Get a Guinness, Together

Togetherness Matters

St. Patrick’s Day is one of my favorite holidays. It’s a wonderful day to have an excuse to have fun. Our daughters love getting dressed up in their green and there’s a little leprechaun, Laddie, that is akin to the springtime Eddie the Elf that will appear in our house. It’s a fun holiday as a kid, in your teens, in college, in your twenties, then back in parenthood as the merry-go-round of life oscillates.

This week marks the five year anniversary of Insight Global going from a pre-COVID work environment to a post-COVID world. March 17th, 2020 - St. Patrick’s Day, was a Tuesday. The week prior, our CEO, Bert Bean, shared with the company that they were going to work from home due the pandemic, but our executive team took Monday to take inventory on issues and Tuesday. We decided we should hunker shown and work from home there on out. It was eerie. I had spent ten years at a company that was known for its energy, bright smiles and friendships where work and life relationships know little separation. But this day the halls were empty. The silence was deafening.

My boss, our President Tim Stutz, called me as I was loading my monitors and docking station into my car at the end of the day.

“Don’t leave quite yet, there’s one more thing we need to talk about before we leave.”

I came back upstairs, to see him grinning, docking station under one arm and a six pack of Guinness under the other.

“Happy Birthday Big Guy. We can’t pack up and say goodbye without a Guinness on St. Patrick’s Day.”

A few of us sat, laughed (laced with a little fear) at how crazy this felt and postured on the wide range of outcomes this thing could have. But we were together, and we were having a cold Guinness on St. Patrick’s Day. The normalcy was the togetherness in the time of uncertainty.

Five years later, the majority of big companies are evaluating their in-office policies. This week Insight Global announced that we are amending our in-office policy to 4 days a week (M-Th) from 3 days a week. We grew top-line and bottom-line last year, amidst pull-back in our industry. We are overperforming by almost all standards. So why make the change? Productivity, yes. Empirical data shows the gap in WFH compared to in-office. Development, clearly. We hire entry level and only promote from within, meaning we need close proximity to learn, train, teach and pivot. Delivery, also improves. We are a services business, serving customers, candidates and consultants and our ability to deliver for them is best in person.

But I don’t remember what skills I developed the week of 2020 when we were facing the pandemic. I don’t remember how productive our team was the week prior, nor do I remember any major wins or losses in delivery to customers. What I do remember that week was the Togetherness in that demanding time.

Togetherness is the antonym to loneliness and isolation.

With togetherness, you feel an ambient level of support persistent at all times. With togetherness, you feel a level of trust created by the transparency of proximity. With togetherness, you feel humility and confidence in knowing your flaws are exposed, as are your peers, where they are normalized and agreed that they aren’t things to be hidden but rather areas to grow in. With togetherness, you spend the time and cycles to build real trust. With togetherness, fun happens. With togetherness, you can experience the win of a teammate and experience it as your own.

Time. Trust. Humility. Fun. Growth. Winning. A recipe for true relationships. But how do you measure it?

Togetherness and relationships are hard to quantify in dollars and cents. Few sales or financial KPIs can measure the togetherness. That’s OK. Maybe as business leaders we should measure them differently. Maybe the real value of togetherness is the quantifiable non-business events. Maybe it’s in champagne bottles and milestone balloons bought. Maybe it’s the number of Instagram posts in-office celebrating a colleague. However you quantify it, I promise you that it is worth it. So measure the moments:

-????????? Buy the birthday cake

-????????? Decorate the desk for the new hire

-????????? Bring the balloons for the $10k/$15k, contests and so on (lots of balloons)

-????????? Break the wooden boards for the quarterly goals

-????????? Share the post

-????????? Pull the office prank on your sales manager

-????????? Get breakfast near the office

-????????? Help with the presentation and the pitch

-????????? Stay late for the role plays

-????????? Laugh about the cold call hangups

-????????? Do the 5 a.m. workouts as a team

-????????? Grab a coffee when your colleague needs the reset

-????????? Bring the tissues when the sale goes south

-????????? Light a fire on a Friday night

-????????? Cut out early when the team hits a big milestone

-????????? Give a shoulder on the breakups

-????????? Throw the engagement parties

-????????? Go to the bachelor(ette) parties

-????????? Dance at the weddings

-????????? Wear pink and blue to the baby showers

-????????? Take the vacations together

-????????? Coordinate kids play-dates

-????????? Compete at Field Day

-????????? Commit to the service days

-????????? Attend the funerals

-????????? Get a Guinness on St. Patrick’s Day. Together

If the path to being great in sales and recruiting is a thousand little things that you focus on in your craft, the path to being great at culture might just be the thousand little moments you accumulate throughout your career.

Cherish those moments, togetherness matters.

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