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Fixing The Broken World Of Work With Luke Kyte

Luke Kyte – Head of Culture @ Reddico.

Luke and I have been connected since 2020 and the work he and Reddico are doing to place culture and performance at the heart of everything their agency does really has enabled them to become one of the best places to work in the UK and win company culture awards.

Luke has helped to move Reddico to a self-management model and they have made it work which is a huge feat. This is a must-listen if you are looking to transform your business, help to improve your company culture and think more clearly around how performance and company culture works together.

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Why Listen: Luke has helped to transform his agency Reddico company culture from struggling to hire to becoming one of the best places to work in the UK and why company culture and self-management is so important.

What Luke and I discuss:

  • How company culture should be shaped
  • Why self management system can and does improve agencies and businesses
  • What it took to get to a world class 96 NPS score
  • Empowering individual’s to do a really amazing job is a key factor to success
  • Why circles (like SWARM’s) helps to get the best work done
  • Company culture is the marketing tool, not a PR tool
  • How word of mouth can be the best hiring tool
  • How to win the Hybrid workplace

Luke’s Key Quote

Show Notes

Luke Kyte Bio:

Luke Kyte is the head of culture at Reddico, a digital marketing agency with a people-first approach. Luke led Reddico’s cultural reinvention from 2018, helping to shape an approach based on trust, freedom and responsibility. 

Now a self-managing organisation, the team has full accountability and responsibility over all aspects of their work life. 

Reddico has since been named a top 5 UK Great Place to Work for two consecutive years, boasts a world-class client NPS, and has continued to enjoy annual revenue and profit increases, despite the pandemic. 

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Fixing The Broken World Of Work Podcast With Luke Kyte Full Transcription

The transcript was automatically created by our tool descript and may have a couple of errors.

Danny: [00:00:00] Luke, thanks for joining me today. I really appreciate it.

[00:00:03] we know each other a little bit we’ve helped each other out a couple of times, but a lot of the listeners won’t know who you are and what you do. So if you I’d love for you to be able to give us an intro and an insight into your day.

[00:00:14] Luke: [00:00:14] Cool, brilliant professor. Well, thank you, Danny, for having me on it’s great to sort of be here and hopefully share some insight into reddico and what we do and something a little bit different, I suppose, to the world of work. Um, so my official title is head of culture, a company called reddico we’re a sort of SEO company, so digital agency, and what makes reddico different is we’ve kind of gone for a real cultural revolution to get to the point where we are today, which is more on lines of self-management so different organizational structure, different way of working, the really put sort of people. First in for-profits I suppose, is the way that we look at it. So it’s all very different in the way.

[00:00:52] Danny: [00:00:52] And self management is amazing analogy. And it’s an amazing concept. Do you want to give people a dive into why you got there and the interesting parts of, of how it’s helped you as an agency grow and become an award-winning in culture?

[00:01:10] Luke: [00:01:10] Yeah, so it’s, I suppose it’s quite a long story really that, um, the company itself founded around 2012. Um, so all great companies as they are founded in the spare bedroom of the director’s house, um, started to grow as a, as a business and got to the point where we had sort of 10 to 15 people as part of the team.

[00:01:28] And as a business, we’d always focused on creating a fun place to work. So it was, I suppose, at the time it was looking back, we got this wrong completely, but things like events and nights out, beer fridges and food in the office and table tennis, all that type of stuff that you think amounts to create in a really fun place.

[00:01:48] And it was around. So it was a 20, 20 17 marks, a five years into the company. And we started running internal kind of sort of team surveys. So using the MPS, as part of the team, thinking that as a business, we were a place where we would be getting some pretty high score, maybe sort of world-class scores in these areas because this fun place to work with created.

[00:02:08] But actually when we started speaking to the team and getting those results through, we found that actually it was the reality was very different to what those expectations were. And we found that the scores are much lower. We’ve had a lot of detractors as part of the team. A lot of people that were saying that there was all of these issues in the business, like all those kinds of issues that come as a part of natural growth in a business or the pain points that start to show like frustrations, concerns, confusion, micromanagement.

[00:02:33] Why can some people sort of get to work late and some people can’t why is there kind of one rule, one rule for others? Or I want to work from home, but I can’t yet someone else can, all of those types of stuff, those kinds of frustrations that started there as a company. And so the directors of the business at the time sat down and thought we need to change this.

[00:02:52] And it’s, every business gets to this point, like the make or break point where they can continue, how they go in and enjoy high growth because we’re growing quickly, we would make more money. We were featured on Deloitte the fastest growing companies in Europe, UK, and all that type of stuff.

[00:03:06] So there was success there for as a business and you can continue doing that and just create this culture where actually the risks get over there and there are problems, or you could sit down and work out what are these problems? What are the solutions we can do to solve this? And so the directors basically snapped out and started working out what does effective Reddico look like? And that came from research, speaking to the most progressive businesses around the world, speaking to sort of leaders in kind of the culture world and the cultural space reading books. And we’re just working out like how can a business work in a different way to being really traditional how can we kind of strip back the framework and the processes and make it more about people and putting people first and essentially changing the way that changing your belief system to believe the best people to believe that people will do the right thing, because ultimately a lot of the way that businesses run in the day-to-day are based around sort of the, the small percentages of people that would probably take the mic and would kind of abuse the system and the processes and the policies, and they can’t handle that level of responsibility.

[00:04:07] Whereas we wanted to move to a place where actually we focused on the 95% of people who can wait and want to do a really amazing job and want to work hard once, be productive once a day. And so we started kind of creating this manifesto of change of what does the future. And then over a period of sort of 12 months or so we started rolling this out well, it’s choosing when and where and how you work or whatever hours you want to choose work those hours. There’s no core hours, anything like that.

[00:04:36] Having things like unlimited holiday saying that we’re going to pay up all of their sickness and not limiting that, or having a cap to that, even removing managers from the business and say, look, actually, we want to get to a place where people are able to manage themselves and don’t need to be kind of told what to do or how to do it.

[00:04:51] And then kind of creating these self-manage and teams that work together as a, as a group of people, rather than for a particular boss or leader or whoever that might be. So what are the kind of changes that we started to roll out? And so we did that over a sort of a 12 to 18 month period and constantly reviewed it completely meant as it comes through, rolled out different things as well.

[00:05:12] And we never really spoke about self management at the time. It was more okay. We’re just trying to create a better Reddico, which is we we’re trying to create this good company. We hadn’t really thought without self management. It wasn’t really until probably two years ago now, but action management starts to become a word that we used on a regular basis.

[00:05:28] Actually, we’ve got to the point now where we’re halfway there and there’s just a few bits that we need to really formalize and to change it, to get to that point.

[00:05:36] And so now it’s just a case where the team have complete responsibility, complete accountability over what they do on that day to day, they set their own goals. They choose how they work when they work. They, the team kind of comes together and holds each other to account because of that. So rather than having sort of like hierarchy, as you were doing a normal company, we work in like bubbles or circles in the organization structure, such as it’s laid out very differently.

