Have you ever wondered how companies create a great company culture -- and how The Motley Fool has created and sustains an award-winning culture of its own? In this episode, David Gardner brings in members of The Fool's own People Team to share insights for investors and entrepreneurs alike.
Rule Breaker Investing
10 Traits of a Great Company Culture
It's the Rule Breaker Investing Podcast with Motley Fool Co-Founder, David Gardner. And welcome back to Rule Breaker Investing. I'm David Gardner and I'm very pleased to be with you this first week of December and I'm even more pleased to be with my two guests here in the studio for this edition of Rule Breaker Investing. Now, this is Rule Breaker Investing, but we're actually going to be talking a little bit more about business today and even more so than business culture. I have two of the people that I think know how to do corporate culture better than almost anybody else I know, Cara Chambers and Lee Burbage, both longtime Motley Fool employees who are really partly the architects and partly the stewards of Motley Fool culture. As I mentioned last week, we're very proud at the Motley Fool that our culture has been recognized nationally in a number of different ways as a best employer. And I really wanted to get underneath that this week. So I figured, why not have Cara and Lee in and let's talk about 10 things that we do at the Motley Fool that if I'm listening to this podcast, maybe I could do in my business too. Maybe I'm a small business person. We have a lot of them listening or maybe I work within a business or non-business. Any organization really can benefit, I think, from what Cara, you and Lee are bringing this week. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having us. Thank you. So we're going to go down the list, you've got 10. And I just want to say in advance that for a lot of the investing that I do, I look for culture in the companies that I'm investing. So while we're taking a half step out, we're breaking our own rules this week on Rule Breaker Investing, taking a half step out of investing. This ultimately does map right back to picking this stock, not that one for me. So that's enough, Prelude. Team, before I get started, I'd like you each to introduce yourself briefly. Say what you do to the Motley Fool, how long you've been doing it, and one or two foolish things about you. Not to put you on the spot, Cara, but how about you first? Okay. So I've been at the Fool just hit 10 years, this past couple of weeks. I started my career in recruiting here. I work in what I call People Insights. So kind of understanding how groups work together, measuring employee engagement, working with compensation and feedback and performance here. Foolish things about me. Well, excuse me, I know everyone's birthday off the top of my head. It's kind of weird. So that's my one. And we have about 300 employees today at the Motley Fool? Yes. So because a lot of people don't know how big or small we are, sometimes they think it's just the two brothers. I have people like... That's true. You all have employees? And then other people who think the Motley Fool is as large as IBM, and as an entrepreneur, I wish. So 300 employees. So that's pretty darn good keeping everyone's birthday, along with lots of other information in your mind. Thank you, Cara Lee. Yeah. And she's not exaggerating. I know everyone's birthday and it really does freak us out. So I've been here about 17 years. I work here in what would commonly be referred to as organizational development. So I work a lot with our coaches and developing the individuals and teams here to be successful and try to make sure everyone's having a great time. I think one of my proudest accomplishments here is a founding member of Fool Soccer. And so we play soccer together at least once a week before work. And we have for, I don't know, probably 10 years at this point. Wonderful. All right. So you both have prepared 10 tips. Now, each of these is something that I could use in my organization, or I could be aware of as I go about my day-to-day professional life. Yes, absolutely. Who's up first? Yes. That's me. I've got the number one. And these aren't in perfect rank order, but we did try to be thoughtful about how we put them together. And so number one is purpose. And so we believe pretty strongly here at the Fool that people come to work for a variety of reasons, but number one is a purpose they believe in. So we think people come to work for a purpose they believe in, challenge every day, and to work with people they love. And so purpose you believe in is upfront. I think any business can look internally at why are we here? What are we trying to accomplish? And then what are the ways we can get that out in front of everyone in mindful ways? So a little thing we do is member Monday. So for instance, every Monday when fools come in, they've got an email or a slack message about one of our members, a member story, how they're making a difference in the world. So that's what's going to get you up to come to work every day. What gets you excited is to make a difference in the world. Everybody wants that in your life. So I think any business can look at who they are, why they're here, and try to impart that into their employees. And Lee, as you talk to other organizations, and Cara, you all get out and get to know others. How many companies do this well, or because I only know our company, I know that we're very purpose driven, is that your experience that here, Federal Government Job here in Washington, you see you feel a strong connection, or do not for profits too better than for profits, or any thoughts there? You know what I see is that