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The Siete Family Foods website, like most corporate websites, features its founders. But it also shows almost all of the company’s 98 employees with photos of children and “two truths and one lie” for each. All staff would be listed, but Siete is growing too fast to keep up: it added more than 30 employees during the pandemic, including three this month.
Visitors have to decide whether Veronica Garza, who founded the grain-free packaged food brand with her brother Miguel and mother Aida, is lying about being a singer in a band, running three marathons, or beating herself during a national cheerleading competition to hand over. (She didn’t run the marathons.)
The company wants its customers to know the team and the team to know each other like family. Which is reasonable considering that much of the pre-pandemic staff was the Garza family, including parents, siblings, and in-laws.
“We are a first, second and third company,” said Miguel Garza, the managing director.
But it became harder to build that family culture during the pandemic as people worked remotely. Growing companies like Siete are struggling to find ways to make new hires feel like they are part of the company when they can’t meet in person. How do you get to know the corporate culture without clues from the office environment and existing systems?
The problem faces both small and large businesses, although it may be more acute for small businesses that may lack human resources or a clear corporate culture. And it will likely get more difficult as the delta variant of the coronavirus puts back-to-office plans on hold and hybrid work structures become permanent. A National Bureau of Economic Research working paper states that at least 20% of Americans’ working days would be from home, even after the pandemic.
At Siete, the Garzas took a hint from their website and developed a game. New employees are given a bingo card detailing the current employees’ hidden talents and stories and asked to video calls with those employees until they click “Bingo”.
“It’s just fun. It’s even fun for people who are already on the team, ”said Miguel Garza. (He likes rom-coms and Frank Sinatra, but he doesn’t see live music every weekend.)
Prior to the pandemic, employees at the Austin, TX office would often cook, eat, and exercise together. Knowing the importance of fitness to the team, Siete bought the staff kettlebells, dumbbells, or a TRX system, and Garza started doing zoom workouts.
Good health is also a reason for the company’s origins. When Veronica Garza was diagnosed with autoimmune diseases, she began a grain-free diet to combat them. Her entire family joined her and they quickly realized that there was no good substitute for the tortillas and other Mexican dishes that they love.
“Going grain-free is really isolating, especially in a culture where food is so important,” said Miguel Garza.
Veronica Garza experimented with an almond flour tortilla. When their grandmother declared it as good as the original, the two siblings and their mother decided to start Siete. That was seven years ago; Today the brand is sold in 16,000 stores, including Whole Foods and Kroger, and expects sales of $ 200 million this year.
Of course, corporate cultures strong enough to handle remote and hybrid work are as diverse as companies. There is a baseline, however: standardized offer letters, clear payroll and benefits information, and a solid employee handbook, said Tolithia Kornweibel, chief revenue officer at Gusto, a payroll and benefits company that serves small and medium-sized businesses.
But these things are not enough, especially in a tight job market, she said. “You really have to make sure that the experience is warm and very human.”
(Emil Lippe | The New York Times) Miguel and Veronica Garza, co-founders with their mother of Siete Family Foods, on August 14, 2021 in Austin, Texas. Growing companies like Siete have struggled to find new employees who feel part of the business when they can’t meet in person.
Josh Albrechtsen hired Gusto when he found he couldn’t handle all of the fast-growing paperwork for Cortex Health, the company he co-founded in Lehi, UT. In March 2020, the company had 15 employees and 400 self-employed nurses nationwide; a year later it had 500 employees in addition to these contractors.
Prior to the pandemic, Cortex signed contracts with hospitals and other customers to provide nurses to follow up on newly discharged patients. It was a perfect niche to expand nationwide to meet nursing needs, contact tracing, follow-up care, and vaccine information.
“We hired so quickly that we couldn’t even say hello,” said Albrechtsen. “For most nurses, we went from ‘offering’ to ‘working’ within a day or two. We just sent people in shifts. “
He tried to use DocuSign to manage the hiring but quickly found that he was not an expert on compliance and cross-border settings. He needed someone who could easily hire team members, manage benefits, and answer payroll questions.
The attitude of Gusto freed Albrechtsen to focus on the Cortex culture, which he defines as kindness; clear, consistent communication; and an “efficiency thinking”. He quickly decentralized authority and hired a full-time employee to oversee the nurses. This person quickly identified other leaders and empowered them to make decisions.
“She turned out to be that rock star,” said Albrechtsen. “We realized that we have a future manager.”
Teams use the Slack messaging platform to communicate quickly, and Cortex staff its channels around the clock so a manager is always available to answer urgent questions from caregivers. The company has developed survey systems and community management tools to find out what teams need in real time.
The urgency of those first few months has subsided and the hiring of staff has slowed, but Cortex’s full-time staff is not shrinking. Employees are focused on selling the software and recruiting platform to healthcare companies that need the tools and services Cortex developed during the pandemic. Another big change: you are leaving the office; Cortex is now 100% virtual.
“COVID has completely changed the way we think,” said Albrechtsen. “Our employees were a lot more productive from home.”
Productivity has become a polarizing issue. Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix, famously called remote work a “pure negative.” Online rating service Digital.com recently surveyed 1,500 small business owners, and nearly half said employee productivity fell during the pandemic.
Working in certain industries such as retail and hospitality must be personal; in others, like manufacturing, remote working can be accomplished with creative problem solving. The key, said Adam Bry, CEO and co-founder of the drone manufacturer Skydio, is building a culture of self-determination and accountability at a high level.
Skydio set up a system where a hardware engineer would pick up parts at the office, assemble them, and then drive them to someone else and leave the product there. Software engineers connected over the Internet – like remote screen sharing in an office – to work on the code.
“We did really crazy things,” said Bry. “We noticed that many employees have a home laboratory and work on these things as a hobby.”
He gave employees autonomy to try new ideas and his job was to make sure they had everything they need to perform well. And he’s been rewarded: During the pandemic, Skydio more than doubled its workforce to nearly 300 employees and achieved a $ 1 billion valuation after raising $ 170 million in funding under the leadership of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
Still, Bry wanted to find ways to keep the team connected. In the early days of the pandemic, that meant having some fun. He rented a drive-in theater near their Redwood City, California office and screened the 2013 science fiction film Gravity.
“We love things that fly, so we went to see an aviation movie,” said Bry.
More recently, he has wanted team building and events that are in harmony with the company’s values. For example, the drone industry is male, so Bry held a “women’s flying day” and invited the women at Skydio to spend a day drone flying on a beach. The company then offered additional training to every participant interested in registering as a drone pilot. Two thirds of the participants took him in.
More and more people are returning to the office, but Bry has decided that Skydio will always offer a hybrid work environment. Many meetings remain digital so that participants can attend regardless of their location.
“Many of us have felt the benefit of quiet, focused time that can be difficult to come by in an office setting,” said Bry.
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