[00:06:00] It’s kind of more of a flat, a flat structure. And we’ve really seen some amazing sort of success from it , since that, that, that kind of rollout of our team NPS has gone through the group. So again, I said at the start, it was. Start to, because of his poor NPS that we got, but that jumped up from when a 14 to two world-class at 96, our client NPS also went up to world-class.

[00:06:22] We’ve continued to make revenue and profits and profits have increase at 40% year on year, as well as a business. And there’s all of these kind of really cool correlating statistics that go with it. Even things like the amount of sick leave that people take as like drops completely to sort of 0.4 days on average per year for each person like the average in the UK is 4.1, which is like a massive difference.

[00:06:45]So actually it’s just showing that. Can you start putting people first, you start focusing on people and believing that they have the ability to manage themselves. You can see more profits, more revenue, happier clients, a better sort of health and wellbeing initiative for the team as well. When it’s just, it’s been a really long journey, but a really fun journey. And one that we seen. You’re

[00:07:05] Danny: [00:07:05] You’re obviously a prospering from a lot of the hard work that you’ve, you’ve undertaken through sort of 7 years of doing it. I’d love NPS as an internal tool. I hate NPS as an external tool.

[00:07:19] So when you said to detractor, it’s really important, some people don’t necessarily understand NPS. So, , NPS zero to seven is, is technically a bad score it’s in the red. And then you have 8, which is sort of mid tier, then they’re not unhappy, somewhat happy and then nine and 10 of the outliers, the ones, that literally the 5% that you, that everyone sort of aspires to.

[00:07:46] So 96 is an amazing achievement and success. You’ve seen in your numbers, which is great. Do you believe that you can be numbered numbers driven when it’s a people first org?

[00:08:00] Luke: [00:08:00] Um, it’s a good question. I think that you can be guided by the numbers and by the feedback. But also just still gotten really cause we enter sort of where we’re in pain, things like the great place to work as well wins.

[00:08:15] There’s a lot of anonymous surveys that form that rank it. We went just over the last three years. We’ve came nine in the UK then open in UK, UK. So constantly in kind of that, that higher tier I suppose. And that’s all based on sort of team feedback through hundreds of questions in different areas of our culture and the way that we work.

[00:08:33]Obviously the MPS kind of shapes that, and this feedback is part of that. And I think ultimately that feedback isn’t is normally more important than the score itself. I think the scores give you a kind of nice way of looking at something over there. And saying, okay, well, we started here and we’ve got to this point with the score. So actually we’ve seen real aggressive movement where we want it to be. And then actually on average, over the last two years, it’s much higher. It was average the two years before that. And you can look at that, that correlates information, ultimately though, it’s the feedback that’s going to the camp the most. The saying that you also have to be careful not to kind of take one item of feedback as being like the normal, what anyone thinks and is really easy to, to do that. So we run we say your mum sometimes bimonthly, we do sort of internal sort of surveys on like nine or 10 different areas of the business from a cultural side.

[00:09:28] So we’ll say right. Give us a score on look tonight, like the transparency or like your workload or recognition or award or different. And so you give a score and then you kind of give feedback. You can as well, you can put your name against it. You don’t have to do if you don’t want to as well.

[00:09:42] So it gives people the option. And obviously if someone comes back and says, like, this is a frustration at the moment, or this is a problem, it’s easy to look at that and think, oh, this is like a bigger thing than it is, especially when you’ve got a team of sort of 30, 40 people. Now it’s you start to congratulate disagree, initial grant problem.

[00:10:01] And what you’ve got to do is kind of take it in context that it’s, you can’t, you can’t say that this person isn’t feeling that way because they are, um, that you can’t tell someone how they feel. You’ve got listen to the practice and just work out what it is that’s affecting them, because if it’s not affecting this group of people here, but it’s affecting this person, maybe how can we help this person and accommodate them and help them to work out what it is that would, would get more from the business and more on the way to them. And so I think, yeah, the data helps in a long-winded way. The data helps you to see the correlation. The feedback helps you to understand where the issues are and what you can improve sort of going forward. But don’t be sort of too fixated on like one comment I think are like, everything’s like ruined, we’ve already read black place there because of this one thing.

[00:10:47] And it’s just taking it all in context really. And work, actually, this is just a small thing in the grand scheme of things. Like it’s one thing that people maybe isn’t working , so I think, yeah, they can take it by parts and put measure.

[00:10:59] Danny: [00:10:59] I think that something when things seem to go well, like one piece of constructive or negative feedback seems more pressing, more challenging, a bigger pain point. I think when people are, uh, generally not so happy you get more open feedback or probably a little bit more anonymous, but you tend to know the problems that come that arise in, and then it’s your job to get to the root cause I think there’s, there’s often when you have such high scores, you can take  these pieces of feedback probably a little bit more personal than you would. If, if things weren’t going so well. So it’s probably just a, a great sign of, of you’re on the right path. And that you actually actively look to, to address some of these issues where, and other businesses, it takes almost a whole team to, to be unhappy for, for things to be addressed. So it’s something you’re doing something you’re doing really well.

[00:11:54] Something that I was interested in when you were talking. The scores are really high and it’s a great thing. And award winning is such a powerful tool for many agencies, but I’m guessing for you guys, it’s probably as much word of mouth referral that you get from your team members and how they interact with the rest of the people in the industry. It’s probably, you guys probably get a great word of mouth referral as opposed to having to really hunt and search for the right candidates and the right fit.

[00:12:26] Luke: [00:12:26] Um, yeah, it’s interesting really. I mean, coming from a, um, a client side, we were pretty much a hundred, like we’re almost a hundred percent word of mouth.

[00:12:34] Um, so we, our marketing only really started about a year ago. He brought in our first person to all the marketing team, and that’s eight years into the business , so which is, I think there’s a nice correlation sometimes in creating this kind of really good culture in these workplaces and also producing amazing work, but they go hand in hand anyway.

[00:12:55] I think clients and businesses on that side of things are starting to see that more and wanting to, to, to work with those types of people. Um, like even if you take into account the BrewDog situation recently, and then a little bit older stuff that came out of that, the negativity around sort of the culture and the politics and what’s going on behind the scenes is kind of how damaging is that going to be on the, on the reputation of Brewdog going forwards?

[00:13:21] And like, even personally, I can say I walked into the shop the other day and I’d started to actually drink their beers. And I got one of the pack sent cruise or another free beer wine to go. That’s all it looks at. And we’re actually, no, I’m not going to fight this time. I’m going to get something else.

[00:13:35] So I think that that automatically sort of damages their reputation. Now in your mind, when you start thinking about kind of the culture and the way that people looked after our the business.

[00:13:44] From a recruitment side, interestingly it’s, it was always one of those things we struggled with from, from recruitment side. We’ve always been very picky, especially from like the SEO roles. Um, and we’ve as a business, not so much recently, it’s been a much better at the moment in terms of like that pipeline. And then again, that could be that correlation. We sort of alluded to the question, but so I’d definitely same sort of pre 2018 or anything from 2019. And before I suppose we’ve always struggled to get good SEO’s through the doors. That would be the key sort of, I think, as an agency, we wanted sort of the best people. And I think the, the, the industry itself, um, it’s difficult because you get people coming from, sort of brands and stuff coming to want to join you.

