Over the years they’ve shared the best practices, tools, and philosophies that make The Motley Fool an award-winning and wonderful place to work. Today, Lee Burbage and Kara Chambers are back to sort through years of practical advice to pick their top 10 tips for making your workplace culture thrive.
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David Gardner: Seven full years of podcasting has enabled Rule Breaker Investing to have a pretty deep bench of topics, personalities, stories, memories shared by you and me. When you return to a certain topic, return to certain guests, the experience becomes something more. More integral, more on our minds, deeper. One such topic recurring over the years has been what makes for a great company culture. From our first Company Culture Tips episode seven years ago to today, we have asserted that the culture of your workplace really counts, and that our award-winning culture at The Motley Fool might have some tips, tricks, and life hacks that can work for you, my dear Fool. Might have benefits that you can put into play in your own workplace, whether you’re a CEO or oversee benefits or are just a new employee who can be a breath of fresh air in her workplace. Company Culture Tips, nine episodes worth of 10 tips each over history precedes this week’s podcast. This week is the 10th. As we said earlier this year we would do, we are making this 10th the best of Company Culture Tips Volume 10, the 10 all-time best only on this week’s Rule Breaker Investing.
Welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing. I’m David Gardner. I’m very pleased to be with you this first week of December, and I’m even more pleased to be with my two guests here in the studio for this edition of Rule Breaker Investing. Now this is Rule Breaker Investing, but we’re actually going to be talking a little bit more about business today and even more so, the business culture. I have two people that know how to do corporate culture better than almost anybody else I know, Kara Chambers and Lee Burbage. Both longtime Motley Fool employees who are really partly the architects and partly the stewards of Motley Fool culture. As I mentioned last week, we’re very proud of the Motley Fool that our culture has been recognized nationally in a number of different ways as the best employer. I really wanted to get underneath that this week. I figured why not have Kara and Lee here to talk about 10 things that we do at the Motley Fool that, if I’m listening to this podcast, maybe I could do in my business, too. Maybe I’m a small business person, we have a lot of them listening, or maybe I work within a business or non-business. I think any organization can really benefit from what Kara and Lee are bringing this week. Thank you so much for joining us.
Lee Burbage: Thanks for having us.
Kara Chambers: Thank you.
David Gardner: We’re going to go down the list. You’ve got 10, and I just want to say in advance that for a lot of the investing I do, I look for culture in the companies I’m investing in. We’re breaking our own rules this week on Rule Breaker Investing. We’re taking a half step out of investing. This ultimately does map right back to picking this stock and not that one for me. That’s enough prelude. Team, before I get started, I’d like you each to introduce yourself briefly, say what you do at the Motley Fool, how long you’ve been doing it, and one or two Foolish things about you. Not to put you on the spot Kara, but how about you first?
Kara Chambers: I’ve been at the Fool just 10 years in the past couple of weeks.
David Gardner: All right. So that was the identical transcript. Lee, Kara, thank you for your bit parts. Sorry that you had bit parts. You’ll have much bigger roles to play this podcast, but that was the exact start to this series on December 2nd, 2015. Discerning listeners will notice I welcomed everybody back to this first week of December. Now, please don’t tell me I missed Thanksgiving, do we? Thanksgiving didn’t happen.
Lee Burbage: Yeah.
David Gardner: Okay. Good. It had not happened, but because we wanted to do the identical transcript from seven years ago where we started this series, Company Culture Tips, we read it and reconsider the record scratch there, Kara, because it’s certainly not true anymore that you’ve only been at the Motley Fool for 10 years. We did that in 2015. How long have you been at the Motley Fool now?
Kara Chambers: I will be here 17 years next week.
David Gardner: Awesome. Lee, I think you’d been here about 17 years. There’s some kind of?
Lee Burbage: Yeah, karma, kismet, something’s happened.
David Gardner: Kismet, karma happening here. Now, how many years have you been? I’m doing the math.
