7 Lessons I've Learned While Growing Helcim to 100 People

Last week, Helcim celebrated its 100th hire after onboarding 7 new team members - a big thank you to those new team members for joining the rest of our team and taking a leap of faith in choosing to be part of this crazy and wonderful Calgary adventure.

Growing to 100 employees has been an education in and of itself. As part of us celebrating this milestone, I want to share some of the key lessons that I discovered along the way in hopes that you can take something away as you grow your own teams.

1 - Culture is your best recruiting tool

Most people know what ice cream flavor they like the most, and which ones they don’t. It doesn’t mean that any particular flavor is bad (except for Durian…), it just means that in order to maximize everyone’s satisfaction, you need to best match the right people with the right flavors.

The same applies to people and company cultures, yet most people don’t know what flavor of culture they are going to get until they are weeks or months into a new job.

A few years back, we decided to try and change that dynamic. Our goal was to make our company culture as accessible as possible publicly, so potential candidates could get a good sense of Helcim’s particular flavor before deciding to apply for a position. These efforts included making our Culture Book, The Way of the Helcim, available to the public, and proudly shown on every job posting. Potential candidates can watch The Helcim Vlog, browse through our (sometimes wacky) social media posts, and read thought leadership articles to get a good sense of what makes Helcim, Helcim.

While it initially felt scary to share so much publically, the culture book ultimately led to one of the most important lessons I’ve learnt these past few years. Our company culture will not be a fit for everyone, and that’s ok. Some people will read our culture book and watch our content, and absolutely hate the very idea of working at our company. But there are others who will gravitate to our company, and by being willing to make ourselves vulnerable and share with the world who we are, we can turn our culture into a recruiting magnet for the right people. I’ve been in countless interviews with candidates who have said something along the lines of “I have read all the articles, watched all the videos, and I’m convinced I have found my people. I want to work here.”

So discover what flavor your organization is, and don’t be afraid to tell the world.

2 - Democratize your hiring process

Everyone at Helcim participates in our interviews. I’ve seen people recoil at that statement, believing that recruitment and doing interviews is the job of recruiters or HR. But we believe that finding great people to join our team is a company-wide responsibility.

This was originally spearheaded by Brett Popkey, Helcim’s CTO. Brett was trying to quickly scale our software development teams and witnessed bottlenecks faced by software dev team leaders in trying to filter resumes, do screening interviews, and perform coding challenges by themselves. To address this, the expectation was changed so that software developers of all levels became responsible. They split up the work, shared tips on becoming more efficient, and trained each other on best practices for filtering resumes and interviewing. The results were simply amazing. Better hires, faster onboarding, and a more diverse team. It worked so well that we quickly rolled it out to the rest of the organization - with a continued goal of having everyone at Helcim able to contribute to our hiring process.

“The results were simply amazing. Better hires, faster onboarding, and a more diverse team.”

Beyond removing bottlenecks, there was an even greater benefit; deeper engagement and retention of our existing staff. People feel empowered, and more enthused to train and keep working with peers that they’ve directly chosen to bring to the company.

3 - Embrace healthy debates

When Rob Park (Helcim’s COO) joined Helcim in our early days, we made a pact about the type of culture we wanted to create, starting at the top. No assholes, no slamming of doors, no yelling, no putting people down, no bullshit.?We had both experienced “less-than-ideal” work environments in the past and we wanted to make sure that everyone joining our organization was treated to a positive experience.

The good news was that we quickly created a company that was filled with collaborative, amazing, pleasant people - it was a happy workplace. The bad news is that early on we confused “friendly” with “no debates”, and our organization lacked what we see now as a healthy dose of debate, pushback, and the challenging of assumptions. Then I read the book “Five Dysfunctions of a Team” by Patrick Lencioni, that made me realize that we were failing one of the book’s core principals; we had a fear of conflict - in ways we had artificial harmony.

