Susan Rice heard the rumors, but she wasn’t quite ready to believe them. It all seemed too good to be true.
When Rice first joined Workiva as vice president of user experience, she knew the basic facts: that the employee engagement scores were very high — around 90 percent — and that attrition was under 6 percent. What’s more, the few who did leave the company sometimes became “boomerangs,” which are employees who follow an opportunity elsewhere only to return to Workiva later, after realizing that another company’s culture can’t compete.
“Normally when you join a company, the honeymoon period falls off at about six months, but in this case it was the opposite,” Rice said. “I kept thinking, how could the company culture be this great? I was a little suspicious at first. And then I realized, wow, it’s all real. I’m incredibly lucky.”
Senior Vice President of Technology Clay Stanley had a similar experience.
“I’d heard that the culture at Workiva was special, but as an outsider coming in, I wasn’t sure,” Stanley said. “Other companies I’d worked for had similar aspirations, but it never quite panned out.”
Though Stanely was initially skeptical, it didn’t take long for his eyes to open.
“As I spent time with Workivians across R&D and the company, I realized that Workiva’s culture is amazing. It’s a powerful differentiator for us. We have amazing people, building awesome products and doing it all in an inclusive and collaborative way. It’s the best job I’ve ever had.”
Stanley and Rice soon realized something else along the way: the company culture at Workiva wasn’t just creating a large group of motivated and loyal employees — it was also leading directly to innovation. Furthermore, that spark was coming not just from the top but from every level at the company, including new employees. The company culture at Workiva, they realized, had also become an engine for innovation.
Many questions remained. First of all, exactly what factors made the company culture at Workiva so special? Secondly, how did those factors influence innovative thinking on such a large scale?
Built In Colorado sat down with Stanely and Rice for a conversation about the blueprint for Workiva’s unique company culture, and how that culture directly influences inspiration and innovation across the company.
Workiva at a Glance
I. Culture Through Leadership
Let’s start at the beginning. You’ve both said that feeling connected is a big part of making Workiva's company culture so special. But where does it start? How is that connectedness organically created and maintained?
Susan Rice: During trying times, we need authentic leaders. Our culture starts with Marty, our CEO, who is just so accessible and real.
When COVID-19 hit, I know some companies had challenges feeling connected, but that lack of connection was not the case with us. Immediately after we started working from home, Marty began having weekly all-hands meetings. He’s very upfront and transparent in his communication, and doesn’t try to keep everything cheery. Importantly, his authenticity also comes through on video. You almost feel like you’re in the same room as him, and you're feeling connected because of the way he talks and interacts with others.
I continue to think, “Thank goodness Marty is our leader.” So the connectedness we feel starts at the top and works its way down to everyone.
During trying times, we need authentic leaders. Our culture starts with Marty, our CEO, who is just so accessible and real.”
II. Culture Through Engagement
Does the connectedness you feel at Workiva spring only from leadership, or are there other important areas in which it can be organically maintained?
Clay Stanley: Susan described the connectedness we all feel through our great leadership, and it’s also there because we truly care about what our people are saying and how engaged they feel. When I was at another big-name company — which at the time was of equivalent size — the normal metric to measure success was velocity. For example, how many engineering days are getting delivered to the site, how many features are we delivering? It was an execution machine. At Workiva, I think the metric we care about most is our employee engagement score.
We measure productivity based on employee engagement — how engaged someone is, no matter what role they have. Our number is consistently around 90 percent. When people are engaged and aligned to a common focus, productivity and the feeling of connectedness rise.
III. Culture Through Structure
How does Workiva’s emphasis on a connected culture relate to the typical managerial structure and complex hierarchy that many companies rely upon?
Stanley: Even though we’re a 1800+-strong company, we want our company to still feel small. Focusing on the individual minimizes the hierarchical structure other companies might depend on, and that personal attention is mapped to the way we’re structured in research and development.
While R&D is organized by departments (think product, user experience, engineering, platform operations, delivery management and so on), people are matrixed into execution teams — we call them squads — which consist of six to 12 people. Those squads have the responsibility for achieving specific business outcomes. We want every voice to be empowered.
And that’s an element that also unleashes innovation. It’s when you allow the folks on each squad to become comfortable enough with each other to autonomously deliver results. It’s also on this smaller level where employees start to develop this feeling of connectedness and inclusivity.
