Build a Culture That Lasts

Speaker 1: when I think about just over my professional life what has been the thing that's grounded all these different experiences I've had it's really been an interest in teams and high functioning teams and what makes a team work hi I'm Melanie bar welcome to the she builted experience with Melanie you're here because you want to experience the life and business that you crave join me as I talk to women who have successfully built it a career and business that they love we dive into the topic of how they built it and talk about everything from Having the courage to make career leaps to the details of how to lead effectively create successful teams Implement strategies for growth and Infuse Tech Innovation magic happens when we focus on the part of ourselves and our business that brings us joy so let's dive in Malika Jacobs is the founder and CEO of myriad a B2B Marketplace featuring emerging and specialized HR Tech supporting a holistic employee experience expence she brings a thoughtful and joyful approach to building intentional and beloved team cultures thank you for joining us Mala you are the founder and CEO of myriad what gave you the courage and idea to launch your business and how has your company evolved over the last few years

Speaker 2: Marriot is an early stage startup born of a pivot the last few years have been a time of change for a lot of companies married is born out of recognizing a really acute and at the same time very longterm and big challenge that we see in the employee experience space and then also the decisions that you make as an entrepreneur to think about what the next best opportunity is for your business even if that might not fit what you thought you were starting out with in the beginning I've been in the service industry for a long time the nonprofit sector went to business school took that into my own first business which was a brick and mortar business our recent pivot as companies went hybrid and remote work environments and that's how Myriad was born out of a lot of s of learnings and asking questions about what the next need and opportunity is that we can help support and you are not alone in that so many companies had to Pivot and also think about what does employee and employee retention look like now if there is a hybrid if there's not a hybrid if you have a business where employees have to come in or they can work from home it is such an interesting challenge that are facing and it's so pervasive it's one of many of these big sectors that just got really impacted and shown a light on some of the problems that we had prior to 2020 and then also how those systemic problems that we have and and how we look at Team culture and people engagement how we can take this as an opportunity to change some of those fundamental structural things that we've been doing and just accepted these past few years gave us an opportunity to like really rethink a lot of that so there's so so many interesting conversations happening in the people engagement Human

Speaker 1: Resources space right now involving gender Equity pay Equity Mobility the gig work environment Wellness in the workplace I mean there's so many things that have changed so it's an awesome time to be in this space if you are interested in high functioning teams and how to create a workplace that has a lot of meaning this is an it's an awesome time to be a leader in the space right

Speaker 2: now yeah and I think the only way you grow is to have a successful team that does collaborate that does work together well and can you tell us a little bit about your first company and how you made the pivot and transitioned into

Speaker 1: marriet you're so so right when I think about just over my professional life what has been the thing that's grounded all these different experiences I've had it's really been an interest in teams and high functioning teams and what makes a team work despite the industry or the opportunity or kind of what your company does you can't do any of that if you don't have a great team behind you and I think everybody knows that but is sort of this thing that kind of gets lost in the shuffle of other business functions that's emerge and there's always a prioritization and ranking of things that has to happen but intuitively people know that they know that you need a great team and you need to support your team in order to execute that gets lost so often the mindset that I went into with my first business I had worked in restaurant as a side gig after I graduated from college and was curious about what made restaurants that were really effective function and and which ones were a little bit more toxic and not great so when I stumbled upon a concept of a board game bar in Toronto that is the thing that I wanted to bring to Columbus Ohio where I live and that's the business that I was curious about starting but it wasn't really because of I'm an avid board gamer sort that was my passion it was more so that I was really curious about the team that served me in that first board game bar experience they were super passionate they wanted to work there they were able to translate their passion to somebody at the table who maybe didn't share that same passion so I was curious about how that team culture and that team environment had been created and I was curious to create that myself and so that's always the lens by which I've gone into my entrepreneurial Pursuits is how can I create a team that is really passionate and I just find the people that do those things really really well and are really excited about it and my job as a leader is to motivate them to execute and create the environment intentionally where they can execute in

Speaker 2: that way and listeners can't see but I see all the board games behind you so I'm not sure that exactly true that you're not a game and puzzle person our family loves games and puzzles trip I have 9-year-old twins I think we were teaching them poker at 8 and I thought hm don't know if this is is the best but we play all kinds of board games it's it's a fun thing to do to bring the family together if I turned my computer

