Let People Bring Their Whole Selves to Work

Many years ago, when we were in one smaller company — you know, we’ve all had this moment — I’m the CEO, and I’m walking around the floor. And as soon as I walk up to somebody’s desk, all of a sudden, they start closing their laptop. And this is happening all the time. And I’m like, well, obviously, they’re doing something that has nothing to do with what we’re doing at the company, and they don’t want me to see that. And rather than think the worst of it, I was trying to figure out how can I get people to bring their whole selves to work? Bring all of you.

Major and Minor

So your major is the thing that you came for. It’s the thing we hired you for. You’re a creative leader. You’re a songwriter. You’re a producer. You’re a publicist. Whatever it may be is your major. And the minor is the thing — think of it as your — that if money didn’t matter, what would be the thing that you would do just out of pure enjoyment? It fulfills you. That, so that’s your minor. If I embraced your minor and didn’t hold you accountable in a negative way for bringing that also with you so that you didn’t have to close that laptop. I would be able to get people to bring their whole selves into work.

So we did was we created this idea, like, in fact, I want to know what your minor is. And part of our hiring criteria was I wanted you to have an active minor. Their interest would actually help us solve certain problems because now we would include them in the problem-solving journey. Because I didn’t know that Jeff over there, who’s a copywriter, had depth of knowledge in music because he was a DJ. Or I didn’t know that this proofreader had a depth of knowledge in sports because they are an avid collector of baseball cards. Those things started to help better inform the kind of thinking we were getting in solving problems for our clients. I think it is something that was an advantage in the marketplace for us, and we incentivize people to talk about their minors and present their minors to the company in town halls. So everybody kind of knew what another person did and what they were passionate about. If they weren’t doing this job, what they would be doing. And once everybody got it, you found a new level of relationship building within the organization, especially cross-functionally.

Trust

Creating the majors and minors program at UnitedMasters, Translation and allowing people to come in and embracing their minors, one of the things that you have to have, some guiding principles on is productivity between people, like, really focusing on, you know, the job at hand and then how the minor could, you know, interfere with that. I mean, that’s obviously the biggest fear. What I found is that if you allow people to bring their whole selves to work and you incentivize them for bringing their minor so that they don’t have to feel like they have to hide it, most A-players won’t abuse that privilege. So we watch it closely, but if there’s any outliers, it becomes really clear. Like, it’s as clear as people coming to the office and leaving early or not coming into the office at all. You know, just it, there’s a pattern recognition where it goes too far. But it’s like one of those things where in our organization, we allow people to self-manage how they spend their time with their majors and minors within our organization.

Like, I remember when people first went to college, they were like, “You know, they don’t take attendance at college. This is amazing.” Everyone was excited about that idea until they found out, yeah, if you don’t show up, you’re going to get a grade that you’re not necessarily going to be happy with. We embrace it, but we self-manage.