there are a lot of companies that have an incredible purpose, but oftentimes it's so prevalent in who they are. They forget to sort of double down on it and emphasize it, but it's about sort of how do we pull that into our daily life? I don't know. I think it's true. I think you have to be explicit about it and talk about why you're here, and the more you can connect with who you're helping, and the why you're doing this, I think that matters more. That's such a job of leadership at any organization, isn't it, to really connect everyone to that purpose. Cara, what's number two? So I started my career here in recruiting, and smart people want to work with smart people, and we've heard that in every piece of feedback and every survey we've ever read, fools really love working with each other. I'll touch on this more later, but one of the things I learned as we debriefed on candidates, I would hear sometimes managers say, "Oh, you know, it makes me nervous." They seem like they might get bored, and what I've learned over my career here is that restlessness is a good thing. I think you really want someone who's going to be kind of eager to do more, and so if you think that the person you're going to hire might get bored, you should hire them. And I like to talk about it as a virtuous cycle of great people want to work with more great people, and so you will get better people, the better reputation your company has. Cara, at a company, how do you score either the smarts of your people and you say smart people? How do I know someone's smart or not? And then how do you score whether people are appreciating the people that they're working with? Well, we can get to that one, and that's another one on our list. All right. We'll park that. How do you tell it? I think there was just an article about Netflix recently that said, "I start my interviews with what questions do you have for me," because thinking about what the person's curious about, right? What's the first thing in their mind, rather than starting with questions? And I like that. I do that a lot, too, but we notice like, "Is the person asking intelligent questions? Are they curious?" So they're asking about things that are bigger than the job they're interviewing for. They might ask us about our purpose, and that would be important, or our business model, regardless of the role. So we've done that. That is an outstanding insight. Thank you, Cara. So number three, communication is leadership. There's a company we greatly admire, the Container Store, and they do a lot of great things, and we've had a chance to talk to them about some of their practices. And one of the things that they do is try to communicate everything all the time. It's obviously a lofty goal, but we enjoy putting out sort of a big goal like that and trying to go after it. So internally at the Fool, we are trying to communicate everything all the time. With information, people have the power to make decisions and so forth on their own. So one thing that we do, for instance, is we have an all-hands meeting once a month. You can ask any question using a tool we love called Slido. You can raise your hand in the room and ask questions. We try to give you all the financials. People are smart. They deserve the information. They can make their own decisions if given that. And I'm even challenging us now because we hear from companies like Google, Warby Parker, Etsy, some other companies we admire. They're doing those meetings once a week. So even our once a month, I think we can do even better, but that communication piece is so important. People can handle it. Now, we managed to dramatically reduce email, intro office email in the last few years, how? We use Slack, which is a new instant messaging tool. It's only about a year old. And the cool thing about that is it was introduced to us by our tech team. It wasn't something our HR team sought out. Everything for a tool, they just started using it and then they stopped answering people's emails and said, "Why don't you just ask me on Slack?" And so that just picked up and it kind of just fit our culture pretty well. It's very mobile friendly and it can be kind of a mix of fun and business, but we're still learning. It's kind of like a feed or a thread on any topic. It might be your marketing team. It might be full soccer. The list goes on and on. Cat pictures. Yeah. I mean, Ross, and each one is a so-called channel. Roughly, how many channels do we have in Slack? Do you have any sense of it? I think it's in the hundreds by now. Yeah. I mean, it's hundreds. I would say hundreds and hundreds for a company of 300 people. So we really use that tool a lot. You mentioned they're relatively recent. I think Slack has about a billion dollar valuation already. Yes. That was a company. So it's one of those recent startups that has gotten very popular. And we combine that tool with another tool we use called Trello for project management. And what we found in both of those tools is anybody out there, anyone can go and just log in and start using these tools. You don't have to have a demo. You don't have to pay up front. Well, that's great. These are things that anybody can just dive in and sort of test with maybe one or two. Or if you have a small team, you just want to see how it works. It's really a great process that these companies have, I think, for being able to test out their product and see if it works for you. Okay, great. So communication is leadership. We just mentioned a few tools we like, but there are lots of others out there. And it's all what works for your culture, whoever you are, whatever organization you're at. By the way, you mentioned Container Store. One of my worst