We had to find ways to change our culture, while maintaining the pact we had made about ensuring that coming to work at Helcim never put a pit in people’s stomach because of unhealthy behavior. We started by making Patrick Lencioni’s book a must-read for every new team member (a copy of the book is now part of their welcome gift package, along with more exciting things like candy). We leaned into 1:1s and pushed for teammates to talk about both what’s working, and what isn’t. We encouraged leaders across teams to challenge each other and to be honest with each other when someone falls short.

We also set clear expectations as part of our culture book, ensuring the debates were always conducted in a way that was in the interest of the team, not for the sake of winning or because of egos. To never personally attack individuals for their ideas, and to recognize when your voice and opinions might be overpowering the room, and to instead let others be given a chance to speak first.

Creating a culture of collaboration mixed with healthy debates remains a careful balance, but one we learned is crucial for our long-term success.

4 - Transparency creates trust, go all-in

A few years back, we decided to incorporate Open-Book Management as part of our management structure. Our team was just 30 people at the time, but this coincided with us also introducing our employee equity program (stock options for everyone). If employees were to become owners in the business, we wanted them to feel trusted like owners, and that meant giving them access to our financials. Any fears that we may have had in the beginning about sharing so much sensitive information quickly dissipated, and was replaced by relief as the team leaned into the business they suddenly felt more connected to.

The experience taught me a big lesson. That transparency leads to trust, and trust leads to engagement. When in doubt, default to transparency. This is especially important with being willing to share not just the good news, but also the bad (and the ugly).

“Transparency leads to trust, and trust leads to engagement. When in doubt, default to transparency.”

The pandemic tested the conviction of myself and the executive team when it came to being transparent with the team. Salary freezes, hiring freezes, drops in revenue, and fears of the unknown were significant, and we feared that sharing too many details would cause the team to lose faith in our future and leave. But we chose transparency, and the result was as hoped; people appreciated the show of trust and continued to feel connected to the organization. It’s important to remember that most organizations are opaque, and employees know that. In the end, I’m a believer that people will most often choose organizations that are transparent over those that are opaque, even in bad times, because it is better to know than to live in the fog of the unknown.

We’ve recently taken our transparency a step further by creating clear salary bands (ranges) across the functions and departments, and making those salary bands available for all to see. Everyone at Helcim can now see the compensations of a senior software developer, junior designer, or customer service team leader. And once again, the response to that transparency was praise and an increase in trust from our team.

We plan on continuing to lean in further into making our organization as open as possible as Helcim continues to scale.

5 - Empower leaders to collaborate across teams and departments

Most founders and startup executives have big visions and strong opinions on how to make those visions become a reality. It takes this level of determination to drive a new business forward when constant roadblocks are part of the day-to-day.

Unfortunately, the downside of this leadership drive is that it often leads to an organization that defaults to those leaders to make all decisions and connect the various people in the organization together. It was when our team reached 60 people that we realized the problem I had created. Instead of connecting with each other directly to improve processes and solve problems, my teams would bring everything to me directly. “Let’s go ask Nic” became the norm - and not because of any inabilities on their part, but simply because I always had an opinion on how to resolve a problem and move forward.

For example, instead of the Design Team directly working through a solution with the Marketing Team, the Design Team would talk to me, I would go talk to the Marketing Team, and then relay the plan back to Design (see illustration below).

To fix this, we instructed all of our senior leaders to interact with each other directly instead of using us as information relays. We encouraged new ideas and processes to be implemented between teams without the need for our permission, and only asked those departments to involve the executive team to communicate new plans or when a tie-breaker decision needed to be made.

Breaking habits is hard, and we had to draw that little diagram on many whiteboards to encourage teams to interact directly with each other and not feel like they had to escalate everything to us first. But the end results were worth it. Team leaders felt empowered to implement new solutions. They built stronger bonds between other departments (reducing the risk of office politics) and ultimately came up with higher-quality ideas on how to solve problems.

