Interview with Josh Allan Dykstra, fouder of #lovework

Why is company culture so important?

I believe that there is now more conversation about company culture than there was five years ago. This is a positive development overall. However, there is still a lot of misunderstanding about what company culture actually is. A few years ago, I wrote an article about this for a magazine called Culturati. Here’s the link if you and your readers are interested.

My article suggested that we should ignore the idea of culture and focus on the operating system instead. I believe that the best way to think about company culture is as an operating system on your computer. This metaphor can help us understand that there are rules in the background of every organization that determine how things work. For example, there are rules about how employees should talk to customers and colleagues.

Thinking of company culture as an operating system can give us more agency to improve it. We can think about how to upgrade this operating system to improve how we work together. In contrast, culture can be complex and hard to understand.

The operating system of a computer or phone is important because it runs everything and dictates how things work. Similarly, the operating system of an organization is important because things won't work without it. This is why company culture is so important.

However, there is still ambiguity when people speak about culture because everyone has a different understanding of what it means.

What happens if the culture is not defined clearly??

If it's not made explicitly clear, people will make stuff up. They will tell their own story in their head about what the culture is. They tell their own story about what your values are. So we need to make these things really explicit and clear and repeated for people to really understand and embody them.

Is it possible to build a company culture in 5 minutes a day through spaced repetition?

The #lovework app makes it really simple to build company culture in just five minutes a day. This is what #lovework is known for and it's part of its magic.

In many ways, five minutes a day is the only way to do this. It's through repetition and reinforcing cultural norms in little ways that happen frequently. This is what really matters, not team offsites that happen once a year.

It's how we talk to each other in emails, on Slack, and in every conversation we have with colleagues. This is what makes up our culture and what makes it real. Therefore, the only way to build and maintain a strong company culture is to do it in small, frequent doses.

Let's imagine a hypothetical situation where I am a barista. Just to clarify, the company I work for uses your software, #lovework , and I will be receiving five-minute tasks every day. Could you please elaborate a bit on these tasks?

Over the last five years, we have decoded what you need to do to build a more positive, inclusive, diverse, welcoming, and psychologically safe culture.

Our belief is that it's similar to learning how to play an instrument or learning how to play sports. If you want to learn how to play the piano, for example, you need to understand the keys, notes, scales, pedals, and so on. There are certain things you need to practice to be able to play the piano.

Likewise, we believe there are certain things you need to practice in order to learn the skill of loving work and build a positive company culture. And yes, you can learn how to do it.

So, to answer your question, what you'll be doing in those five minutes a day is a practice that your entire team will also be doing at the same time. You'll be doing it personally, but your team will be doing it too. It's like doing a workout at the gym with your team. You're going to do your daily workout five minutes a day, but your team's going to do it with you, so it feels like you're all in this together. That's a really important part of it.

What role does energy play at work?

One of the things you'll be doing is noticing something that energizes you at work. Often, we spend a lot of time at work complaining about all the negative things that drain us. However, we may not be as aware of the things that bring us energy, such as certain activities, meetings, or people. Noticing these energizing moments is a core part of the #lovework approach.

To make it simple for you, we provide an assessment that gives you some labels and categories. You can use these to identify the things that energize you. Then, you can check in on the app and share with your team. For instance, you may say, "I just had a moment of creative brainstorming that was super energizing for me." This way, your team can learn about you and you can reinforce this new habit.

While the mechanism is straightforward, repetition is key. We need to keep practicing this instrument to play it better.

As far as I know, there are programs for employees, teams and leaders. What is the difference?

Individuals commit to doing five minutes of daily practice, regardless of their position. However, team members are required to do the workout together. This applies to everyone, from the CEO to the front line. In addition to individual practice, teams of 10-15 people are encouraged to participate in a weekly 15-minute huddle. A video is provided for the team to watch, which lasts 2-3 minutes. Afterward, a discussion question is provided for the team to discuss for about 15 minutes before moving on to the rest of the meeting.

For team leaders and managers, an extra hour per month is allocated for training and support. Leaders will watch a video alongside other leaders who are also using the #lovework program with their teams. This additional hour of support is aimed at helping leaders navigate the complexities of leading a group of people.

How to promote those new policies in a very non-violent way? There are different types of work culture and I'm pretty sure that at some workplaces, people can still be very old-fashioned and strict. So do you have any guidelines and recommendations?