Lee Burbage: Next month will be 24 years at the Motley Fool.
David Gardner: Spectacular. You both have been present all the way through the series from the start to the celebration, the best of, the 10th edition. We talked about this earlier this year when we did Company Culture Tips Volume 9 together, we talked about the possibility of doing 10 near the end of this year as a best of, looking back over seven years of Company Culture Tips. We’re now in 2022, we’re no longer reading a transcript from 2015. You’ve both brought your favorite 10, looking back over the nine previous volumes of the series. This is a best of. We don’t have fireworks. Well, actually, we do have fireworks. Thank you, Rick.
We don’t have the solid gold dancers. Oh my gosh, maybe we do have the solid gold dancers. We don’t have elephants or trumpets for you. Oh my gosh, I guess we do have those for this special edition. Kara and Lee, what a delight to have you. Seven years and what an incredible seven years it’s been. In fact, let’s delay your introductions for a second. Let’s just talk about the last seven years. I listened to this first podcast, Lee, and there we were talking about how we had just, within the past year, introduced this cool new thing at the Motley Fool Slack. It was from a new upstart company, and it was reducing email in the office.
Lee Burbage: It’s just incredible. The number of emails that I get today, they really rounds to zero compared to the amount of Slack. My whole life is Slack. I can’t imagine it without it now.
David Gardner: Seven years later, that really has been true for you.
Lee Burbage: Fully taken over.
David Gardner: Same for you, Kara?
Kara Chambers: Absolutely. I feel like we all live and die by Slack now.
David Gardner: It’s fun to think you were saying, since we listen to the podcast seven years ago, you were talking about how our techies had brought that to us. It wasn’t an HR initiative or CEO Tom Gardner saying, “I’ve discovered this new tool.” It bubbled up from, of course, some of the smartest people at our company, our techies.
Kara Chambers: Absolutely.
David Gardner: We talked about Slack back then. We had also just introduced Trello as a project management tool. Are we still using Trello?
Kara Chambers: We’ve grown up now, we’ve gotten bigger. So now we’ve moved to Jira, which is Trello’s cousin, owned by the same company, Atlassian. But just bigger and more complicated, and I’m still learning it myself.
David Gardner: J-I-R-A?
Kara Chambers: Correct.
David Gardner: Okay. Yeah. Speaking of bigger, we were talking in that first episode seven years ago about having about 300 employees at that point. Lee, how many employees do we have about today?
Lee Burbage: About 600 employees today. So we’ve doubled in size since that first podcast.
David Gardner: As you looked back over the 90 previous tips that have come through this series, did you see ones that in some cases made more sense for a company that was 300 instead of 600? Does it feel different today where you with today’s eyes, as you thought about our top 10 all time, were you thinking more about any company or more about the mid-sized company of 500-plus employees today?
Lee Burbage: When I look back at the list, there really just things that we’d love to do that I think works for us. I’m not sure. I felt limited by numbers. Some of them did not age well, and some of them have aged really well that we’ll talk about today.
David Gardner: One other thing I was thinking about, Lee, is another tool that came to the Fool in these past seven years. It was not there in 2015. We weren’t thinking yet or using Zoom yet, but when did Zoom come to the Motley Fool within these past seven years?
Lee Burbage: I’ll have to ask Kara what the date is because she’s actually the one that brought it to the company. But I will say it was a huge cultural challenge for us figuring out how to communicate with people that weren’t specifically in the office where these fancy Cisco rooms. We had little like egg cartons on the wall trying to solve for sound. Skype was cutting in and out and it was a big challenge for us until we really got on Zoom, which, like you said, has taken over our life today. Do you remember the inception of that, Kara?
Kara Chambers: Yeah, I do. At the time, we had opened an office in Denver and we had had maybe I want to say 10 percent of our employees working just remotely, but we’re very office culture. It was about 2018 and I was laughing about this because I found a document because, Lee, you and I sat down and said, “Let’s…
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