Joy, Inc.: How We Built a Workplace People Love

by Richard Sheridan

Joy is designing and building something that actually sees the light of day and is enjoyably used and widely adopted by the people for whom it was intended.

ways to connect with customers and end users in a real way by getting them directly involved with the work. In contrast, my team usually got information second- and thirdhand from the marketing team. We built software to its shadows-on-the-wall specifications, which were never entirely thought through and would change dramatically many times during the process. We never delivered what the market really needed.

I’ve come to realize that, in the face of a significant change initiative, emotional reactions fitting a standard bell curve will likely never create lasting change. You need the energy from the edges, not the middle.

As you consider your own aspirations for cultural change, don’t lose sight of how important it is to draw others into the energy and excitement.

In order to get others to accept change, you must recognize that any change involves tearing down existing reward systems, especially if those reward systems unintentionally foster and perpetuate pain-filled systems. If the change is to stick, you must quickly replace the old rewards with new rewards of equal or greater value (and remember, most treasured rewards are not monetary).

collaborative, on-the-fly learning is the basis of our competitive advantage. Through pairing, we give our team permission to learn.

What I have learned is that pairing is one of the most potent managerial tools I have ever discovered because of all the traditional problems it helps solve. Pairing fosters a learning system, builds relationships, eliminates towers of knowledge, simplifies onboarding of new people, and flushes out performance issues.

Visitors sometimes ask us how we can absorb the loss of productivity that pairing represents. Of course, there is no real loss, but tremendous gains as learning goes faster. Stuck people are quickly unstuck when their partner suggests a different approach. Quality soars with four eagle eyes on the screen, and we achieve a superior result in a shorter amount of time.

One of the key elements of a joyful culture is having team members who trust one another enough to argue.

The traditional interview process was always the same for me: two people sitting across from each other and lying to each other for two hours.

Freedom from fear requires feeling safe. If you feel safe, you run experiments. You stop asking permission. You avoid long, mind-numbing meetings. You create a new kind of culture in which you accept that mistakes are inevitable. You learn that small, fast mistakes are preferable to the big, slow, deadly mistakes you are making today.

We could always do something else if we really didn’t like how it worked out. Our team is willing to try an experiment if some members on the team are passionate about it. We don’t need to have full buy-in just to start an experiment. Another team member further reinforced this notion by saying we should do the same thing for at least two to three weeks in a row before making any judgments on how the experiment had gone.

“I’m not smart enough to have all the answers, and I’m willing to accept that my personal view may not be the right one.” In short, “I need your help.”

One classic fear scenario that has been repeated often at Menlo is when the customer brings the fear into the room. We all carry around this age-old mantra in our heads: The customer is always right. No, they’re not. In fact, the customer is seldom right. If the customer was always right, why would they need us?

At Menlo, we know the people who work the smartest and most conscientiously—who produce the best results for our clients—are people who know when to work and when to rest.

Legendary Michigan football coach Bo Schembechler once said that the hardest part of college football is graduating your top leaders every year, and the best part of college football is graduating your top leaders every year.

If this is part of Kristi’s dream and we try to get her to stay, what do we end up keeping? A team member with an unfulfilled dream, always wondering what could have been.

The one that resonates most with me for long-lasting team engagement is the ability to go to work and get meaningful things done. Not just started, talked about, or delegated, but actually done—finished, wrapped up, and delivered. It doesn’t matter how simple or hard the task or even whether you had to work longer hours to get there. Done releases endorphins, the body’s natural opiate, and it’s addictive. Done, when it really means done and behind you, leads to the joy of knowing that a hard day of work produced a valuable and valued accomplishment.