My 20-year Report: Finding our Happy Place
Jason Steed
Owner & CEO
My 20-year Report: Finding our Happy Place
Look, even our logo got a little happier!
Since opening Targa Media’s doors 20 years ago, I have given highest attention to the human aspect of business. In this post I will touch a little on company culture, but I’ll emphasize a few basic practices that have provided an unmistakable environment for trust, camaraderie, and yes…good old happiness. ;-]
Happiness and “team-focused” behaviors
In a breath, workplace happiness is all about recognizing the right behaviors. Caveat: The right behavior isn’t the same for everybody. Oh snap, this is going to take some time and attention! To help carve away the layers on that statement, I’ll elaborate with my only credible evidence: 20 years of personal experience.
Does the workplace even need to be a happy place? Taleen at the office pointed me just this week to a sound bite from Simon Sinek (source) who stated that we used to be able to gripe about the grind with friends after hours, serving as our prominent path to find bond and balance. But a deliberate shift has taken place due to the jarring post-COVID shift of our work environment and after-work social structure. Bottom line: Today there absolutely needs to be a sense of belonging and well-being during the span of our working days.
Behaviors that Promote Creativity
In our staff, I strive to recognize individual qualities. One employee might be adept at enabling more creativity from coworkers. Another might excel at helping to build trust among the staff. Somebody might have the skills to look out for the best interests of their team. Others might have the skills to be teachable and motivated. Maybe you spotted a trend—all of these items are much more about team collaboration than individual performance. This becomes much more clear when I describe the behaviors that I don’t reward.
Bringing a Smile to Teamwork
Individual productivity is not the prize. It’s also not the pathway to a happy workplace. In a separate blog post I talk about fiscal productivity as the culprit for contention and a useless measurement for collective morale. To summarize, I enacted a Productivity Perks program in 2014 that looked not at percentage of billable hours but rather at extra-mile efforts to nurture camaraderie, creativity and gratitude. Efforts such as these “soft metric” contributions can often fly under the radar, making it hard to recognize and nurture. But for as long as I can remember as an entrepreneur and employer, I have sought daily to discern, recognize and help perpetuate these qualities. Admittedly, I’m sometimes hit and miss. I suspect I’ll be working at recognizing and refining these soft metrics for many years to come.
Job titles make for squishy rewards. Instead, I prefer to look at talents and capabilities that encourage teamwork. To distinguish between these, a job title is something that is manifested from employer to employee, whereas talents and capabilities are manifested from employee out to their work circles. In essence, we’re creating “team titles,” along with a little help from our clients.
I love the good that comes from our collective creativity. Individually, we can come up with great ideas. However, our team authors a powerful “collective” creative portfolio. In this model, our clients benefit from far more effective marketing campaigns. When we huddle, our team is so much more vibrant and creative than the sum of our individual parts.
I don’t pay my gratitude solely through salary. It’s both vital to employee engagement and innately important to me personally that I applaud in ways beyond monetary salaries and bonuses. Although money is a powerful tool in showing value, it is only a part of the formula. If it were only about money, I wouldn’t be able to afford any of my talented staff. I happily shoulder the attentive tasks of finding non-monetary ways to recognize and reward our team. I’ll speak on this more specifically in a later blog post.
I don’t recognize staff for allegiance to our company vision. We’re all individual, and as a business owner I recognize that I have a lot more skin in this game than other team members. To be clear, we still must all share a common loyalty to the moral and humanistic rules that let us feel secure, valued, and respected. The motivators that ready each of us for the workday are always personalized to our individual goals and trajectories. In fact, it’s actually the variety of these individual motivators that propel our firm’s mission and vision statements. I want each of my employees to be “all in” far more for each other than for me.
“In a breath, workplace happiness is all about recognizing the right behaviors. Caveat: The right behavior isn’t the same for everybody.”
Five Humble yet Happy Workplace Tactics:
Though always in flux, here are a few of our current programs and practices that help to promote a happier workplace:.
- “Best weekend” report: Just a casual top-of-week catch up on each of our weekend events. Simple, but a great way to set the stage for the week. I confess that my weekend adventures seldom top the leaderboard.
- Daily virtual/physical face-to-face status huddles with the entire staff. I’m grateful that our company size allows us to logistically accomplish this each and every day. Taleen, our Chief Program Manager, started this practice as a sanity check during deep COVID 2020, and it stuck! Whether on a daily or weekly cadence, businesses would be well-served to adopt a comparable “everybody in” policy.
- We utilize “full team” Google Chats, and we discuss both work-related and non-work-related topics. Just as importantly, we respect team members taking the day off with custom exclusion Chat lists.
- Open door policy – My management team and I always keep our office doors open, other than for the occasional video call when the office volume is up.
- I share client feedback—both the wins and the losses—with the creatives who lead the project, as well as the whole staff. In this way, I believe we can better one another. Furthermore, it’s our chance to show clients how unified we are as a team on their behalf.