[00:14:28] And actually that they’re not actually up to the standards that you’d want from a senior role, for instance, in that area. So we always struggled to get the right seniors through the door, but since kind of a Clover house, we’ve really focused on this culture, we have started to get much better candidates for we’ve managed to get, I suppose, over the last year or so, or four or five so really. People in those kinds of high end sort of senior mid-level roles are coming froze or figuration citizens. Um, these places, especially from outside London, especially now the pandemic has definitely helped. Um, there’s that definitely a good correlation to suppose that actually, when you’re looking at a company, you can have these, this is one of the best places to work in the UK and they’re in my field and my, my industry and actually there’s all these problems I’m facing in my current role.

[00:15:12] Um, and then the frustration of getting there in the way that the thing has done and bureaucracy that that happens in my day-to-day life. I had not thought that I’d rather just join this company. That’s going to be a case of light. Just let them get on with it. Just, just, it’s just give me the work. Yeah. We don’t need to do and just get on the bit and deliberate produce amazing results. And that’s what people want at the end of the day. They want that freedom. They want the responsibility, they want that trust to score, to get on with it and obviously the team are massive advocates, as well as .

[00:15:40] I would say we probably don’t get as much word of mouth just because of the industry we’re in. Um,

[00:15:46] That’s a tough one, really, but I think it’s definitely been that correlation actually the high caliber candidates have definitely followed that cultural shift, which is really good to see. It’s good to come in to start seeing that side of things as well.

[00:15:58] Danny: [00:15:58] It’s amazing that culture is a marketing tool, not a PR tool. Yeah,

[00:16:03] Luke: [00:16:03] absolutely.

[00:16:05] Danny: [00:16:05] And this is,  having a huge long marketing background. This is something that think a lot of people, having in that BrewDog as an example , use it as a PR opportunity generally and use the brand and the personal brand side to build a the strong brand behind it.

[00:16:24] They came on to fire because people had decided to challenge it and it goes against the narrative they created likewise in their base camp had a number of issues more recently too.

[00:16:35] And that’s leads into the sort of leadership and motivation and understanding. I wonder what, what sort of your motivations were for taking this career path? Cause it’s, it’s, you were ahead of your time really versus versus in a hire and fire, which is the traditional HR role or, or unit of unit of culture, some people to refer into it. What are your motivations for taking this sort of step?

[00:17:02] Luke: [00:17:02] It’s very interesting, actually, because I didn’t have any background in this at all.

[00:17:07] So when I joined reddico was in 2014, so there was only sort of five of us by an issue joined as a writer. So I went to uni or came out of uni, presented another role for a while. Um, studying journalism at university had all these ambitions, these plans of going to London and Brighton sort of sports, journalism and things like that and all that type of stuff.

[00:17:27] That was a dream, I suppose, when I was 21. Came out of uni struggled to, to, to find out that there’s more redundancies and hirings at the time, the papers were obviously in decline and things moving to online. So there were those fewer jobs around. So I fell into more the copywriting sites and joined Reddico very early on. And I think, yeah, I was in a, in a fortunate position at the time where, when you joined the company yeah. And one that’s going through kind of rapid growth and they’ve got these plans to scale and take epic at the time. It was to get to sort of 50 people and a 5 million turnover, but things over a five-year periods,

[00:18:01] when you’re getting sort of your foot in the door early, you start to get other opportunities that show up and there’s you almost start to put on multiple hats in the business, even though I was in the content marketing team, it was, I was the first one in that they had that position moved into it or head of content rather than stuffs to build out that content marketing team as well and operate on a few people.

[00:18:21] And there’s also doing more operational side of stuff within the business. too That was a case of like what the process is we need to nail. What are the things that we need to do is grow. If you haven’t got enough people to have a head of operations. So I was kind of filling that, that camp as well. And they’re doing training around that, things like that,

[00:18:37] and then moved into a, kind of a more operations role, moved away from the content side. And when the manifesto that I talked about earlier was first creators. The directors sat down and put together this plan of what this better Reddico looks like. Um, Nick who’s, the managing director of Reddico just turned to me and said, we want you to roll this out. And I suppose it was one of those things where, um, I, had a bit of a reputation for just being able to get things done.

[00:19:03] And if we’d been able to do things, and one of the things you need to focus on, especially when you want to change a company in such a drastic way, if you need to make sure you do it because you can’t tell the team while with all these exciting plans and get them sort of bubbling about it and talking about it and thinking, oh, this is amazing.

[00:19:21] This is where reddico is going to go next. And nothing happens in your sort of go stay or that dry over the next few months. And that causes more frustration there’s in case of right. Um, I’ll put in place now to just, to, to roll this out and to focus on it. And I’ll be honest, when I first saw the manifesto and the plans behind it, I thought, I don’t think this is going to work like, cause obviously it’s kind of like you have to like change your mindset almost because a lot of, a lot of the time now I sort of, when I speak to people and talk perhaps the Reddico story and where we are are and where wegoing and people say, well, they’re quite skeptical and like, well, does it really work like this? Is there not any problems or issues that come out of this? Like, can you really trust people? Do people abuse it? Are they, are they doing that?

[00:20:06] And so 2017, I was kind of in that mindset of still thinking that actually people do need to be handheld and they do need to kind of have more clear direction on what they should be doing, things like that.

[00:20:17] But it wasn’t until I really got stuck into the manifesto and looking at the detail, thinking about how are we going to do this? What’s what we’re going to prioritize. What we going planned first? How are we going to kind of roll this out next month period. And it wasn’t until I got in, got stuck in this kind of cultural world, you realize that there’s, it’s almost like a, a sub level world of people that are kind of bubbling away in this culture stuff or this future of work type, reinventing work type movement that’s going on.

[00:20:43] And there’s so much that’s kind of happening around that. You don’t really see it until you invest yourself into it and get your head stuck into it. And then it would, I suppose, for me, it was just changing my mindset and changing my way of thinking and believe. I started to think, actually we can believe that we can put together these policies and these frameworks and these way of working around.

[00:21:05] Thinking that people that are going to do the right thing and that we can trust them and that they do want responsibility. And, and this is how you can motivate people and empower people and support people. There’s different ways of doing it than the way that I’ve been grown up to kind of follow them. We’ll kind of grow up sort of seeing the way that businesses run. And don’t really think about an alternative way until green. You get stuck into that. That’s when your mindset changes. Um, so for me, it was more, more luck of the draw that I ended up going down this path that I’m super glad I did because I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.

[00:21:36] And it’s really been a nice, a real good learning curve for me and adapting my own mentality, my mindset and my belief system and the values now that I hold about people has changed substantially over sort of four or five years.

[00:21:51] Danny: [00:21:51] It’s it takes such  a long time to break tradition and conditioning and habit. And I think that’s probably the biggest challenge for a lot of people.

[00:22:02] So when you had the manifesto that I’m not saying it was your aha moment, but it’s probably the aha moment or light bulb moment that probably went off within an organization six months afterwards. You know, it’s probably took a long time for you to embrace it and then be able to reinforce it almost to people around you and sell it in.

[00:22:25] And I think that’s something that a lot of people have learned probably over the pandemic is some people haven’t learned that you can work remotely and you can get a lot of work done. And we’re obviously seeing a lot of tech companies being open and saying, they’re going to force three days a week on people to be back in the office.

[00:22:44] And you said that he can work from anywhere whenever have you got a strong opinion or opinion on, on how that’s sort of playing out now the hybrid versus an office versus flexibility?

[00:22:58] Luke: [00:22:58] Yeah. So it’s definitely an interesting one. And I think all the bad stuff that’s come out of the pandemic that obviously the Travis’s as opposed to around the world, that becomes a bit one of the only shining lights. And the only one of the only good things sort of, as you mentioned, is actually companies starting to see a different way of working. And I know that we started doing this, or I suppose two years prior to academics, it wasn’t for us. It was really easy to sort of last March when, when sort of the UK first went into lockdown and a lot of companies are really struggling to understand how they could do this and how they could work it out and not have they got the right technology in place and the right infrastructure, the right ways to be able to kind of survive with people not being at the office is that, is that thing for us, it was a case of this is just normal.

[00:23:44] Like everyone, everyone can, can do this. We know we can do it as a business, survive it. And I think you then started to get a wave of company. I suppose going to make them sort of two, two ways you had the ones that really embraced it and said, right, this is now a chance for us to really change our business and to start focusing on people a bit more and listening to people and how they want to work.

[00:24:08] And then you had like a number of smaller group of people and were group of companies that started to put in place more control, even though people were working from home. It was like, when you get in, in the morning, you have to message at nine o’clock to say, you’re working, you’ve got a message where you finish at 5:00 PM and my wife was working for a company that was like that. Um, and there was a, the other companies have got sort of like CapEx or camera sort of software, wherever it is on that, on the, on the laptop saying that we can watch you, we can see what you’re doing and we to take random screenshots throughout the day, like to see what you’re up to and there’s all this like control and fear about what people do when the working from home and such a lack of, of trust. And just by having these types of systems and policies in place. Just destroys, like the culture and the engagement that people have for their companies. And I think now you’re seeing, I suppose, as you kind of said at the start, like the companies that are going to continue to embrace it and say, not over the last year, people have shown that they can work from home. It is possible, especially. I mean, not all every industry can work from home. Obviously you’ve got, if you’re fortunate to work for a job where you’re pretty much office-based yeah. Obvious block base, I suppose that’s the type of roles that are more suitable for five days. We’ll work in the home and now getting those companies were just like, yeah, we can continue doing this.

[00:25:29] And actually we can get rid of the office, um, completely. And as a business, we can save money from that and then focus that attention on something else and maybe put that money into other schemes that we do or ways that we can sort of help our team.

[00:25:41]You are now, getting the ones which yeah, uh, saying, we want you back by this amount of day, or we want you to become an Inn on this day or this or this. And I think that they dress up a lot of the time with the idea that unless you’re with people in the office or around people, you’re never going to have those kinds of innovative moments where people talk in, come up with an idea or can collaborate and communicate. And for me, I think it’s more about how you manage, like, not necessarily manage that process, but how do you create space for people to get to do it when they’re working remotely or not working in the office rather than saying, the only way you can possibly do this ever is if you’re sitting in the same room and it’s a case of, well, let’s, let’s just take a step back here.

[00:26:25] Think that we’ve managed to survive as, as, uh, as old and as an industry or as a company for the last sort of year, 15 months or so. And, and people have been able to work, but I’ve never been able to get the job done and maybe they’d be more productive and more efficient and more effective. And now they’re doing stuff on that day to day. Like maybe this is the future. This is how we could do things.

[00:26:44] For me. It’s around choice. Uh, but not everyone wants to work. Not, I mean, as a personal standpoint, I would like to be in the office at least one day a week, maybe two days a week, just to see other people. And I’m sat at home today and it’s a case of, well, my wife walks out the door at nine o’clock and probably doesn’t come back into sort of five o’clock. And it’s kind of just, just by yourself, on you, if you don’t have any music on it. And that, that I think quite lonely. And, um, I find it much more kind of invigorated and I find it easier to work when there’s other people around. So for me personally, I like it. It’s that choice. It’s not that a choice pay do it. And that’s how we’re doing it. Sort of going forward as the case of like, we’re going to keep the office there. If you want to use the office, you can, do you want to work from home? You can do we’ve, we’ve, we’ve switched our policies to kind of remote first, which means we can, cannot hire people from other areas of the UK. So we’ve, uh, someone’s joined the team who’s in Scotland. People have joined the team from now all over the UK, so we’ll see we are Kent based, but we’ve got people in, in Bristol with, on us. in Nottingham we got people that are already in London, so wouldn’t be coming down the office. And I think it’s just thinking like how everyone knows themselves best, like, you know, how you work best. I know I work best everyone on our team knows how they work best and we’re all different. So why say to people that you’re different and your work in different ways and client productivity in different ways?

[00:28:04] Why are we going to say you can work? You have to work nine to five, five days a week, and this is actually how it’s going to happen across the board. When actually you get people that I bet a good grade in the morning and they might be like, why I’ve shown that I’m an early bird. I wake up at six. I’d love to start cracking on at seven o’clock getting stuff done. Maybe on a bit of a break in the afternoon. You get people that are or night owls. And I think you might, I work best at, at nine, 10 o’clock in the evening, we’ve got developers, in our team.

[00:28:28] So pretty stereotypical sort of saying developers. Um, but th they’re they’re, they’re some of the people that actually, um, will work till midnight say, and actually that’s when they find their productivity, it’s heightened. And all of these companies, that kind of thing. We’re just going to take the last year and just pretend it never happened.

[00:28:45] We’re just going to go back to how it was, uh, obviously with that flexibility, you get for a parents as well, and then people with families and like all the benefits that they had over the last years, we’ve been able to pick up the kids from school. But knowing that actually when they get back, they can do a couple of hours at seven, eight o’clock that might look like for me, it’s just, it’s just putting people first and saying to people that you are responsible to, to work out, go ahead and do it.

[00:29:10]I don’t agree with kind of focusing again, a long long-winded answer. I don’t agree with kind of forcing, uh, forcing people to do what you want them to do as a business, because it’s too much in control. It’s kind of saying, this is how you think it should work. Actually for me personally, it doesn’t work like that. And if you want the best out of me, give me the choice.

[00:29:30]Danny: [00:29:30] One of the biggest learnings I think people will have is around command and control. It wasn’t necessarily working in office. And it definitely doesn’t work when you’re being more flexible on being more remote. They’re more hybrid. And I think it’s led to being went to tech lit.

[00:29:48] So we tried to force offline online. So all the bad practices we had offline, we forced online and that’s from having back to backs, you know, executives were used to it, people mid-level and below, unfortunately hadn’t had that exposure. Hadn’t had that experience. It’s difficult for them. And for many people working on zoom or teams or any other tech product, you can think of FaceTime coming. That’s something that people copied from other people. And then there wasn’t anyone that was being deliberate in saying, this is how you reduce this down. It’s completely fine to have deep work or focus time where you block out calendar slots and that you did a work in, for instance, I spoke to my dad , who retired a few years ago. And I said to him before the emails, you know, how did you actually get your work done? And he said, you just had to be good at communicating. So I’m going to be working on this. I’m going to give you updates then. And that’s when you did it. And that worked. And we’ve become as a business world, we’ve become so driven by tech and the tech tools that we have. We forgotten how to be efficient and operationally smart.