Speaker 1: around you'd see my bookshelf of games but I have since become a huge advocate for it it's definitely an activity and a mechanism that brings people together no matter what skill level or interest the reason we got into team bonding and have gotten into the people experience space is that because we were we were using board games to facilitate team experiences so while I opened a public facing nighttime social experience so that's what I went into open as soon as we open people said can I bring my team in for a session and that's how we grew this team bonding facilitated board game playay experience that we did you know for eight years and and really brought a lot of teams together it's a great way to bring any group of people together whether you know each other or don't like each other or don't and it's so smart because my husband's parents just took the family on a cruise after dinner we would get together and there was probably 16 of us playing cards and it just became what we do and now when we get together as a family we do that and it's fun and we laugh and it brings us together and it gets us talking and it's a commonality so I see how that would translate into the business world and

Speaker 2: into bringing teams together absolutely

Speaker 1: it allows people to see their colleagues in a different way in a different space than maybe they're used to it allows people to connect in a very human way to share stories to share memories to create those memories because then that's what gets referenced those jokes or those moments that you were laughing or had a shared connection when you're in a project you're having a really tough time or it's like you're meeting a deadline or whatever that is these are the moments that you can call upon and sort of be like this is reminding me of that time that we had a you know more chill fun experience together our our experiences were all facilitated and I think that's something that we learned in the team environment especially that's something that we learned is very different than family settings and when families and friendss would come into the Parlor to play that's a different environment and a different level of social connection than when you're in a workplace setting the addition of a facilitator is is really critical and so all of our events events always had a a facilitator and a guide present during the game play which can seem intrusive but I think what it does is invites equal participation so in a setting where there's hierarchy in a workplace setting there's different shared histories and management and levels of familiarity it's really important to give everyone an equal seat at the table and to invite them to play and to invite them to participate a game naturally invites that sort of turn order and participation but to add in a facilitator really allows everyone to sort of be in a more Equitable setting when you appro approach play and that is a bit more of a structured environment that that's conducive to a work a workplace setting and leaders have so much they're thinking about it's delegating to the team it's running the overall business it's doing what they're passionate about I'm sure leaders appreciate having someone facilitate the team bonding experiences it's one thing that is taken off of the leader plate at that moment huge so this is how merate our current company was for in order to get into one of our team bondings we do a consultation call with the leader who was booking it we started these in April of 2020 if Business Leaders were busy and was hectic beforehand this was just an an elevated sense of that personal challenges going on professional everybody was in their own home so all those things were colliding we would start to say that they were almost therapy sessions for Business Leaders we would ask them these guided questions and they would just talk and I think one of the things that started to emerge is that people wanted for their team culture the moments that they were getting in a team Bond but they didn't know how to create those moments throughout the entire employee experience so they were thinking of it as a oh I need to schedule a team bonding because my team is disconnected has low morale I just hired somebody new I want them to engage but we were encouraging to think about a team bonding being like your everyday employee experience how employees show up at work how you talk to them how they're engaged what they perceive as leaderships priorities or how they're being treated that all makes up your company culture and you aren't going to solve that or Elevate that by a team bonding itself that has to be that intentionality that you bring to a team bonding to go book a team bonding with a facilitator that level of intentionality has to happen across the entire employee experience journey and that's what we're tackling right now with Myriad we've just taken what we know from the team bonding experience and expanded it out to touch all those touch points that an employee has with their employer at during the life cycle that they're with a company and how would a company work with you at Myriad we're in a stage we putting we're putting our prototype in front of a lot of early users so if any HR professionals or people leaders people that are interested and you know managers are listening we're at a point where we'd love feedback on the early version of the product we are hoping to be in a beta and launch by mid next year so at that point it will be available we do have a set of resources on our website so if you were to put your email in and your company name you'll get a list of the vendors that we think are doing really awesome things and employee experience right now so you'll get all of our categorizations around it and the and sort of our searching so that you don't have to do those searches you can find that awesome list of emerging Innovative companies that are really tackling in very heartfelt and interesting ways using technology using services to tackle these really meaty problems that we're seeing in the workplace right now it tackles

Speaker 2: everything from attraction retention all the way through engagement Learning and Development coaching wellness and that list is on our site and so you could access that today and see what those vendors are and then of course when we launch or even before that we'd love to hear from folks and see what they think about what we're putting out there we've switched from facilitating the individual team bonding experiences to now being sort of facilitators of here's the whole set of vendors that you could use here are all the different ways that you could piece together Dynamic HR Tech stack that would work for your company that supports across the entire life cycle journey of an employee you are

