A Simple Tool To Understand Your Company Better

You go to work every day. You sit across the room from the same people, get water from the same cooler or kitchen, and Cc the same handful of colleagues day in and out. You spend a lot of time with your company. But how well do you know your company?

That's the question that entrepreneur Jason Fried recently asked himself as his business crossed the 30 employee mark. "The answer was, unfortunately," he writes, "'not as well as I used to.'”

When I started my current company, Contently, there were just three of us: the "business guy," "the tech guy," and the "creative guy." We grew, until now there's a Tech team, Creative is now divvied into Marketing and Content and Design, and Business is now Operations and Sales. Not long ago, I stopped being able to count the number of people in the office on my fingers and toes. (Including interns and dogs, there are often more than 30 mammals in the office at a given time!) It was at that point that we founders started worrying about communication, an easily neglected, but essential company nutrient that doesn't scale naturally with headcount.

And I'm not talking about communication as in reporting metrics up the "chain of command" or filing TPS reports. We were concerned about the kind of communication that keeps people fighting on the same side, marching toward the same goal, and feeling good at work. The kind that fosters good culture. Facilitating these is a critical function of leadership.

About a month ago, my cofounder Dave, (the tech guy), happened across Fried's post about the same topic. To address this issue within 37 Signals, Fried built a little tool called Know Your Company, and he let us try it out early at Contently.

It costs $100 per employee (one time fee, forever; I get no kickback for talking about it), and it's already paying itself off. It actually wouldn't be too hard to replicate its functionality manually, but we were willing to spend a few bucks to put discipline behind it.

Here's how it works:

Every Monday, each person on our team gets an email like this:

It's completely optional to respond, but often most people do it.

Every Wednesday, we all get another email, this time asking a serious question about work, like this:

When you reply on Wednesday, you get to see everyone else's answer from Monday:

Then on Friday, everyone gets an email with a fun question:

... and the answers to Wednesday's question.

And when you answer the next Monday's "What are you working on?", you get to see the answers to the fun question:

It's a surprisingly simple idea, and we've found it to be both fun (which means people participate!) and insightful (which means we're often surprised by the responses we get). People are allowed to submit "private" responses, which only Dave sees (and many do).

Here's what I've learned about my own company in just one month:

• People want to know what jobs we're hiring for and are often surprised when new hires suddenly show up (which can be uncomfortable, understandingly)
• Not everyone can articulate the vision of the company as well as we founders can (which means we're too much in our own heads and need to spend more time talking about it)
• For the most part, people feel like the company is a place where they can voice their ideas (which means we're doing all right at being kind and open minded, but of course can do more)
• Developers want to know more about how the sales team is pitching our product, and sales want more insight into the product roadmap (which makes sense, but we now have data and candid feedback about where we specifically need work)
• My team is awesome!

Also, you learn a surprising amount about your colleagues from answers to questions like "What books are you reading now?" and "What was your first job?"

For anyone with a department, team, or company in the 20+ person range, I recommend checking it out. Like I said, it's a simple tool, but so far it's brought us together a little closer than we might have been, and has helped us all (including management) learn to be vulnerable—and trust each other more.

And what kind of price can you put on that?

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Shane Snow is Chief Creative Officer of Contently. He writes about media and technology for Wired, Fast Company, Ad Age, and more, and tweets at @shanesnow.

(Image is Creative Commons via Flickr user bpixch)