stock picks the last few years. Thanks a lot, Lee. Sorry, Dave. All right. Number four. Okay. So this one's about lead with trust. We sometimes do tours for external organizations here and we get this question a lot because we famously have no vacation policy. And I mean, you can take what you want, and we always hear, like, aren't your employees going to abuse that? And we say, well, if you followed one of our rules, which is hire great people, by and large, most smart people want to work, and they want to work hard and come to work. And that's still an eye-opener for a lot of organizations, I think, Karen. I mean, we kind of take it for granted, don't we? Yeah. That we don't count your vacation days. Yeah. We just don't-- Get your work done. Yeah. And so if someone's saying take an advantage, it's more of a conversation of, well, are you not getting your job done? And that's a different conversation. It's a harder one. And so it's rare, but it's harder than saying, hey, you've taken too many, but you've exceeded your allotment of our allowed vacation days. I'm sure some people would be listening to say, well, I'm hearing from Karen. They're like management at the Motley Fool, and I bet secretly they are counting the days there. Thank goodness, no. We're not paying attention. We often get to ask the question, how much time are people taking off, and we just don't know. Honestly, I don't know. I think it's a mindset too, with oftentimes when people push back, they're asking questions on don't people abuse it. Well, when you think don't people abuse it, you're probably thinking about the lowest performers in your organization. And so with anything that you're going after, I like to put the highest performer in the organization in my mind and think, how will they handle this? Do you think your highest performers are going to be abusing more vacation? Any new policy procedure program that you're about to put out, put your highest performers out there, hopefully that's a larger group at your organization, try to serve them and not build your organization to protect against the low performers. That feels like a bonus. I know we're only doing. Sorry, sorry. That was just part of the lead with trust, but thinking not about your lowest performer, but about your highest performer and designing accordingly. It's a really wonderful inversion for a lot of people in terms of how we think as professionals. All right, number five. So number five is one of my favorites, and this is we try to make nothing mandatory. Obviously, there's a few things in any organization that are going to be required by law or insurance or things that just must be done. But instead of making programs mandatory, we try to make them compelling. So think about a common practice at most companies is a feedback process or performance management, performance appraisals or things along those lines. If you made them voluntary and not mandatory, how many people would sign up? And if low people are signing up, you probably haven't built a very good program. So switching it to making it compelling, I think in particular for Karen and I in the human resources field, it turns us into people who want to build something. It's something amazing that people want to use as opposed to building something and then having enforcing people to do something that's mandatory. So compelling not mandatory programs. Do you have an example of that, Lee, something that comes to mind that looking back over your 17 years of the fool, where you initially designed it and said, "Everybody has to do it, but then you realize, no, this can be done better." Sure. I mean, I would throw out our feedback system, right? And so we first looked at our annual performance review. We realized nobody liked to do it. It wasn't very fun and Karen and I spent a lot of time trying to make sure everybody did this mandatory process. So we stopped doing that and instead, Kara has launched a new 360 process that's totally voluntary. I don't care if you want to talk a little bit about that. Yeah. I think so for feedback, you sign up voluntarily. If you decide right now you want some feedback and then you choose a neutral third party, not your manager to deliver that feedback for you. So it takes the pressure off of it. It's not like your boss coming to correct you. It's more like, "I want to develop myself. I think I want to sit down with somebody and talk about what my strengths and weaknesses are." I think that it's driven by the employee and when we talk about what we design, we think of our employees as our customers internally and we like to look at them that way. So if you think about a world where people are actually looking forward to and voluntarily signing up for your feedback process, then that like Karen and I start to giggle. Yeah. I mean, I think it's really a subtle and again, we're only doing 10 points, but I feel like you're salting in some additional really good points there. You're honest. That idea that you would be getting feedback not from your boss, not that kind of top-downs, pressured environment, but from somebody who's a third party that you've even chosen into. One of an approved list, no doubt, people who are good at doing that. Yeah, we've deputized a couple of just managers that like having these conversations. Roughly, how many coaches out of 300 person company, how many people could give feedback? We have about 27 right now. Okay, so 27 people, some of whom just raise their hand and say, "I like to do this." Yes. And who you could select to give you your feedback. Yes. Of course, they're just collating the comments from all the people, 360 degrees around you, right? And they can help you where you