Speaker 1: naturally curious about designing high functioning workplaces where employees love to work how do you think that has changed the last few years for companies overall and what do you recommend business owners do for employee engagement and retention

Speaker 2: the juries out we're in a period of a lot of fluctuation the question that you just asked me I had an HR professional tell us a few weeks ago that the disruption and sort of this question will be the thing that she and her peers spend the rest of their careers trying to solve this generation of HR and people leaders will tackle this because so much has changed there's an awareness that your employees are served in the same way that your clients and customers and the way that you treat your employees serve your employees the team culture you build is just as important as the product or brand that you're putting out to your customers and that there is an equal level of discerning in the way that a customer client is able to to choose you or a competitor there's that same level of choice available to employees and that Equity has really changed the landscape of how employers and employees will talk to each other and relate to each other going forward it's a fascinating time that Genie's out of the bottle right so to try to fight it that ship has sailed the sooner a company or team can get on board with thinking about how can the straints that they have as a company and a team be best shared with employees and like attract this employees that share that same cultural you know mindset and and support the mission and the work and the way that a company and Team Works we've moved into that phase and there's really no going back the companies that most and quickly get on board with embracing that and really treating their company culture the same way that they would their company brand will Garner the best loyalty and the best evangelists for their company and all of that right in the same way that they think about their customers absolutely and if I'm picking a company you can tell if a team is fragmented getting along well working well together or if they're happy being there absolutely I mean whole roles in HR are changing Chief remote officer employee experienced Brands these are roles that companies are being created as we speak there's all these new titles there's all this new awareness that

Speaker 1: there needs to be intentionality and focus around this in the same way that you would put that intentionality around the product that you're developing and we talk a lot about alumni networks for employees think about if you were to take a job you would go find your friend who had worked at that company and ask them right so how you treat an employee even at the off forting or exit it could be a huge asset or it could be a huge liability depending on how you treat

Speaker 2: your company culture and that's a great Point I've never thought about adding that alumni but it would be great to be able to go to someone and ask questions as you're entering a new role and that you can really support a workplace at a team culture even if you're not there anymore right even if that wasn't the best for use at this moment you could have had a really great experience while you were there and be a real advocate for them if that company was sort of taking on that task looking back at all the places I've worked I know what I would say about each one each one and it's interesting to melie because I think a lot of that they're probably tied to managers so a lot of how you feel about a company is how you were treated by your managers another thing that's sort of changing or mentality shift is that the people leaders and HR professionals within a company are really there to elevate and coach and train and give their managers the best tools so that they can actually do the work on the teams that impacts employees and creates those really like awesome team cultures and that the work of the Professionals in our space is to really just be the tool and the resource that helps supports the managers that are doing the daily work of team building magic

Speaker 1: happens when we focus on the part of ourselves and our business that brings us joy what is one way that you make sure to find and live your joy each day

Speaker 2: I love people I love talking to people I love working with different people I've never been a solopreneur right as much as I've been rur I've always built a team first I truly get a lot of Joy by working with the people that I get to work with every day that was true in the restaurants I loved working with it was true in the nonprofit jobs I had it's true at my first company and all through these pivots and it's true today so I think that that is the thing that I find the most energizing is who I get to show up with every day and the problems and the conversations that we get to tackle and the ways that the teams that I've built and the people that I've hired have always pushed me in ways that I sometimes are hard I do find challenging sometimes but I think giving people the space to do that I've grown so much as a result of the people that I've had the privilege to work with and have hired it's all been a learning experience I'm really motivated by the people that I get to show up with every day and that says a lot about you as a leader to be able to create and build a successful team like that and you are building an incredible business and what you are

Speaker 1: doing is so needed and the timing just seems so perfect can you please tell our

Speaker 2: listeners how and where they can find you we are at work mad.com it's work and then m y a.com you can find us on LinkedIn under the same name you can find my Linkin as well drop us an email at the hello email there at the bottom of the website definitely download our resource and reach out to us let us know what you think about it and we're always happy to have a conversation about what you may need in the people space right now

Speaker 1: thank you for joining us today I'd love to hear from you reach out to me at hello Sheil it.com on our shetit website or at Sheed on social thank you to my editor Rich draino who always makes us sound good until next time let nothing stop you from experiencing the life and business that you crave