Building A Conscious Culture ft. Jennifer Christie, Chief People Officer @ Bolt
Authored by Joe Patalano
The secret is out. Companies more so now than ever recognize the impact that Chief People Officers bring to an organization, knowing that finding a people leader who is dynamic, mission driven and dedicated to building a Conscious Culture is the key to building a successful and meaningful business. Gone are the days of founders and operators looking to build a traditional HR function; there has been a seismic shift in the last 5 years which underscores the robust importance of people. This has required CPOs to become Chief Business Ambassadors, serving as the glue to an organization and driving change across leadership and employee experience.
People have become the number one currency for advancing a business, and as we say at Daversa, there are three things that define a company’s success. The people, the timing, and the idea. #1 (the people) accelerates the rest. If ‘people’ are a company’s number one asset, how do you achieve success across this function? It starts with building an intentional culture that reflects your entire employee base, giving every individual an opportunity to make a tangible impact.
Jennifer Christie, the Chief People Officer at Bolt, is someone we consider one of the great business and cultural influencers of today. Throughout her tenure Jennifer has driven DE&I at Amex, helped shape Twitter’s modern work environment, and is now spearheading the Conscious Culture initiative at Bolt (spoiler alert: this involves a 4-day workweek). Nonetheless, she has experienced what it is like to be at the forefront of the tech-wide push towards building a purposeful culture. In our next installment of SpotlightOn, Jennifer sits down to share her insights, accumulated expertise, and how Bolt’s emphasis on developing a Conscious Culture is paving the way for future generations.
What does company “culture” mean to you? In your opinion, how has the culture within Tech evolved over the last decade?
Culture is the personality of an organization — it’s the shared values and behaviors that are most prevalent in the way a company operates. It can be anything from how things get done, how people interact, what the expectations are, what the shared mindset is, etc. Sometimes the culture is created intentionally by a company, and oftentimes it happens organically when you bring an extraordinary group of individuals together.
I think one of the reasons why we’ve been talking a lot about culture over the last couple of years is because of the seismic shift that occurred within companies due to the pandemic.
Companies that weren’t as intentional about their culture and believed it ‘just happened’ when people were together in the same spaces found that they couldn’t replicate it when they were forced to operate remotely. In an in-person setting, employees are able to observe how the company operates, what the dynamic of their team is, and how the values are lived by leaders and employees. However, when thrust into this remote world, companies that previously assumed the culture would simply emerge just because people were around each other found it really challenging to maintain that cohesive culture.
Over the past couple of years, there has been a shift in companies intentionally driving their cultures in different directions. What are the challenges you see with companies trying to implement these changes?
When you’re in a remote setting and don’t have people seeing each other face-to-face, having the before- and after-meeting conversations, the serendipitous conversations in the hallway, the drive-bys, and so on, culture is harder to experience. I think that’s a big reason why we’re seeing a lot of burnout lately — companies are trying to make up for these in-person interactions the only way they know how — virtual meetings. Now you see employees scheduling a gazillion meetings a day and even starting their days earlier and ending later just so that they can connect with one another.
I do think that this has led to a big experiment over the course of the last couple of years. Executive leadership teams are asking themselves, what does company culture mean and how do you drive it? Rather than just expecting it to happen by virtue of people being in the same room and operating together.
Tech culture is especially interesting because the tech industry has always been known for having a culture of fast-moving innovation, but as many of these tech companies grow and mature, they are forced to slow down because with rapid expansion comes added layers of structure as well as policies and processes that didn’t exist before.
What does “conscious culture” mean to you, and how have you taken that to heart as you have implemented this kind of culture within Bolt?
Conscious Culture is really this balance between humanity and execution. We absolutely focus on our employees and what is right for them, like providing an environment that is fair and equitable, and making sure that their experience working for our company will allow them to grow and succeed in their careers. In return, we’re going to demand a lot because we are a company that is growing and doing what needs to be done in order to scale our business. Essentially, our goal is to be intentional both on the company front and the employee front — we will have a people first culture and give them the resources they need to succeed and they will contribute their time, talent and skills to help us achieve our goals.
Included in Bolt’s conscious culture initiative was the shift to a four-day workweek. In your mind, what have been the advantages and disadvantages of this new system?
For us, implementing the four-day workweek is our way of balancing humanity and execution. We were concerned about burnout. A lot of companies have seen their people unable to regulate their work schedules and environments, not taking PTO, not signing off at a reasonable hour, and so on, and that all catches up to them.
At Bolt, we saw how much time our employees were putting in while also following the overall trend of productivity and general satisfaction of our employees. We came to the conclusion that though our employees have the responsibility to produce, they also need to take care of themselves. Ryan Breslow, Founder and Executive Chairman of Bolt, came up with the idea of implementing a four-day workweek after reading an article about how having a condensed work period allows employees to focus only on tasks that are priority to them so that they can spend meaningful time to disconnect during their off-hours.