focus, right? Everybody kind of naturally goes to like that one line of somebody who criticized one thing you said, and they can help you give some context. You know, when I read this feedback, it tells me this about you and to really double down on these strengths. That's so much more powerful. Karen, number six. Number six. This is Lee and David favorite. I learned this from both of you, but to top it, you hear us talking a lot about other companies we learn from, but we like to have things that are just homegrown that we like to be original here. And so we try to do things that no one else is doing. So one of my favorite examples is the Fool's Aren't. Every month at our monthly meeting, we draw a name and that person, and you get your name in there one chance for every year you've been here, and you get two weeks off with no contact with the company, and you have to leave that month. And you get some money, some travel money, and you could go out and do something fun. And so it takes the pressure of people that feel like they won't take any vacation, but the idea of like, it's a surprise, and it also gives us kind of a sense of single points of failure, right, of where it, you know, we might find somebody who really can't take a vacation and be like, okay, we should know that now before they won, want to, or something bad happens. And I'd rather see you go off unexpectedly for two weeks for a fun reason. And so that's just always been fun for us, but I like things that are just completely homegrown and we like to do the original here. So we try not to get, we like to learn from other companies. We also like to do our own stuff. And the Fool's Aren's a great example also, just because it has our name Fool in it. So it fits with our brand. So for each of these, again, listening, putting myself in the shoes of those listening to the podcast this week, think about your own organization and what is organic to that and be creative within that context. And think about how you can be original and improve your office life. Yes. Awesome. We're getting near the home stretch back as we're down to number seven, eight, nine, ten. Now you told me that this is somewhat force ranked. So does this mean these last four, you just throw it in because Dave said let's have 10 or do you believe in these and are these meaningful points Lee? Well, I mean, imagine that we're doing hundreds of things, David, and these are the top 10. So be number 10 at 100. That is true. It's still pretty powerful. I totally agree. I'm excited. Give me lucky seven. I do feel some pressure now though. Lucky seven is making memories together. And so this is something that you've talked to us a lot about, David. I know you're a believer and it's important to create those shared memories. And what we find is like the more that you get to know someone on a personal level, the more that you can share memories and experiences. Then when all of a sudden you're in a conference room, you're trying to do some heavy strategy or make some hard decisions, you've got something to build on. So something that we do every year is take the whole company offsite for a little over a day. We play some games, we talk about the company, we break bread together and there's always some funny things that happen and some shared memories. And there's always the question, hey, should we spend the money really to take everybody offsite or to do certain things and the answer is absolute yes because later you're going to be making some important strategic decision. And we remember that time on the golf course, David, where you hit that poor deer with the ball and that was hilarious. We could laugh about it and then just we have a sort of a jumping off point to making harder things. Right. And so really whether it's at an all corporate level, which is what you're speaking to there really, or of course, a team level or just individual groups creating those. I think part of what you're saying is those shared memories are not within the office necessarily. You're largely talking when you get out of the office and you create something together that bond and that shared memory really can knit a whole corporate culture together over the course of time. Am I right? Yeah. I think that's important. When I was a younger man, my father had talked to me about the importance of taking a vacation out of your town because it really can shake you up and cause you to think differently and feel differently. And so... No, no, staycations at the Burbage House? No, no, staycations. So, but even as close as what we call the near box, which is the Starbucks closest to our office, I'm sure they're very tired of us because there's constantly a stream of fools, never alone, always with others going over. And again, yeah, creating those little memories and those touch points outside of the office, a relationship that you can build on, I think is just a fuel for a really efficient and fast moving pace inside the office. So because this is the only company I've really ever worked for, I don't, I'm not good at understanding how unique or not this is. And certainly, and you can let us know on Twitter at RBI podcast, if you like, how true this is or is not of your organization. But is it common for organizations across America for people to have a lot of friends and do stuff outside of the workplace with them or do people tend to divide their work life from their friends and family life? There's some studies about having friends at work being better for the business. You kind of build a loyalty towards your friends, right? So even if as you're growing in your career, like you want to do right by the people you work with. Because friendships is important and we kind of keep, we encourage that to build those relationships. It just makes everything go better. There's that Gallup poll that has 12 questions that are asked for of organizations about engagement, 12 questions. And one of them is, do I have a best friend at work? Correct. And you're considered more engaged probably for good reasons if you could say yes to that. Right. Regardless of where you work. Exactly. Then if you would say no at that. And that's what you're speaking to care about. Yes, absolutely. All right, good. Number eight. Let's show some love. One of the things we love to thank and share recognition with our fellow fools. We use a tool called You Earned It, another very purpose-driven company. It's a public post feed. We all get a budget of points to share with each other every quarter and you can use them to just thank people and it shows up in a public feed. And it's just been so positive in three ways. One, there's plenty of studies so getting recognition feels great, being thanked feels great. Also, giving recognition, saying thank you, having gratitude, is also very good for your morale. Very apropos after last week. Yes, thanks. Thanks for giving here in the US. And finally, it's fun to see, right? It's kind of just a little bit because of the public feed, you can see what other people are achieving. You can be proud of your co-workers. You can give them a high five in the hallway. So that's just been such a positive thing for us and even before we had this, I mean, you could put slides on the TV or you have a thank you in your weekly email. Any company can do this. We found a program that we liked, but just the idea that gratitude is so important at work. It's one of the most important things. So that's been fun for us. And we call it Fools Gold here here. And I think you're primarily responsible for getting us on this platform and building it all out here at the Motley Fool is one of our favorite things internally. It's a very vital part of our culture and it does remind us of the importance of gratitude being there on a daily basis, not just one week at the end of November. Would you just give us a little bit more about that? Because I think a lot of people probably don't have this in their workplace. Sure. Yeah. You are allocating. We call it gold. Right. Right. So let's say I'm an average employee. I've been here a few years. Do I get a different level of gold than Lee and Cara to give? No, it's roughly the same. We give a little bit more to managers to use for some spot awards, but typically it's about the same. Okay. And just one of the numbers. Like how much gold do I get? Roughly. 5,000 points. 5,000. Yes. Yes. For the year or for a month? For a quarter. For a quarter. Yes. And it's use it or lose it. It's the end of the quarter and you know it'll go away. And so you get this kind of rush of thank you. It's at the end of every quarter because everybody forgets. But science will tell you it's something you want to do every week, right, or put a reminder in your calendar. And this is for anybody out there that doesn't have a program, but once a day, every week day for three weeks will help you build that habit. Just sending a nice email. But for us, yes, points works really well for us because it's there for you to use. It's your discretion. It kind of democratizes it. So it isn't leaders deciding who gets rewarded. It's your fellow fools who are saying, hey, you've really, and you see some unsung heroes kind of rise up out of that, which is really fun to see. Yeah, the surprising. Some people get a lot more gold than anybody was expecting because it truly shows how well they're appreciated. You can cash that in, right? Yes. Yes. You cash them in for prizes, trips, Amazon gift cards are popular. Uber rides. Uber is a very popular one, right? And then those are kind of fun because you're like, oh, I've got this check at the end of the dinner because I've got gold and I've earned this, right? Or I'm taking everybody out in an Uber tonight because I can share that. So we tried to put it a lot of travel and experiences in there. So that's fun. And so the platform we use is you earned it, right? There are some others out there probably doing the same thing. So strong double thumbs up to all those platforms from us here at Full HQ. Yes. All right, lean number nine. So number nine is we finally learned to the years to let employees tell us the tools they need. And so what happens is it used to be we would decide we are a Microsoft shop and this is the kind of desk that you're going to have and this is the chair you get and so forth. And so in terms of the tools that folks have and we've changed that and what we've realized on a number of levels is different people doing different roles need different speed of computers, different, they prefer a laptop or a desktop, they might want a Mac. It just depends on what the type of work that they're doing and what they need. And so we're hiring smart people. Why would we try to guess at what the tools it is that they need or why would we try to assume that every person in every job of the company needs the same type of tools. So a couple of things that we do are one, we have a program called pick your own device and what we do is instead we've established the budget that each person gets to purchase whatever technology tools that they need. And we let them decide, we let them pick their own device that they're going to work best for them. >> And that makes our IT budget go up, right? Don't we have to have more support for lots of different tools? We're hiring an extra techier too to keep up with that Lee? >> Well what happens is the budget in terms of devices is