There are certainly plenty of old-fashioned organizations out there. The reality is that they're probably not hiring us at this point, so we don't worry about them too much. We're focused on early adopters and people who believe that culture matters and that there's something important about people science in understanding how to help your people work better, be better, and support them better. We're looking for leaders and organizations like that and don't worry too much about those who aren't quite on that train yet.

Moving on, I saw that your company has very principled ideas and beliefs. Could you please elaborate a little on the differences between what you bring and what other companies in the HR tech sphere bring to the table?

There's a lot of good stuff out there, and technology is increasingly entering the HR space to help us deal with all the complex people and culture issues. However, like you, we haven't really seen anything quite like what we're offering.

What we believe sets us apart is that organizations are currently employing two types of solutions to help their people. The first falls into the event-based bucket, such as team or leadership off-sites, or bringing in a speaker for a division. The other category is what we call learning solutions, like learning management systems or LinkedIn Learning, which can have valuable insights but require users to search through a vast amount of content to find what's relevant to them.

While both solutions can be inspiring, they lack the critical component of continuous learning and ongoing habit formation. That's where we come in, offering a unique approach to help organizations cultivate continuous learning and training for their employees.

What are some of the drawbacks of current HR-tech solutions?

From our perspective, the current solutions addressing problems like how to help people work better, feel more engaged, feel less burned out, and feel more psychologically safe, all have a fatal flaw. There is almost always a "now what" question. For instance, if I attend a team offsite, it's great, but what do I do next? Similarly, if I watch a great video on LinkedIn Learning, now what? This flaw is prevalent in almost every initiative that aims to fix these problems. The question of how to keep it alive and ongoing arises, and it's a problem that #lovework is designed to solve.

And #lovework is aimed at solving the "now what" problem, which is how to move from information to habit formation. It's like football; footballers don't train in a four-hour workshop once a year. Similarly, it's not feasible to be a world-class footballer and get all your training in a four-hour workshop once a year. That's complete craziness. However, this is how things are approached in the corporate environment. That’s why #lovework aims to move from information, which can be great, to habit formation.

Consistency and implementation are crucial for building a habit, and this is where #lovework comes in. It's not just about companies; it's about personal experience too. It really works.

I have watched your TedX Talk and you say that it's very important to find one's strengths in order to be able to apply those at the work we do. So how do we find our strengths?

We believe that what's important about a strength is not only that you're good at it, but that it also makes you feel strong. You can be very good at things that suck the life out of you, and that is not something to build your career on. You might be able to do them well, but don't build your career on it if you don't actually get energy from it. So, when you think about strengths, think about things that make you feel strong and energized in your work.

If we go off of that way of thinking, then it actually becomes easier to discover what these things are. We give people an assessment to help with this in the #lovework journey, but you can certainly figure this out yourself. You need to start paying attention, maybe in a slightly different way to what's happening inside your body when you do things. Your body will give you clues. You will feel like when you do those things, you like it. When you do those things, you feel tired or exhausted, or like you just want to quit and be done. So just start paying attention to those things. Your body is a really good energy detector. We're mostly trained to ignore it and just power through, but if you want to figure out what energizes you, pay attention to what energizes you and do more of that. Also, pay attention to what doesn't energize you, and try to do less of that.

Certain things capture you and your curiosity. All we're saying is to line up the work that you're doing with those things that capture your attention. The more you do that, the more natural engagement you get. You don't have to be coerced to feel engaged about those things. You already like that. It works out really well as an organizational philosophy because everybody's energized by slightly different things.

Are there any universal future-proof skills??

I do think that there are universal skills that may be useful for everyone to join the workforce of the future. Let's put it that way. We're seeing some consistent things coming out of the last decade or so of research, and I think we need more emotional intelligence and empathy.?

If you look at the research, there's a lot of consistency in this. We're understanding that the mechanical way of thinking about organizations and people that we used to have, whether it's Theory X versus Theory Y, is no longer enough. As we look towards the future, we need more awareness, empathy, and emotional intelligence. We talk about this as something called energy intelligence, which is a crucial skill for people to develop over the coming years. Understanding what powers and energizes you is a whole field of study that we believe is essential.

We're also seeing a consistent push towards self-leadership and self-management in organizations. People need to be more autonomous, even more so through the pandemic, with remote or hybrid work. There's more responsibility now to manage oneself and get work done. Skills around self-management, self-leadership, and behavior-based leadership are essential for anyone to be a leader. Those ideas are universal in terms of what we need from the workforce of tomorrow.