Is Company Culture Real or Just B.S.?

In June 2021, when Marketplace Events was clawing and scratching to recover from pandemic-induced shutdowns, I read a Substack post by Ed Zitron titled: “Office and Company Culture Are Bullshit”.?

The notion that company culture is B.S. because it’s a tool for corporate power/leverage masquerading as principle or ethos – is not crazy talk.?Examples abound.?Cynicism is warranted.?Before arriving at Marketplace Events in 2003, I experienced it firsthand.?

But the article generated significant, visceral anxiety within me, because in my role as CEO me and our senior managers have believed in and invested significant energy in creating a company culture.?How significant an investment??Almost 20 years towards building an environment where consistent values are held up and embraced.?

The dominant thought as I read (and re-read) Zitron’s article: what if the idea of “company culture” is truly B.S.??Have I been deluding myself for decades??Worse, have I been deluding others for decades?

With our company facing its existential crises, this was, in the moment, a bit terrifying.?Because for sure we were going to find out if our investment in culture would mean anything, and soon.?It was binary: meaningful culture, we survive and our efforts are validated.?Culture as bullshit, we don’t survive and we are proven wrong and perhaps something worse: naive.

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Fast forward 10 months…

By Sunday night, April 11, 2022, the employees of Marketplace Events (aka MPE, North America’s largest producer of consumer trade shows) accomplished something amazing: successfully completing 71 indoor events during the pandemic (22 in Fall 2021 and 49 in Spring 2022) and returning the company from what can only be described as a financial near-death experience to profitability.?

A staff reduced by nearly 40% produced the nearly the same volume of work as pre-pandemic.

We had our answer.?This could not have happened if company culture was bullshit.

There’s no way for me as CEO to do justice in this space to the sustained excellence of effort our people put forward to achieve this result.?Suffice to say it’s best described as an extraordinary and extended (nearly 40 weeks) display of selflessness and professionalism during arguably the most uncertain and volatile times our society has seen in our lifetimes.

This company has achieved monumental successes over recent decades.?But none of them compare to what our people have achieved these past 40 or so weeks.?Not even close.

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Pre-pandemic, 150+ MPE employees were brilliantly executing show sales and production for 77 events, and growing.?Our company was a flywheel of forward activity and profitability.?

On March 15, 2020, Covid-19 put a stop to all that.?It wasn’t a soft landing.?It was a terminal velocity event – a financial vaporization.?Revenue was gone.?The expenses stayed.?The non-negotiable reality was until mass gatherings were OK’d by health officials, MPE had no business.?Literally, no business.?

Thankfully, our lenders understood this was not the company’s doing and were quick to rally around us, providing a strong financial safety net and full support.?We could pay our bills, but for the foreseeable future not our debt obligations.?So, we had to reorganize.?Preserving cash became an exceedingly important priority.

On April 3, 2020, we announced massive furloughs – all employees but for a skeleton crew of 19 people.?The fact we extended and paid in full the employee health benefits during furlough (the right thing to do during a pandemic) was little solace.?Closing 12 of our 14 North American offices was numbing.?For a company that greatly values face-to-face communication, it was horrific all this had to be communicated facelessly over a conference call (we weren’t Zoom or Teams users yet).

I always use simple lists of talking points for calls, meetings, presentations.?But not that day.?For the only time in my career I prepared a script. I wanted to be sure I had thought through every word and didn’t want to ad lib.?Here’s how I finished the call:

To get personal, I miss you all and desperately miss our company as we used to know it before the pandemic.?Just 23 days ago no one could have imagined us taking the steps we have today.?The past three weeks are unlike any before.?Our world has been turned upside down.?Like it or not, our fault or not, we have to adapt.

On behalf of Marketplace Events, I apologize for the furloughs.?They weigh very heavily on me and our management team and investors. Right now, I don’t expect anyone to understand, but we are trying to ensure the company’s future and your future.?If we have broken your trust in this moment, I can only hope we might have a chance to regain it again in the weeks and months ahead.?

Let me close by saying I can’t wait for the day – hopefully soon – where I send the email saying, “We need you, come back, please!”?Until then, thank you, and please stay safe.

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Fast forward to today – 740 days later.?Marketplace Events is back to 110 employees, with more to come.?Of that, 93% were with MPE pre-pandemic.?That statistic encapsulates the greatest satisfaction of my working life.

Many of you may read this and think: they must pay really well.?For sure we strive to offer a fair and competitive compensation package, but certainly not over-the-top.?We’ve had some people leave for higher paying jobs only to return. For them, highest pay doesn’t always reflect the best payback.

I should also mention we strive for work/life balance but our business is seasonal; when in season our people can be stretched to their limits.?Many are on show site for multiple 12-hour days and work multiple shows per year.?It’s hard work.?And yet our people decided to return.

I’d like to think our people deciding to return (when other jobs are plentiful) has something to do – however defined - with our company culture.?Culture probably is bullshit at most companies where the sentiment doesn’t match how it feels to employees when they go to work every day.?It isn’t bullshit at MPE because it isn’t bullshit.?We believe it.?We live it at all levels.?And that’s how we treat each other.

No one knows how MPE’s culture evolves in a post-pandemic world, especially without our physical office structure.?Ultimately, if our people want our culture to continue to be meaningful, then together we will adapt and culture will remain an essential part of how we do what we do.?

People don’t stick with an organization and its managers if the culture is bullshit.?For MPE and many other companies, culture is real because something about the company – the people attracted to it, the work it does, the way it operates – provides more than just a paycheck balanced on a wobbly framework of corporate blah-blah.?

Somehow at least a part of the experience becomes a community.

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It’s easy to find MPE’s core values on our website.?I didn’t write them, a large group of our people did.?They incorporate the words love, commitment, trust, promise, accountability, communicate, teamwork, respect and well-being.?The idea is not complicated: these are values that make our human experiences rich.?By extension, if we strive (albeit imperfectly) to achieve these values in our work, our business experiences may be rich as well.

As I said above, so far these values have endured the most drastic of existential challenges.?I can’t quantify the cultural impact, other than it is unimaginable to me that our company could have survived our near death experience without a collective belief MPE was something worth saving.?The only way to accomplish that circled directly back to our core values.

Two steps forward, one step back.?If an organization can regularly sustain that – and retain engaged employees – I’d say that’s pretty good evidence of more culture than B.S.

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A final thought on bullshit.?

This little book (67 pages) by Harry Frankfurt (Princeton University, 2005) might be the best ever written on the subject of B.S.?

Frankfurt writes:

“It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth.?Producing bullshit requires no such conviction…He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it.?He pays no attention to it at all.?By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are…The fact about himself that the bullshitter hides is that the truth-values of his statements are of no central interest to him…however studiously and conscientiously the bullshitter proceeds, it remains true that he is also trying to get away with something.”

There but by the grace of whatever you believe in, go all of us.

Tom Baugh, CEO, Marketplace Events