the same because we were going to spend that money anyway, it's just we were picking your device for you instead we're giving you the chance to choose. What we found on the tech side is our techies are actually more interested and engaged because they're working with a lot of different things. Imagine you're that techy on the other side having to support the same system all the time with the problem with the yellow button, right? And now you've got all kinds of things, it's forcing you to learn different systems and so forth. It does add complexity yes, but the efficiency and effectiveness, I mean as a small aside we had one person who was spending up to an extra an hour a day doing some sort of work around because of the computer that he had. We let him then choose the system that was right for him. And so imagine that an hour a day and so we're now getting five extra hours a week out of this one person because he has the right tool for him to use. We use the same thing for office space so more and more we're just trying to provide places in the office for you to work the way you want to. Today I need to be by myself, tomorrow I need to be with a group. This afternoon I'd like to be standing tomorrow when I walk on a treadmill. Just sort of depends so we try to give you some variety of choose from. So a lot of standing desks here at Foolage Cume, definitely some treadmill desks, a lot of stuff on wheels, push it around, work in a different place in the office, convene with a different group of people, wheel right up to them. Yeah, it's a big deal for us to be able to, again, it flows into everything that we've been talking about. So imagine if you're in a cube and you want to move to another cube, the person in that cube has to move, there's a lot of logistics involved. But if I'm sitting at a desk that's completely on wheels, the only two plugs I have in the wall are data and electricity. I can unplug those two things, I can wheel my desk off wherever I want to go. I don't need to check with anybody, I don't need approval. It's all up to me. And so I have autonomy, I have a flexibility. I can sit next to friends that I love. We can talk about the purpose of the company. It all works, David, it all does. That is really beautifully put in. And that's something that, as you mentioned, Lee, we kind of grew into over time. Initially we were kind of the Microsoft shop with the cubicles plugged in that couldn't be moved. So this is a 20-year story you're telling of just more autonomy, right? And better tools. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, for all of these, I was talking about Kara's feedback process earlier. And she's been here 10 years, I've been here 17 years. We've had some really bad feedback processes in the past, right? So we're continuing to improve and sort of top it over and over year after year. All these things we're discussing hopefully will be even better next year in the year after. So not afraid to keep trying to up our game. And I trust they will and that hails back to Kara's point number six, which is top it. A big thing for us at the Fool and always having that mentality. Okay. Home stretch. Kara, number 10. Oh, okay. So I've got Embrace Healthy Living. It's very common now. You'll hear a lot about companies with wellness people. We have a wonderful, dedicated wellness person here named Sam Whiteside. But the story of wellness came in a couple of years ago and we had an employee who was a techie who just really was passionate about fitness. So he just started teaching classes at like 5 p.m. in a conference room and people loved it. And healthy employees always good for any workplace. Again, it's fun, it's friendship, it makes you happier. But I think what we learned from that story is it doesn't have to be a formal program. It worked out so well for us. We did invest in it, but any business can have a pedometer contest. You can just open up a Google spreadsheet and see who can do the most pushups or eat the most vegetables or camp outside or something. Like, you can have these little challenges. There's plenty of them without any budget at all. But what we found is once we really invested in it, we found out how many fools were just so passionate about it, whether it's playing sports or doing yoga or nutrition. We really just started to really investing as a company, but we did not start out that way. And so it's been a fun lesson for us. And boys, that a great one to close on. I will say that in my brother's praise of my brother here, our CEO, Tom Gardner, I think Tom has such a heart for health, such an important thing for him. And he's always projected that on everything and everyone around him. And that's definitely if you have a leadership that's willing to go there, I think it's a beautiful thing. It is also, I think it probably pays pretty well. I suspect we'll have lower medical insurance down the line because of the steps that we've taken in the past few years. So like a lot of these, they might sound like a nice and good thing to do, but they also typically will pay off as well, often in spades if you're doing things right. Right. And I'll add though, what I get a lot of questions about, it's not mandatory either, right? It's just, it's there. And again, the wonderful thing about Sam is she'll meet you where you are. If you just want to walk more or stand for an hour a day or you want to train for a marathon, you know, it's every different type of fitness level here and that's just been really nice. All right. Well, that was a delight. And I'm just going to really quickly tick down the list to summarize number one, purpose and purpose driven businesses, such an important part of any culture. Number two, smart people, Cara said, want to work with smart people. Number three, communication is leadership. Probably can never have enough of it in this world. Just got to figure out how to do it well, how to optimize. Number four, lead with trust. Let your employees take vacation. Don't count their days. Don't count their hours. Doesn't work for every business, but for the ones that it does, it works really, really well. And I think it's a great trend these days. Number five, nothing is mandatory. If you're forcing your employees to do this in that program, you probably haven't brought enough creativity. Number six, top it, be original, make your workplace culture authentic to your purpose and to what fits with your brand and what your employees want. Number seven, make memories together, often offsite things, such an important part of making onsite better. Number eight, show some love out there. There's never enough gratitude in this world and have a good platform or arrangement within an office for people to say, thank you on a regular basis, maybe with some points, maybe being able to spend those points back to buy stuff, not a bad, not a bad approach. Number nine, let them decide. Sure. If somebody likes the PC, give them a PC if someone wants a Mac, give them a Mac. And number 10, embrace healthy living. So we broke our own rules this week. It's one of our longer podcasts, but I wanted it to be one of our longer podcasts. That's part of breaking the rules, but Lee and Carrie, you've helped me break the rules in two other ways. First of all, you're my first guests on Rule Breaker Invest. All right. So set the bar low. Thank you. Well, let me just say, I've just been kind of by myself, lonely talking to the microphone for the last 22 weeks or so, so it's a pleasure to have some other voices here at Rule Breaker Investing, but also to be talking not just about investing, but about business and culture. And ultimately, how much that does end up leading, you mentioned Netflix earlier to some of our most rewarding investments. So investing as an entrepreneur in your own culture will so often pay back your investors in lots of ways, and we as stock pickers are looking for that a lot more. Finally, I want to mention that I'm going to use this particular week's podcast and probably say, re-listen to this one a lot in future. So there are certain podcasts, which for me, jump out as ones that you should share with friends and family that you should make sure somebody went back and listened to that week. The first few weeks of this podcast where I laid up the whole Rule Breaker framework, I think, or some of the people go back and listen to. And I think this is going to be one of those where it's so relevant because so many of us are spending so many hours of our professional lives within organizations, and doing your best to make your organization, yes, I'll say it, more foolish, more capital F, foolish, I think will pay off, as I already said, in spades going forward. Cara Chambers, Lee Burbers, thank you both very much. Thanks for having us, and thanks for caring so much about the topic. It's great. You know, as I think a little bit more about those 10 points that Cara and Lee made, I do want to connect some of those back to stocks that you and I know and make co-own. I think about Google Alphabet, Alphabet today, which, you know, smart people want to work with smart people you bet. That's practically Google's watchword, and what a great company in stock that's been. Certainly Netflix popped up once or twice during our conversation, and then I also think about just think about purpose-driven and think about how many companies really do that really well. Not every company does. But if you're working in a biotech lab, I mean, how many of our healthcare companies in our portfolio have people really working to save other people's lives or just improve the quality of life, extremely purpose-driven work, and it's not just there in healthcare. It runs through a lot of the stocks that I pick. I'm very conscious of that when I think about picking this stock, not that one. Is it really fulfilling a good and important purpose in this world? All right. So those were 10 from us. I bet you have an 11th. One of the things we do at The Motley Fool is we listen and we learn, and a lot of our workplace practices didn't necessarily start with us. It started by us noticing something that someone else was doing or learning or trying something that we hadn't been doing. So if you have an 11th one, I'd love for you to share that this week on Twitter @RBIPodcast is our handle. And just tweet it out. Let us know your 11th. What can The Motley Fool learn from your workplace culture? And speaking of learning and thinking about our purpose here at The Motley Fool to help the world invest better and thinking about another free resource like this podcast, Rule Breaker Investing, which is a free resource. Do you have a new ebook out and you can find it at fool.com/beginners and it's just right there to help you get started investing. So if that's where you are in life or if you have a friend, co-worker, family member, grandchild that you think should be getting on top of this stuff and getting invested, The Motley Fool is there to help you fool.com/beginners. All right. That's it for Rule Breaker Investing this week. I'll see you next week. Fool up. As always, people on this program may have interest in the stocks they talk about. And The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against. So don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. Learn more about Rule Breaker Investing at rbi.fool.com. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]