[00:31:00] And it sounds like what you guys are doing is trying to help enable that and pull that out. I’d be a little bit remiss to say who’ve had all these great experiences. Was there anything around, like more of a negative tone that would to help people, learned from your learned experience or, or a bad experience you’ve taken on and sort of run with, run for it?

[00:31:23] Luke: [00:31:23] Yeah, it’s an interesting one. And it’s one I get asked a lot actually is kind of like what’s what’s going on? What were the things that are kind of, um, not, not really worked in this way at work and yeah, it does sound bizarre, but it’s, it’s kind of been quite seamless, which is a weird thing to say. Like when, again, when sort of the person and manifesto, and sort of the ways of working, especially in sort of saying that we’re going to move to a point where people can choose where they work, they’re going to choose how they work, they’re going to choose, or the hours that they work on, that Matt can fluctuate.

[00:31:54] We’re going to say to people that you can now have as much holiday as you want to. So you can control that you won’t need to get approval for it. You can just book it into the system, Mike, again, make sure you talk to your teams, make sure you’re not gonna come to my clients. I’m going to be serviced all those kinds of things that you expect adults to be able to do it and kind of handle.

[00:32:11] Um, and we’re going to say to people that actually will trust you. Like if you’re sick, you’re sick. I just take time off, like we’ll pay for all of that, et cetera. And. It was one of those things where I haven’t, when I was kind of looking at the implementation and the rollout of it at the time. So sort of three or four years, and I was thinking to myself, like, I’m not really sure how this is going to work, because you’re going to get the moment to say we’ve got 20 at the time 20 people get three people working 20 different work patterns could be taken holiday, who work from home, maybe in the office, like some work at night, the nights are nine in the morning.

[00:32:44] Like, surely this is going to be chaos and this isn’t, this isn’t going to work. And there’s going to be some real kind of issues that crop up because of this. But it’s just one of those things that as we did it, it just, it just worked. And it just, it just made more and more sense. I think one of the things that we did that helps throughout the whole process is just kept the team involved in the conversations and the processing happens are going to work and that’s, and that’s really important.

[00:33:12] And I’m one, I suppose the lesson is just knowing that you don’t have to have all the answers. I think when you’re a leader in an organization. Or in charge of rolling something out and implementing something, but like I was then it very supporting to that chat where you think I need to have all of these answers.

[00:33:28] I need to be the person that works this out and solved this problem and addresses this headache. Whereas actually it’s the, the team of the people that are doing this on a day to day basis. They’re the ones that are doing that work. They’re the ones that are come into the office. They’re the ones that are seeing those frustrations, almost like that front line type thing. It’s that these are the problems that are going on.

[00:33:48] So by speaking to your team and asking them questions and saying, look, I’ve got this problem that I’d need to try and solve. Like how, how do you think we could solve it?

[00:33:56] Or what, what would work here to kind of, to get over this and to get to the point where we kind of roll this out and we can get to this utopian place. I suppose that that involvement just, just helps you to get those offices and, and anything to show you can come through from that. So rather than taking that approach, but I need to, I need to do this myself. Like no one else. Can you give me an answer? It’s just not that you don’t have that those answers.

[00:34:19] When I started that light, especially with some of the work in anywhere, the working policies just, just works. There’s other bits that we rolled out where there was a few more even issues or move into a place where we didn’t have the managers and we introduced coaches instead.. And obviously naturally again, you’ve, you’ve got people in companies who are already kind of leaders, I suppose, in their field or they’re they’re experts in what they do, or they come from other companies as well, where they have a managerial position, especially at the moment you’ve got some people joining Reddico on a regular basis.

[00:34:53] And then some would have been managers of departments or managers of all various people in the past. I think one of the, not necessarily an issueat the moment, but one of the things that we need to really conscious of as we grow is just how we I’m not sure the word, but like educating people in the way that we work. Um, and, and knowing that actually people are gonna come with their own beliefs and values and ways of doing things. And actually it’s not until they get to Reddico that they’re going, gonna start seeing things in a different way. Um, and obviously pretty recruitment process we sort of say to people that this happens work, is it the oppose policies you have in place.

[00:35:27] This is like the advice process, for instance. So anyone can make a decision in the company without needing to get like absolute approval, um, or that you can spend it’s kind of have a much you want on training. There’s no kind of to that. There’s all these types of things that we do, which are different.

[00:35:42] And we sort of sort of plug that and we say  that private recruitment, but it’s not until you actually join and see it on  day to day that you really start to adopt, train yourself in that system or work out actually, this is a very different way of work as well previously. And you just have to remember, that myself, when I started rolling this out, I was in that place where I didn’t think it was going to work.

[00:36:01] So you’re going to get people that join are very kind of hesitant to, to the way that things of work here. And until they kind of really start going through that process.  Got to kind of have to challenge their own belief system and challenge how they, how they do things that’s really important.

[00:36:17] But in terms of just rolling things out has been reasonably seamless, I suppose. 

[00:36:21] I mean, we, we distributed responsibilities amongst the team to kind of solve the managerial problems and the leadership issues, um, and, and things like that. And just, yeah, any problems that have come up with just, I suppose, just addressing at the time and constantly have that feedback from the team.

[00:36:38]Danny: [00:36:38] One of the most important aspects of it’s unspoken around in work and workplace is when you’ve got such a good culture. If you hire a bad manager, as in that you hire someone who’s coming in at a senior level, they’re going to bring in all of their scars or all of the condition they’ve had from a previous organization. And I think it takes a long time for you to. As a manager and often you’ll come in and you’re even less that world of bad traits of a bad manager. And unfortunately you just, you, you become conditioned by your previous environment. So I’ve worked with people from ex- Amazon, ex- Facebook, ex-Google , all had great experiences or loved, loved their experience, but they bought the worst parts of them as, uh, as well as the best parts of them.

[00:37:30] And that’s something that we just don’t talk around enough as, as you know, leaders and business people, and especially culture champions is that actually when you’re hiring people, they need to be a good fit for the people around them.

[00:37:43] But B if they’re in any sort of leadership position that they know, this is the, almost the code of the culture that you have. And that’s something that I just don’t think many business. Oh, deliberate enough around. They might talk around the in interview and in the process, but they don’t onboard people as a manager or a manager in this culture.

[00:38:05] And I think Stripe are relatively famous for it is that they have management onboarding as well as onboarding as as employee. And I think that’s something many people need to maybe consider moving forward is how you’re probably more deliberate with management hires and onboarding and then necessarily people underneath them.

[00:38:25] Luke: [00:38:25] Yeah, absolutely. He manages, uh, suppose a back to be advocates of the culture. And if you’re working with people, bringing in managers or people in kind of more senior positions, it’s a case of like, they need to be leading by example and show it actually that this culture is the way that we want to do things.

[00:38:43] And if they believe that this is the way of doing things as well, so actually spot on example to kind of get that right, because I’m always calls real disharmony and my problems within that team.

[00:38:53] And it was one of the reasons we wanted to shift away from the managers , in the first place, because we, we kind of saw all this, this problem, around not just at reddico, but across the industry and across the UK as a whole, where managers are often put into managerial positions and hired based on their skills and their experience and their expertise, but actually true, well, really good managers, really good leaders have to have a different set of skills, which is those people skills like leadership and empowerment and support, and being able to encourage and motivate other people to coach.

[00:39:27] And when you get someone that that’s based solely on those skills next day, that role B all those, those other skills, people skills are kind of forgotten. It, it creates real issues in that, in that team at a massive problems. And it’s one of the reasons we kind of shifted this approach and sort of said that we want to move on to your managers because we want people to be able to come in and Excel in their job and just to be able to get better at what they do.

[00:39:49] And to, to, to bring more to the company, to up-skill to have that level of experience, to help, to be mentors in terms of like the actual, the actual skill set, and then some that, that people can lean on for advice for when it comes to work.

[00:40:00] But ultimately we don’t want people that are going to be managed by the wrong people, which is why we kind of moved to that self-management model.

[00:40:07] And so we’ve been introduced to like, uh, a coach structure, we choose our own coaches. Um, and again, as I said, everyone’s different and everyone knows who the right person needs to be able to coach or support them. So that’s why we kind of have that where you just choose, choose your own coach to help that side of things.

[00:40:23] Uh, and so you’re absolutely right that the, the manager that comes in has to have that, that culture really embedded because it can cause problems

[00:40:32]Danny: [00:40:32] I love the self-management side of him being an agency side and, and being in some of the best environments. And unfortunately, a couple of times the worst environments for, from an agency side, how do promotion, how do people get promoted at your company?

[00:40:47] How do you handle that sort of that natural evolution for people within? Reddico? A

[00:40:55] Luke: [00:40:55] very good question. And only recently something that we’ve solved. Um, so it’s still kind of a hot, the hot the process suppose. Um, but I suppose what has, I suppose, one of the issues that you have when you move from traditional to that progressive way of working kind of move into that self management model, you get legacy things you need to try and solve, so you trying to move away from the managers. Okay. So it’s not just necessarily about like, okay, This person manages this group of people and their workload, the process and stuff like that. But like, if you’re moving away from that, who’s going to start setting their salary. Who’s going to start having one-to-one with them. Who’s going to promote them as, as you sort of said, you, you have to try and start thinking about out of the box ways of doing this because it’s not, it’s not a common thing, especially like you can go and look at yourself management companies like Burt’s or, uh, sort of Dutch sort of healthcare provider.

[00:41:51] And they’ve got thousands of nurses and they work in the self-managed way, but we can’t copy what they do because it’s a different industry, a different way of working and then they can do things differently to how we do it. So it’s almost like you’ve got to try and think of these innovative ways to really change things up.

[00:42:05] And promotions is, it is a good one and we’ve always had in place. Um, career matrix is for many departments in the company. So very early on, actually so in 20 15, 20 16, the main departments in the company. So the SEO team, the dev team, the content. Uh, ones where we were going to get sort of grow those departments and have sort of multiple people filling the different roles we put together these matrixes, which are like, if you joined the company at an entry level, for instance, intro of SEO, um, these are the skills and experience your needs to get from that.

[00:42:37] So to be an executive to a consultant level, and it’s like a senior, so you’ve got kind of these tiers. Um, we, we put together kind of marketplace research for salary research around the different tiers of the different roles that that would be sort of when it’s a consultant to a senior, attribute that to the matrix as well.

[00:42:58] And so if you joined Reddico tomorrow, you would be kind of put onto your matrix and you’d kind of know whereabouts you are in relation to that.

[00:43:06] So we’ve now got to the point where obviously so beforehand, which was kind of managed by a manager or someone in that department would kind of manage that process and tell someone kind of where they were. And so we had to figure out a way of like, how can you sort of self manage this. We simply switched it to the case where now someone actually just, just manages their own career matrix. So if you’ve got someone who’s joined in as executive, which is kind of the lowest tier, I suppose, in SEO role, they’ve got all of these sites, 20 things so they’d need to kind of be proficient app to get to the next level because they self manage. They’re wearing matrix. We use something called the advice process, which we use throughout the company anyway, in the advice process in summary is , and everyone kind of has like a core list of their roles and responsibilities and what they’re accountable for and can kind of make changes, um, as they want to, they don’t need to get approval.

[00:43:53] However, for like certain things where it does impact a lot of people and other processes, you have to get advice and you don’t have to follow that advice. So for instance, as an example, we changed the values of the company last year and it was the values fall under my responsibilities and we were appointing.

[00:44:10] We actually want to sort of change these values. And so that impacts the whole business because everyone’s going to have new values ultimately they need to follow.

[00:44:18] And so I use the advice process and spoke to the team to kind of work, have what they kind of about the values should be. And I don’t have to follow that advice. It’s just me listening to it and understanding it and then working out my own path for that.

[00:44:29] And so this works exactly the same way that the self-management when it comes to crew matrix, so everyone has their matrix and if they think they completed something or they could go with this stuff that they completed, they would use the advice process in their team and say, look, I think I’ve done this now because anyone think any differently.

[00:44:44]And other people in the team can kind of come back and give advice and say, yeah, so you actually smashed that, or, yeah, maybe, but maybe like, you need to do like a little bit more on this area.

[00:44:52] And again like that executive as, as that power to kind of say my, I think I’ve done it, or actually I know you’re right.

[00:44:57] Maybe I should do something else. And that’s that responsibility is up to them.

[00:45:01] Until they get to the point now in that matrix where they’re the, to do that, that push from say an executive to a consultant level. But at the same time, we also realize that it’s not just about as I said earlier, kind of the skills and experience you have.

[00:45:16] There’s a lot of soft skills that come into it as well, and especially like a senior level. So if you’ve got someone that wants to become a senior in the business, going from consulting to that level, there’s all of these soft skills they need to show as well. Like being able to give sort of effective one-to-one feedback, being able to be great at communicating, being able to kind of show, um, having like a stand for inclusion or these types of things actually people would want to have it in that senior senior level. And, um, we’ve, we’ve, we’ve learned in the past that it’s really important to focus on, on these skills as well when you’ve got people, especially people in those senior roles, because they’re the ones that are the role models for other people in the team.

[00:45:51] They’re the ones that people should be looking at and say, I want to be like this person, or this is the person in the team that I really want to get to their level from both an experience. And also, uh, um, sort of the other side of things as well though. There’s kind of people skills in a way that they will show themselves on a daily basis.

[00:46:07] And so we also develop this kind of soft skills matrix as well, which kind of goes hand in hand with the career matrix. And it’s all around  self-reflection and understanding your own sort of like your own traits, your own ways of working. So we introduce things like the Myers-Briggs comes into it. People complete their own Myers Briggs and the report, they get their personality, they get their blind spots, they can start selling reflecting and on that their blind spots and things can actually happen. I’ve worked on a tap. I get better at this. Like what can I do here?

[00:46:36] And then we have eight different sort of soft skills, which we have, we’ve got expressions of that soft skills are what examples of how you might demonstrate those as well.

[00:46:44] And again, self-reflection in terms of, okay. Right. Communication. How would I score myself on that one to five, um, in different areas, you kind of write your own summary and then you would pick two people in your team to, to score. 

[00:46:57] And again, that makes that it gives you a chance to kind of get that feedback and we’ll be really kind of we want feedback all the time. We do things like 360 as well.

[00:47:05]There’s always feedback sort of going across the company, but you’re getting feedback then on, so not just your, your career and where you’re going, but also you’re asking people in the team to score you. It’s gonna be feedback on those soft skills as well.

[00:47:17] And you need to get both of those sort of bits, hand in hand, and then you can then almost promote yourself. Um, so once you’ve got the career matrix, you’ve got the soft skills matrix. You can then again, use the advice processes again, just say, look, now I’m at the point where I’m ready to be promoted. We have to include like the finance team in that advice process. Because obviously as a business, if everyone’s trying themselves, that’s going to be X amount of money that’s coming out of the pot. And we have to obviously focus on PNLs and things like that. So we didn’t include the finance team that say, look, I’m going to promote ourselves.

[00:47:45] Like, is there any issues, anything that I need to be aware of financially? Um, whether it’s the department or the business as a whole. So there’s obviously  extra mechanisms that come into it as well. But it’s just, we just got to that point now where people can automate career. And it’s a really good thing that we have where it’s just, you come into the business and you kind of think, well, this is where I can get to, and I can own this path. And I know those skills and that knowledge that I need to gain to be able to start from here and I get to here, um, and you can work out with it and it was planning your career based on that. Um, and it, I think it gives you more, more of an insight into that potential and that future than you would do, if you’re waiting on someone else to provide you, because you must waiting on, someone’s gotta see that potential in you or to, or to kind of believe you can do that.

[00:48:30] And to push it forward where we’ve now got this dynamic, where the team are kind of more supportive and more encouraging of each other, but you can own that process yourself. And if you want to progress, if you feel ambitious, your career led, you want to keep going, you’re the, almost like the master of your own ship and are able to do that rather than waiting on, on someone else to do.

[00:48:48]Danny: [00:48:48] When you were talking, it was three things that came to my head is that your lose staff? Uh, only when someone comes in with probably two leaps above where they’re at, and then they’re going to want to steal the knowledge often around what you guys are often. The second thing was, um, personal motivations is going to be so important within Reddico and what you do but personal motivations typically are money status, influence, title. So I guess they’re probably all important areas that, that sort of spring up or where you’re maybe some, sometimes need to be the leader or, or mediate on that.

[00:49:28] And the third side of it was What you and the team are doing at Reddico is very interesting. From a point of, you’re kind of taken the levels of what tech teams are rolled out in either Googles, Amazons, et cetera.

[00:49:40] And you’ve made it more personally attainable because if you speak to anyone in an Amazon, they won’t always know how to get from our 6, 9, 7. Um, so they might have to wait 18 months. They might have to do take on big pieces of work, but it’s just not open to them. So it’s almost impossible to get to that level above.

[00:50:01] Whereas actually, what you’re saying to people is if you’re the master of your own destiny, it’s as much on your collaboration and influence on others, as much as, as the work that you’re producing and what you’re showing people the end product is not just the work’s getting done, but you’re developing.

[00:50:19] And the team around you at developing, which is very smart

[00:50:23]Is there something that you feel that there’s one really important tip that you could give someone in that process? Because it sounds like something that other agencies would love to roll it out and I know if you come startups with this approach, is there like one tip that you’d give someone just to prep them in, in their journey?

[00:50:43] Luke: [00:50:43] Yes. I mean, to be honest, it would probably just be something around making it your own. Um, and the reason I say that is because we’re very kind of looking at that like career progression, putting together kind of these foundations would be eight people to be able to, to manage their own career and having these kind of matrix in place and these processes, or it’s like the work-life balance or it’s the manager situation or it’s recruitment or whatever the problem is you’re trying to solve or trying to address, you can go out and you can speak to people like you can speak to me, you can speak to yourself, you can speak to all these other people that have invented it, or have knowledge of it. Experience is everything that, I mean, you can read books, you can sort of find all of these kinds of these leaves, ways and inspiration of doing things.

[00:51:29] But I feel like it only works in a unique way for each company.

[00:51:34]I feel like you can’t just lift something from someone else and just implement straight strategy into your business because it doesn’t necessarily work because there’s different values are in place. There’s different ways people to work, and there’s a different belief system.

[00:51:46] You’ve got a different team that you’re working with. Everything is so, so different. All these kinds of, of the other things, kind of the factors to consider you, can’t just have lifting to kind of copy and paste it into your own organization.

[00:51:59] So I think that the real, I suppose if it is a tip it’s just to gain inspiration from as many sources as you can work out what the problem is.

[00:52:08] You’re trying to solve. And then try and just find your own, your own way of doing it. And you can emulate things. So you could take a we are doing for example, actually, I find that sort of great. This is how I want to do things as well. I want to go do sort of that route. I want to go down and you can tend to, it will be real key core themes from that, but it’s probably not going to work as like a whole copy and paste of lifting up and put it into your business and you could do this, just taking that inspiration and what can actually how’s that going to work? It might most effectively to give the most to my people and to be able to open up so they can control that their career and their progression, and we can move away from this rigid framework where it’s just not really talked about it. It’s not really, uh, a way for people to advance their careers, to get what they really want to out, out their work.

[00:52:56] Danny: [00:52:56] Completely agree. The one thing I’d say is from my point of view, just from stealing some of the sort of five minutes of knowledge bombs that he gave and your processes. You say around values, I would say that things that have worked for me in clients and in previous roles is shared principles. So make sure that everyone agrees on a set of principles that everyone operates to.

[00:53:19] And then you can start rolling out, bigger changes or radical changes because people are all brought into the same thing. I think one of the, the challenges almost every business has, especially if they’re more command & control or more atypical hierarchical is everyone tends to look at the most senior person and how the information flows and then they have to make a decision whether they follow it or they have to hit their goals, that might not be connected.

[00:53:46] So I’d say my tip would be, if, if you could have shared principles, then that will really guide so much of your decisions. Say many of your change requests. So many of them. so many steps on your journey. So that would be my bonus for you..

[00:54:04] Luke: [00:54:04] And I think also I appreciate that your values may well change over time as well. So when we first started this, this kind of journey, um, we put together, well, we had six new values that we introduced it in sort of 2018, like how we wanted this business to look where it’s going to go. And these are the six values when they’re going to have as a business. And as I said, last year, I revisited the values because actually they were the ones that we put in place for kind of where we thought we were going to get to. But as a business, we probably landed in a different position and different places. So those values are now kind of old hat. They weren’t as kind of tied to Reddico where we are now. And so by revisiting those and speaking to the team and working out well, what does, what does my company stand for now?

[00:54:47] Like it’s changed over time. So the values are going to change. 