6 - Invest in internal marketing

Communication and knowledge sharing has probably been one of the hardest challenges in growing our team from 20 to 100 in the past few years. Getting everyone excited, let alone aware, of all the internal initiatives going on at our organization at any one time has only gotten harder as we scaled. One of the ways we’ve tackled this challenge has been through a willingness to invest both time and money in internal marketing initiatives.

So what is internal marketing? Most companies put a lot of creative resources into selling their message to their customers, but seldom put even 1/10th of that same marketing energy internally. When was the last time you dedicated any budget to getting a particular message out there to your internal team? The common pushback I hear is along the lines of “Well, they are part of this company, they should just care.” But the reality is that just like consumers, employees are bombarded with messages and it can be difficult to cut through the noise.

Have a big exciting team initiative? Why not record a fun video instead of a plain-text email? Trying to get volunteers to sign up for an event? Why not distribute special-themed donuts as a conversation starter? Trying to sell the team on a new idea? Why not invite an expert speaker to pitch it for you?

The investment doesn’t necessarily need to be significant, you just need to approach the creative lens of a marketer trying to get the attention of the audience.

Thiago Valentin, a senior software developer at Helcim, has been organizing?monthly “Internal Tech Conferences”, where others present their new and exciting projects and learnings to the rest of the team. In order to drum up attendance to the latest one, he collaborated with a Helcim designer to make flyers for the upcoming event and distributed them to the whole company. The result? Attendance nearly doubled!

Internal marketing works, and the rumor is that Thiago is already planning on printing large movie posters for the next one.

In the end, just like your customers,?you need your team to be engaged with many initiatives in order to drive change and the outcomes that you seek. We’ve learned that putting the extra creative effort into driving messaging internally works, and will ultimately contribute to our external goals.

7 - Delegate to empower your people

Delegation can be hard. When you’ve built an organization from scratch, you get used to being the only one that can get it all done. But what starts out as a positive, high level of ownership on your part, can in time turn into a demoralizing behavior for your growing team.

I had to relearn that lesson a few times over as the Helcim team has continued to grow. Early on it was removing myself from the phone queues, trusting our new customer service team to do it themselves (and do it better) so that I could make myself available to focus on hiring new team members. Later it was moving away from coding - our growing development team was more talented and I was simply getting in their way. Now it’s about learning to empower my leaders to take on bigger and bigger challenges themselves. There is a certain guilt that can come with delegation, a mixture of not wanting to lose control and feeling like you are not showing ownership by not doing the task yourself. But I’ve learned that delegating big projects and initiatives communicates to your team that you trust them. This in turns empowers them to rise up to the challenge and often deliver beyond what you could have done yourself.

“I’ve learned that delegating big projects and initiatives communicates to your team that you trust them.”

Failing to delegate doesn’t allow you to focus on high-leverage tasks, and worse, it erodes the trust between you and your team. You hired them to be meaningful contributors to your organization - give them those chances to try, fail, learn and ultimately succeed.

The future and upcoming challenges for our next phase of growth

Our mission is to be the world’s most loved payments company, and more small businesses every day are hearing our message and resonating with our service. We’re growing quickly - aiming to triple our team in the next two years. That speed of growth is going to demand a new set of learning. We’re going to have to find ways to reduce tribal knowledge and information silos between teams and departments. We’re going to have to learn new ways to onboard new members of the team faster and make them feel connected to an ever-growing organization.

We’ll also need to keep evolving our culture to the changing needs of our organization, while maintaining that special magic that is Helcim. And most importantly, we’re going to have to find ways to keep delighting our merchants in their day-to-day use of our service, no matter how big we get. This will be the ultimate long-term test of our mission and vision for the future.

But to all of it I say Bring It On! I’m looking forward to tackling the next phase of our adventure with this amazing group of people.

-Nic

Original posted on The Helcim Blog: