Building Culture: Our House Cup Experiment

‘Not Slytherin… not Slytherin, but are you sure…?’?

Remember this moment? A choice for a young boy yearning for a sense of belonging. Who should I associate myself with at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry? Our workplace may not have the magic halls, but we make similar choices where biases tend to creep in.

This can be destructive for both our personal growth and the building blocks that underpin a great working culture.?

The best moments in my life and career have been interacting with humans that I would never have ordinarily chosen to associate with (even those I did not particularly like or misjudged at the beginning of our relationship — we are all human, it happens).?

We are all a little like Harry (polyjuice potion not required) in 3 ways:

1. We have our people — comfort combined with familiarity defines who we interact, make friends and spend time with. Life changes. Our template for what we consider goodness for our soul shifts as we grow. And that’s okay — it’s normal. But could we be missing something wonderful? The people who we do not naturally gravitate towards: the ones who challenge us, change our perspective, shape and help us grow. What if they sit outside of our status quo?
2. We like to be recognised — we want to feel valued, our skills recognised and efforts rewarded. A joy that comes from a deeper place then simply our monetary desires. Isn’t this what really gets us out of bed in the morning??
3. We crave authenticity — we secretly don’t want people just to say what they think is right for the sake of it; we want them to actually mean it. We want to know whether our work on that project, task, the late night going the extra mile — was it truly worth it? Am I just a simple cog in a very large wheel, or did I deliver impact and contribute to a bigger mission than myself??

(Side note: Read Little Things That Make Employees Feel Appreciated — Harvard Business Review’ — it talks to this point on authenticity, especially tips on avoiding expressions of gratitude that are considered inauthentic or sweeping generalisations)

Authenticity is explained beautifully in the moment Neville Longbottom wins the house cup for Gryffindor, with his points tipping his team over the edge. It was not just a tick-box exercise, but a feeling of value that his specific contributions impacted in a bigger way than himself to team mission they were striving towards. The cherry on the cake: he didn’t even realise it himself and that’s the true magic of recognising value.

That moment you realise people think you're awesome, but you didn’t realise it yourself.?

At Oracle for Startups, we’re a bit like a startup ourselves. We love testing new things. Could we build this within our team culture and reinforce our values in recognising the humans within?

It started with band of mavericks (don’t all great things?). We had a vision: culture is what we make of it. We volunteered our time as part of this global melting pot of humans (our culture committee who I’m so grateful for!) from different walks of life and experiences who came together to build a movement bigger than ourselves.

How it worked?

1. Breaking down silos: Team members were ‘sorted’ (in true Harry Potter style) into houses balancing geography, roles, areas, skills, tenure etc. House names were chosen by the newly formed teams in startup fashion: Unicorn Hunters, The Dragons, The Zebras and Team Moonshot. Each house nominated a self-selected a ‘Housemaster’ — an energetic team member (specifically not in the leadership team to ensure others feel empowered to lead) to run the house and build camaraderie. The intent of the house: Build relationships with your fellow house members — people you may not typically work with daily or regularly and root for building as many house points as you can together.

The energy of the housemasters was infectious when volunteering time to build relationships between their houses and its humans.

2. Recognising value: We had 2 leaderboards: one for house cup points and another for individual points. This was important. This ensured whilst everyone operates as an individual, the focus was on the ultimate goal to build points for the success of their team and newly formed House.

We saw a whopping 264 shoutouts given across the team in Q2 FY21 alone.

3. The currency of gratitude (#shoutouts): To win points, you would #shoutout gratitude in a dedicated Slack channel, calling out specific individual(s). This would typically include their contribution, value and how they’ve gone above and beyond to impact you / a project. Each shoutout was worth 1 point for both the individual and their house. We attempted to limit this to 10 shoutouts per quarter so that people would be intentional about who they call out. We tracked weekly and ensured this was the last thing everyone saw on a Friday going into the weekend.

An example of the weekly leaderboard(s) and messaging shared every Friday with other culture committee announcements to our entire team.

We had some terrific shoutouts that grew week to week:

4. Celebrating success: Quarterly, we would host team awards. This would be a combination of nominated specific awards and awards based on house points. For example: The Mountain Mover Award — a nominated individual award targeted to someone who had done something wonderful that delivered mammoth impact in a project or activity. We also purposefully created team awards like our Top Team Cross Collab award, to encourage greater team working and diminishing any silos. Winners were selected by the leadership team and received recognition on our end of quarter All Hands and prizes. In our last quarter we celebrated 264 shoutouts with 26 winners across 6 award categories (2 team, 4 individual)

The value to our team

We ran this experiment for 1 year (Dec 2019–20'). We didn’t plan for this to coincide with a global pandemic (COVID19). However, this came at exactly the right time in recognising value and motivating the team when we really needed this for our collective morale.?

