addressing the Help-Seeking Gap and Responsiveness

Nathan Latka

04:00For example, look at the difference in the array. People are having a totally different experience depending 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 wanna burden others. And then it falls to the side. So

04:32how do you then address and create what we realized is we needed to focus on creating a culture of more responsiveness. Responsiveness. That it's not enough to say we're helpful if we don't actually respond effectively. So it started setting KPIs around when somebody asks for help, managing expectations for when they need to get back to them. And also we had to look at some really hard things about staffing. The reality is Nathan loves our revenue per

04:55employee 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 questions, particularly in customer success. Cause 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 did we decide to do? So in addition to what I just

05:16mentioned, some other things that we did more broadly. 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 putting requests in the context of OKRs. We actually decided,

Hiring a Culture Lead and Radical Candor Training

Nathan Latka

05:43we were small at this time, were 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 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. The other thing is that our team's really nice. It's a great attribute, but sometimes they're too nice.

06:08And 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, 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

06:29have a high relationship but not being honest with people when they 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 Y, and to be able to say that.

Tech Services Client Case Study

Nathan Latka

06:48Alright, so then we did this with some others, bigger companies. And so I'm gonna give you an example of a tech services firm that we worked with. So, 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

07:13by some of the comments that came back and what we identified. And the head of HR, who's one 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 of how they socialized that dramatically hurt psychological safety. About drinking, smoking, other things, always after work when other people need to be home because they

07:38have 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'd fit in. 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, etcetera 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.

08:04It was all the micro inequities and the micro aggressions and things like that. There's an example quote right there. This company had been refusing to share their D and I 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

Recommendations: Learning, Behaviors, and Interventions

Nathan Latka

08:27knew which leaders to do interventions with. So, what Doctor. 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 psychological. 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

08:55a 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 than around practices and procedures in a culture. And so you need to identify those practices, policies, procedures that are impacting safety. Things like the informal socializing framework, or even certain policies around, or practices around

09:22what times meetings started, and things like that.

09:26Recognize it's a behavioral problem. We all have to go back to kindergarten at some level for psychological safety. It's things like interrupting in meetings, or not soliciting people's broad, asking people to speak up and letting those who feel comfortable jumping in, jumping in. It's modeling just little microbehaviors. And then radical candor. This idea that it is okay to be direct with people and to criticize them when they let you down, but you've gotta work on that

Call to Action: Just Start Measuring

Nathan Latka

09:51relationship. But that being too nice is actually ruinous for a company. So what do you do next? First, just measure it. Just get out there and ask the questions and see what happens. But once you do, recognize you're now on a journey of learning and listening, and that you have to take action, but you need to recognize that you're gonna have to take action sometimes on things that are policy and practices first, as well as behaviors.

10:15And so over the last twenty minutes, what I think you've learned hopefully in this, is that psychological safety is a powerful predictor of performance, and now you know the questions to ask and how to measure it. You've seen what happens when one company measures it, and the things that all of a sudden it forces you to reckon with, staffing, behaviors, people, being too nice, being too aggressive, those kinds of things. And then it can apply in

Scale: 30 to 400,000 Employees

Nathan Latka

10:41small companies like ours with 30 people, and it can apply in one of the organizations we work with has 400,000 employees around the world. So it scales. And all I would encourage you to do is just get started. Thank you very much, and I'm open for any questions now.

Susan Hunt Stevens

10:58>> Thank you, Susan. Questions?

Nathan Latka

11:10So interestingly enough, all of them were very progressive on remote first. The first company we did pre COVID. The second company we actually did it during COVID, which was fascinating. And one of the things that came up is in fact, the culture had, because of COVID, actually worked much harder to connect people and to improve relationships, to solicit voice of the employee and things like that. And so what actually came out in a lot of the

11:41verbatims were some of the very positive things that were relatively new in the culture, particularly for remote employees. One of the things that was interesting about the second company is about 50% of the employees were international, so we looked at whether there were global differences differences in psychological safety, by country. And in fact, you could very much see differences in cultures. But a lot of their hypotheses around where things were more safe or less safe were

12:08dead wrong. And we were able to, that's half the valuable work, is ruling out things that in fact aren't predictive of psychological safety and identifying those things that are.

Susan Hunt Stevens

12:18>> Other questions?

Nathan Latka

12:31Oh, Amy Edmondson, the professor from Harvard, did a TED Talk about psychological safety.

12:38Let's see. Oh,

12:41radical candor? Yes, the radical candor training, yes. She's amazing. Great book too, if you haven't read it.

Susan Hunt Stevens

12:48>> Okay, I have a question. Yeah. We're being held to operational efficiency and measuring the return on investment for anything that we do. So do you have any examples of how the CEO or CFO who brought this into their organization, how they measure the return on investment?

Measuring ROI on Culture Investments

Nathan Latka

13:06Yeah, so the number one way that you can measure the return on investment for any investments in culture, but particularly psychological safety, is looking at how it changes the ability to attract and retain talent. And so you look at things like your employee Net Promoter Score and how that has changed. You look at how your time to hire is changing. And you look at how retention is changing. And obviously there's so many things that influence those

13:31factors, but one of the things that we're able to do, which I recognize is unique for our customers, is because we're running these inclusive culture programs on our platform, we're able to look at those employees who participated versus those who didn't, and see the impact on retention and tell clients about it. So we're We and our customers are unique in being able to do that, but you can You know, if you use WeSpire to do that,

13:56or if you can There's other ways to do that, you just need to find the signal through the noise, given so much can impact retention.

Susan Hunt Stevens

14:01>> What's the frequency that you recommend for measuring that employee satisfaction NPS? Is it quarterly, is it in?

Recommended Frequency for Surveys

Nathan Latka

14:08Yeah, so I'm a big believer that psychological safety shouldn't be measured more than annually, because you need to work pretty consistently to get at the core drivers of psych safety.

14:21They're really important factors that can take time to influence, but I think your pulse survey, whatever your pulse question is, like employee net promoter or SAT or something that I would recommend either running that monthly or doing some sort of ad hoc, just in time, some segment of your workforce. So that, you know, 10% of the workforce gets asked at least once every 30 days, or something like that. So you've got kind of a running metric

14:51around it.

Susan Hunt Stevens

14:52>> Thank you, Susan. Another question here in the back.

Nathan Latka

15:13Yeah. So

15:17We rely heavily on Google's research that shows that the highest performing teams were those teams with the highest levels of psychological safety. They've done the most rigorous, academically defensible connection between psych safety and overall performance. So that's kind of the bible of good HR metrics. In terms of what we've seen, yes, you can implement psych safety as a team, even if the rest of the organization doesn't, and improve it to a point. But what you need

15:50to understand is what are the things outside the team that might be affecting psychological safety. And so one

Professional Services Client Case Study

Nathan Latka

15:59of the firms that we work with is a professional services firm, and they got started in their, what's called OLA, which is legal admin, things like that. And one of the big things that was impacting people's levels of psychological safety was just the way the sales team was treating them. So you could do all these things internally as the leader of this organization, but if the sales team is being aggressive and not particularly respectful and demanding

16:27in a way that's not appropriate, you've got to get that sales team to start changing behavior as well to see the next level of improvements.

Susan Hunt Stevens

16:38>> Any other questions?

16:41>> So Susan, Let's thank you so give a round of applause for Susan.