A four-day workweek was really a forcing function for us, where we told our employees to look at their calendars and be ruthless about how they spend their time. We gave them full permission to just slash and burn all of the extraneous, unnecessary meetings and tasks so they could buckle down on the things that are the highest priority and make the most out of those four days.
When we piloted it last year, we did find that our customer-facing teams had a little bit more of a challenge because their meetings were dependent on external partners, customers, and agencies. Our solution to that was to not mandate a certain day where employees can or cannot work, but give them the flexibility to shift their schedules as needed, and try to maintain that balance by condensing the time that they work so that they can still have this extra time off to focus on the things that fulfill them.
Do you think other companies will follow suit? How long do you think it would take the entire industry to adopt?
At Bolt, we focus on outcomes not hours. The message we’re trying to convey is: focus on what you want and what you need to achieve to have the biggest impact. Sometimes it’s going to be over 8 hours a day, sometimes it will be under, but the purpose isn’t to try to squeeze 5 days of work into 4 days. The purpose is really to be conscious and intentional about how we spend our time.
A simple thing that we asked of our managing teams was to communicate clear timelines. Sometimes a manager will give an employee a task and they do everything to grind it out within the day, and then find out that it won’t be looked at until the week after. The message wasn’t clearly communicated, but it can be as easy as, let’s focus and be intentional about the things we need now and the things that we need a week from now, and prioritize based on that.
Implementing a condensed work week may seem like a radical thought, but it reminds me of the genesis of remote work. Prior to Bolt, I was at Twitter where we were implementing remote work long before COVID started. A lot of the pushback we got from managers was because they thought their teams could never work remotely, and their work needed to be performed in an office under direct supervision of a manager. Then COVID hit and lo and behold — everyone figured it out.
In the same way, I believe that there’s going to be a forcing function, such as employees demanding this kind of a functional work week because they see other companies making it possible. I don’t think this is a bigger hill to climb than everyone working remotely, honestly. It’s just change — it’s just a change people are going to need to go through, and until people are forced into a situation where they need to do it, they’re not going to lean in and figure it out.
How can fast-growing companies instill this kind of culture? What needs to be done?
The most important thing is to grow intentionally. Many companies who are in the growth phase are focused too intently on the volume of hiring vs than the quality of the people they are bringing into the organization. Growing a company is not a matter of checking a box, it’s about bringing in the right people that fit the culture and propel the business forward.
At Bolt, and like most companies, we have aggressive hiring goals, but we are willing to be flexible with the numbers to ensure that the people joining are the best at what they do so we maintain a high bar for performance. In turn, we will invest back in our people by providing flexibility and opportunities to grow and develop. We want to stay fast and nimble, and we need our employees to have a certain urgency and hunger to do the work.
What does the future of culture throughout Tech look like?
I feel like there has been a merging of cultures, not just within tech, but across all industries, and the pandemic has served as the great equalizer in that. Pre-pandemic, tech was one of the few industries that allowed its employees to do things like work remotely, but now we’re in a place where there’s more of a level playing field across industries. Employees have certain expectations regarding work culture that they can demand their employers meet. With this shift into a more employee-driven market, most people out there can be very selective about where they go and how they spend their time, and they interview companies just as much as companies interview them.
Going back to Conscious Culture, I believe that if companies are specific and intentional about what they offer their employees and what they expect of their employees, they will be the ones that have the best growth trajectories. At the end of the day, companies are here for a reason — they have numbers they need to hit and goals they must achieve. If they don’t have that transparent connection with their employees about what they will give and what they expect in return, they will struggle to achieve those goals.
What are some of the key takeaways from your professional journey, as you transitioned from one company to the next, specifically in regards to the shifts in culture?
Going from Amex to Twitter was eye opening in the sense of seeing how quickly things moved. Amex has 170 years worth of culture building, so there were a lot of aspects that caused it to move slower — socializing everything before you make a decision, the meetings before the meetings and then after the meetings, etc. Because that kind of culture did not exist at Twitter, I felt like it moved so much faster, and now Bolt is evidently moving even faster than Twitter.
With Bolt, I think that there is an extreme level of intention and urgency to work. We have an enormous opportunity in front of us to democratize and decentralize commerce. When there is both high expectation and a lot of opportunity, there is a great deal of accountability that goes with it. I know the leadership team feels it, and we ask that everyone we bring onto our teams to feel and demonstrate it as well.
It’s just interesting — when I think things couldn’t go faster, they do. What I’m focused on now as we grow is not getting bogged down by the structure and policies that slow us down, but focusing on how we can ensure that we’re compliant and have the infrastructure to operate in a way that is streamlined and fast so our people can do their best work for Bolt.