IV. Culture Through Inclusion
Let’s follow that idea and talk about inclusivity, which is frequently an important factor in establishing a strong company culture. Why is inclusivity important to Workiva, and how have you become more inclusive over time?
Rice: We have a wide and growing variety of employee resource groups (ERGs) that offer support and connection, and I am becoming involved with them more and more. We've all seen the hate speech and crimes happening toward the Asian-American community this past year. And as an Asian-America myself, I often worry about my own safety and that of my family. Being a part of a Workvia ERG, I was encouraged to speak freely with my coworkers about my concerns and fears. It allowed me to truly bring my whole self to work and it was really awesome to have such strong and understanding support at Workiva.
A more micro example of our inclusion is that I recently saw a workshop that was talking about how to factor diversity into UX and product design. So I made an announcement to my team that I would pay for people to attend if there was any interest, and there was certainly interest so three of our designers participated.
The awesome part about this event was that I might have initiated that first part by notifying everyone and paying for our designers to attend, but those designers took it from there. After they had participated, they not only brought back insights for the UX team with ideas of how to improve diversity, inclusion and equity, but they also created a Slack channel and an inclusive-by-design meetup every other Friday. Sometimes there are hot topics and difficult conversations, but the goal is to increase our awareness so we can increase our capability to support. It’s a well-attended meet-up that’s helped solidify the feeling that we’re all on this journey together.
Stanley: We recently completed some excellent inclusive leadership training. Coming out of that training we took a hard look at many of our internal practices and asked, what can we do to get better? We initially focused on hiring. What kinds of job descriptions are we putting out? Are we casting a wide enough net? Do people feel comfortable applying for the roles we have? Are we screening in the right way? Are interview teams set up the right way? Have we thought through the selection criteria for evaluating candidates? We found lots of opportunities to improve..
You realize when you go through inclusive leadership training that you’ve settled into a pattern that can lead to unconscious bias. Those training sessions are helping drive change, as are the ERGs that Susan was talking about. A lot of good things are happening here.
Being a part of my Workvia ERG, I was encouraged to speak freely with my coworkers about my concerns and fears. It allowed me to truly bring my whole self to work.”
V. Culture Through Innovation
We’ve talked about how connectedness, engagement, structure and inclusion are some very important aspects in establishing a quality company culture. But how does this culture then drive innovation?
Rice: Let’s first look through the lens of inclusion. Honestly, divergent thinking and associative thinking is key to innovation. And to get divergent thinking you need a diversity of experiences, diversity of ethnicities, diversity of knowledge and so on. It all comes into play when you’re thinking about innovation, and you’re building on all of those different experiences to come up with something new.
In an inclusive environment, employees also feel psychologically safe and free to be authentic. This plays a huge role in allowing people to feel free to make mistakes. If you feel like it’s OK to make a mistake, then you’re going to be willing to put your neck out there more often and try new and innovative things.
Another way psychological safety plays a role — not only influencing authenticity but also innovation — is that it encourages people to ask all sorts of questions. This ends up having a major effect, because sometimes what someone thought was a “dumb” question ends up becoming a key that can unlock a current problem.
Considering that engagement is a major aspect of Workiva’s company culture, are there any tools available to those highly engaged employees who want to innovate and move their ideas forward?
Rice: We have an innovation process where anyone within the organization can submit an idea to be put into an innovation funnel. The idea goes through a committee and a process and eventually comes to the point where it is considered for a long-term investment. If it does go in that direction, it’s subsumed by R&D, which takes it on over time. But we’ve got a whole innovation funnel for anyone with ideas, which is something that some organizations don’t even have.
Stanley: Another thing we do to encourage innovation is something called LINK, an annual conference open to the entire R&D organization. During the conference we pause our normal feature work and allow people within R&D to form self-organized teams to pursue innovation ideas or improvements to the Workiva platform.
Innovation time is so important that we take a full two-week window for the conference. When people participate in self-organized teams, it allows them to work with colleagues in different parts of the R&D organization. It’s an amazing experience.
In our last LINK conference, there were 53 separate projects, many of which have since been deployed to production. At the end of the conference each team creates videos highlighting their innovation and experience.
We celebrate these accomplishments and give out several awards. LINK is an R&D favorite that serves as a good proxy for Workiva’s culture. I think this event fosters the connectedness that we talked about earlier. It’s magical.
LINK 2022