Last week, I received this note from someone in the team (almost 9 months post our experiment) which inspired this article, as it showed there was far more long term value in this than we had originally thought:

The award meant a lot to them. They mentioned it wasn’t easy to demonstrate this value we recognised, particularly when explaining this to others (i.e. their new manager).

This email stood out from several received from many members of our team:

Praise came in different mediums, even as #shoutouts on our own channel:

Choosing the best quote that frames the entire experience was hard, but this does it beautifully from a long standing team member:

'The House Cup has been a brilliant initiative for strengthening teamwork and raising team morale during what has been a difficult period for everyone. As well as providing a platform for expressing gratitude, it also helps team members to learn what others in the team are doing. Over my past 3 1/2 years in the team, I feel that this initiative has had by far the greatest impact on team culture and connectivity."

3 areas we learned we could improve on:

1. It didn’t recognise or engage everyone — those with less interactions with others (due to their roles) or geography on less friendly cross-over timezones didn’t get recognised as often. Despite the fantastic job they do, it was harder to recognise their contributions being made at a team level. The individual leaderboard ranking steered more towards those who had cross-functional and visible impact / roles. It would explain why we only had 87% participation (defined by interactivity with a post; sharing a shoutout, receiving a shoutout or response through comments). More could have been done to engage those who were disengaged and pivot our model as we saw the data build that this was not working for everyone.
2. Houses were a hit and miss — this worked at times, and didn’t at others. We intentionally made ‘housemasters’ — energetic self-selected people to shake things up and positively help build community. They communicated between each other to share best practice alongside a volunteer culture committee. This helped a ton on what worked and replicating best practice. On the flip side, it was a time investment alongside their day jobs. It was difficult at times, especially when they weren’t getting much back from their housemates. We learned that simple, easy to follow tasks and competitions worked like a dream. Ask someone to post their best breakfast photo this weekend and you’ll get instagrammable shots from around the world. Ask someone to reflect on what went well for them in the week and their learnings: maybe a step too far for some.?
3. Shoutouts needed better guidance and guardrails — we had a great problem. There were weeks when there were SO many shoutouts (way past their quota), it was hard to keep up as those counting and keeping track but we didn’t want to discourage the goodness. One colleague who beams positivity in our team on one day used 27 in one go. That’s the equivalent of stepping off a plane and downloading a 3GB movie on roaming charges in the arrivals hall — they were seriously over quota and whilst we loved the initiative, it made it clear we had a problem we needed to solve. As lots of love was being shared across the team, the question then came: Are we shouting out people for just doing the job we expect them to do, or something truly meaningful that goes out of their way beyond their day to day to go the extra mile? This was subjective to each individual. We concluded that better guard rails would be needed in future to ensure that we’re calling out the exceptional and not just the ordinary. As leaders within the team, we should have set better examples for what would be considered the extra mile.

What would we do differently next time?

• Criteria: Create better criteria for what a ‘good’ shoutout looks like, enforce the quota (to an extent) and what we define as goodness without discouraging people.?
• Leadership: Encouraging our leadership to call out people who may not always be in the direct limelight. Set the example we hope others to follow.
• Interest based interactivity: We noticed an uptick in interest when we introduced interest based social activities (i.e. yoga, quizzes, coaching, subject specific workshops etc…). People wanted to interact with others. This may have been a little more effective than houses + encouraging people to join in an easy and safe setting based on connecting on similar interests.?

These are great example shoutouts on the impact of these activities:

Final tip: Ask your humans what they want. You’ll always find they feel more included and you’ll get increased participation because it shows you listen. For more tricks and tips on this topic, do check out my last article on listening well.

So did this work? Yes - partially. We’ve still got a ton to learn.?

Today, #shoutouts continue to grow on our channels. It is a joy to see our team bustling with love and gratitude for others. People participating genuinely enjoyed building meaningful connections and learning about their fellow team members and this continues. This is the exact behaviour we wanted to foster as I learnt in my old Techstars days of #GiveFirst — a wonderful mantra that the more you give without expectation, the universe will always work to making that eventually right for you when you least expect it.

Culture only happens when we all contribute positively to it.?

I am proud that at Oracle for Startups we have an incredibly high retention rate overall and have maintained 100% retention in our group operations and strategy team for the past 18 months during what has been a challenging period globally. I’d like to think the House Cup and our culture committee has played a small part to play in that and continues to do so.

I leave you with the mantra that I try to live by encouraging this with the incredible humans I work with:

We came for the mission but we stay for the culture.?

How will you build yours?

?—

Huge shoutout: Whitney Durmick, Hiran Adhia, Amisha Adhia, Lourdes Saca and Mobrhen Rattray — thanks for giving feedback early in helping me think differently.

Nik Adhia is Senior Director for Global Operations and Strategy, Oracle for Startups. These views and opinions represented in this article are in a personal capacity and not on for or on behalf of Oracle or any other company or establishment. You can follow Nik for more updates on Twitter, Medium at @Nik_Adhia or connect with him on LinkedIn here