[00:54:50] And so what does that look like now? What’s the differences? What are, how can we make this more relatable to where we are today? Um, and obviously, you know, when to change the values every five minutes, it’s good just to kind of review those periodically things like, are these still valuable?

[00:55:03] Are these still useful? Are these were all actionable values that people can look to it and their actions can follow these values as well. A lot of values are quite kind of bitty or don’t really give people an idea of what the expectations are in their behavior or their way of working and being themselves at work.

[00:55:20]Just reviewing those on a periodic basis because they will change over time as your business changes as you, you become more progressive, you move away from the way that things have been done in the past. Those values have changed too.

[00:55:33] Danny: [00:55:33] I think it’s GitLab up that have a number of different values in this open and they have one document that they live from.

[00:55:42] And if anyone really wants to see sort of radical transparency, I believe that they’ve got, they got it. It’s on the distributed podcast with WordPress CEO and obviously they’re, they’re fully distributed, but it’s really important if you want to see a live example of values and, and  number of changes that they go through and how deliberate they are, they wings through their day to day.

[00:56:07] Like, and it apparently it’s an ongoing joke, but people refer to it constantly. So therefore it’s obviously working, you’ve given loads of, uh, great insights into, into how you guys operate, how you’ve moved forward. The journey you’ve been on, I’d love to jump in and wrap up with the quickfire questions if you’re up for it.

[00:56:27] Uh, is there one book you’d recommend to read and what would it be?

[00:56:32] Luke: [00:56:32] It depends on what stage you are in the journey. If you’re very new. Um, and, and you’re kind of getting going. It would be something that the happy manifesto by Henry Stewart is a really good place to, to understand it, if you’re already posed for that journey.

[00:56:45] In something like reinventing organizations by Frederic Laloux is, uh, is, uh, quite a heavy book, but, um, a good reading understanding of how organizations can work differently. And even the things like the Netflix, no rules rules I read recently, it was just a really good insight into a bigger business that has a focus on culture.

[00:57:03] Because again, one of the questions I get a lot is how would this work in a bigger business? I think that’s a good example of how that culture can be successful. No

[00:57:10] Danny: [00:57:10] rules rules is, uh, is, uh, is the sort of brutal end of of it. I’d love to read it in within sort of hours pretty much, but yeah, if, if anyone wants to see the, the other end of, of you have to be a high performer and you have to have every process ready to go. That’s definitely why not a hundred percent agree, happy manifesto is it is a great book to, to kick off.

[00:57:35] Is there one podcast that you’d recommend to listen to, or a radio show or something that really resonates with you and that you listen to constantly?

[00:57:43] Luke: [00:57:43] Um, so there’s a, there’s a good one called leader morphosis by, um, uh, self managing consultant, Lisa Gill.

[00:57:50] Um, so she kind of focuses on talking to the self-managing companies and companies that are really progressive or around the world. Um, not just based in the UK, but should speak to those in America. She’s looking for companies in Africa and Asia and across the rest of Europe and places like that, and just understand how they work and then different approaches to work in and how it can have a positive impact on people. A good one.

[00:58:15] Danny: [00:58:15] Is there a newsletter or a piece of content that, that you recommend subscribing to, or that it’s must read or, or must consumer centric?

[00:58:24] Luke: [00:58:24] Um, I would say corporate rebels is my go-to. So the corporate rebels that are, um, to initially started as two blokes that quit their day job because they were frustrated with, with work and how it was and now, or where before the pandemic just traveled around the world, just speaking to these revolutionary leaders and different people.

[00:58:43] And they’ve got a really good website. It’s loads of articles on there about all different approaches to it, and it may help yourselves or various issues. They’ve got a book as well, and they’ve got newsletter. So I’ve been to plenty of content on there,

[00:58:56] Danny: [00:58:56] content Kings, um, is there a video or a course that you would recommend people to take?

[00:59:04] Luke: [00:59:04] Um, so I took the tough leadership course last year, which is T U double F. Um, and so that’s all around kind of changing, not changing mindsets, but changing the way that you, um, deal with people in like a one-to-one and changing away from kind of that, that mindset. 10 people have to do things to kind of relate it to people’s potential and creating kinds of really have good effective one to one feedback loops.

[00:59:30] So really kind of effectively, if you’re looking to help managers and your team operate in different way. Um, or if you’re looking to create the kind of self managing teams that can work and function different way as well, some really good, useful side takeaways from that, especially around sort of conflict resolution as well.

[00:59:44] We should be good.

[00:59:47] Danny: [00:59:47] That sounds perfect. And what’s your one piece of advice for anyone that’s looking to, uh, introduce, uh, a more efficient or a better culture within their organization.

[00:59:58] Luke: [00:59:58] Don’t try and do it all at once. So you can, I think put together a plan, an idea how you want to do it and just create a really strong roadmap and a foundation of how you’re going to do it.

[01:00:10] Um, and don’t worry about changes over time. Yeah. Just try. If you try and push everything out at once and push it all out to the world, it’ll probably go bang when you go wrong. And you’re very quickly, or that back to the old way of doing things or the used to take your time, you need to communicate to the team like the expectations and be really honest and say, this is something that wants to do.

[01:00:30] Um, and just, just be, could be slow and patient, but continually do stuff.

[01:00:35] Danny: [01:00:35] And lastly, it’s probably not gonna be quick fire, but if you’re taking over another business who have a cultural issue, what would the three steps be that you’d take to improve culture?

[01:00:49] Luke: [01:00:49] Um, so the first one would be just to talk to the team.

[01:00:53] I think my, my first thing would be to sit down and talk to as many people as I could, um, to find out what those frustrations are, what those concerns are, what, what are the issues that are impacting their work? What’s stopping them from doing their best. Ultimately, what are those kinds of real key issues there?

[01:01:08] Uh, I stopped in there, um, then sitting down and I suppose sharing in that wave with whoever it is that’s in charge, but for that’s, uh, uh, directors or it’s the board, whether it’s kind of a top leadership team or senior tomorrow that might be, and also kind of talk to them separately as well. And as a group and work out how they want the business to function, where they wanted to go.

[01:01:30] Like, what’s their, I suppose, idea for this, my work ways that they really wants to do, because a lot of the time it’s, it’s those people that are holding the business back and then they don’t really want that to kind of get to where you went to go to. Anyways, it’s about kind of changing those mindsets really important.

[01:01:46] Um, and then the, it would then be creating that plan and that vision about what that better, better future could have liked for the company. Once you kind of really spoke to as many groups as you can to work out what those frustrations are, it’s starting to pick face to face.

[01:02:02]Danny: [01:02:02] Thank you for being so honest and open today.

[01:02:05]if someone wants to try and hit on you or wants to connect with you, where’s the best place is that, and how to connect with you?

[01:02:13] Luke: [01:02:13] Yeah. So I’m available in multiple places or LinkedIn and catch or connect with me on there or anything that we’ve talked to today. I can also share those as well.

[01:02:22] So we’ve even got like an open hand book, which I can share. I can pass it down if you want. Um, gives me more informationon Reddico how it work, on Twitter and also just emails, so luke.kyte@reddico.co.uk, happy to kind of do your email chat. So

[01:02:40] Danny: [01:02:40] thank you very much.

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