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

by Richard Sheridan

We hold most of our conversations where we sit because I want my team members to hear my client interactions. They care about our customers as much as I do, and they might have important data to add to the discussion.

These closed meeting rooms send a powerful message: if you’re on the wrong side of the door, you don’t have the authority to participate in this discussion. It says, “You don’t matter as much as I do.” Menlonians should not feel left out of these conversations.

Our Lunch ’n Learns have also become community affairs. If someone outside the company catches wind of an interesting Lunch ’n Learn we are holding, we invite that person to attend. We share a glass wall with TechArb, the University of Michigan’s student start-up incubator, and students there know they are free to confer with us whenever they feel the need. If a Lunch ’n Learn comes up on a technical topic such as unit testing for iPhone apps and we know some of those student teams are working on iPhone apps, we’ll be sure to invite them. It’s a good way to expand the base of people who know us and know our story. And you never know what value they might bring as well.

While that probably happens, the one day I tagged along I saw that they stayed in their pairs and talked about the story card they were working on. This is yet another example of casual but supportive and constructive conversation.

For the whole company, we discovered that none of us—including me, the CEO—clearly understood our overall financial performance until we displayed revenue, expenses, and profits on a simple wallboard display for everyone to see and understand. If we kept this important information as electronic documents stored on a password-protected server, no one would ever look at them. If it was printed on office paper and cataloged in a standard binder on the shelf, no one but the most obsessive team member would ever pull the book off the shelf and bring it into a team conversation about a design idea.

“If I want to just keep doing what I’m doing in my current job, I’ll stay there,” he said. “I heard you had these cool new Java projects going on. I want to learn new things.”

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

folding photocopies of the task cards to the size of the estimate for that task. A 5½-by-8½-inch copy would mean that that task card would require sixteen hours of work. That same card folded in half would mean eight hours would be needed for that task. This card folded in half again would indicate four hours, and one more fold, two hours. A thirty-two-hour card would be taped to a full-size sheet of paper, making it twice as big as a sixteen-hour card. Easy to create, easy to understand. We then created tabloid-size planning sheets with an inscribed box that could hold forty hours’ worth of folded cards. Our product manager picked up the folded cards and placed them inside the inscribed box. He could place up to forty hours of task card time on the sheet—but no more.

To truly run an experiment, you need to try something out more than once, because at first—no matter what you try—it will probably be bumpy.

If we burn out our team two years into a seven-year project, they will still keep coming to work every day—they just won’t bring their brains with them.

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.

In my experience, there’s no replacement for a live, in-person company, with all members working in the same physical location. Being in the same space, with the sounds of your peers all around, greatly increases the possibility of innovation and collaboration. No advanced video conferencing system has gotten to the point where it’s on par with being in the same physical location as the rest of your team.

“They’d start to pad their estimates,” he said. “The project managers would catch this and start trimming estimates based on this padding. The team would start lying about actually being done, and then quality would start to go down the drain. Suddenly, we’d have all kinds of support problems and a demoralized team where no one trusted anyone. You’d have at Menlo exactly what we have here at our company.”

Jen and I tried to interrupt the system, but we couldn’t. Even the CEO and the client couldn’t budge the accountability measure set in place. Ours is the only system we’ve found that enforces and supports accountability without fear, ambiguity, or intimidation. Most accountability breaks down when existing systems are ignored or worked around to get the real work done.

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.

“align the world’s outside perception of your company with your inside reality.”

what we call a “leveraged play.” In this practice, we offer our clients up to a 50 percent cash deferral on our invoices in exchange for equity in our client’s company or royalty in the product we are helping them bring to market.

Ongoing royalties from previous work amount to around 15 percent of our annual revenue.

At Menlo, you don’t get promotions by sucking up to your manager, working extra hours, gaining hero status, or threatening to leave (as I’ve experienced elsewhere). You have to earn them. In fact, it is your peers who determine if you have earned them.

Would you let an outside visitor—let alone a reporter—sit in on your most confidential meetings? Would you be open to letting them hear you discuss budget concerns, staffing issues, personnel disagreements? If not, this points to the existence of certain practices and values you wish to hide from others, since they don’t align with how you want the world to think about your culture. Instead of hiding your culture, change it. Our

Our reviews are peer reviews organized by the team member wishing to get feedback. Currently, we have three different pay grades at each of five different levels (Associate, Consultant, Senior Consultant, Principal, and Senior Principal). Our challenge is to figure out a more consistent approach that feels fair and is understandable to everyone.

Good problems are good problems for the first five minutes, and then they just feel like regular problems until you solve them.

You can always book the conference room yourself for those truly private conversations. I’m guessing you will be amazed at how few there are. If you are having a lot of private conversations, there is likely something else amiss with your team that requires deeper attention.

When certain books become wildly popular at Menlo, we start ordering them in quantity. Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team and Getting Naked are two of our most reordered books. We have many copies of The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman, as well as The Inmates Are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper. Others that have been longtime hits are Creativity at Work by Jeff DeGraff and Katherine Lawrence, and Pine and Gilmore’s Experience Economy. My personal favorites are anything produced by the team at Zingerman’s, including Ari Weinzweig’s Zingerman’s Guide to Giving Great Service along with his more recent series, Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading.

Our checkout policy is simple: take a book and keep it as long as you need it. Bring it back when you’re done.

If the reader finds real value in the book, we encourage them to hold a Lunch ’n Learn. Of course, this means that we all get even more value from the book, including the presenter.