THE UNICORN WITH A “NO SHOES” OFFICE
Imagine walking into an office for a professional meeting and upon opening the door you’re welcomed by a crowd of busy, shoeless workers. What’s more, before you go any further, you too have to take off your shoes.
Welcome to Gusto.
Gusto is an online payroll, benefits, and HR service that seeks to reimagine and simplify human resource practices for businesses across America. One of the brains behind Gusto and this shoe-less office is its CEO and co-founder, Joshua Reeves.
Why the “no shoes” policy? Reeves was raised in a no-shoes household. When he and his co-founders began working on Gusto in an upstairs bedroom of a Palo Alto house, they continued the tradition. Though the company began to grow, the tradition remained.
Even before Gusto, Reeves was no stranger to Silicon Valley. Prior to the HR company, Reeves was the CEO and co-founder of startup Unwrap. Facing one of his toughest business decisions ever, Reeves and the team decided to sell Unwrap to Context Optional in 2010. It didn’t take long before Reeves was wrapped up in his newest and greatest venture. In 2011, Reeves and his co-founders Edward Kim and Tomer London launched Gusto.
Six years and 450 employees later, Gusto has become a leading all-in-one HR platform supporting modern companies across the U.S. Valued at $1.1 billion, the company serves more than 40,000 customers with offices in San Francisco and Denver.
With experience running two successful companies in the competitive Bay Area, it’s no doubt that Reeves knows a thing or two about being an effective leader. Here’s Reeves’ take on leading workplace culture.
What’s culture?
There’s no right or wrong culture—there are many ways to build a company and many ways to have a culture. I think what’s most important is leaders in a company being opinionated and being authentic. It should be a byproduct of what feels natural.
Culture is simply your values and your traditions. Traditions are things that develop organically, and values are things that are very core. It’s spending the time to understand what that core value system is and in the way it’s maintained, and that should really drive hiring.
We have three pillars to hiring, and it’s all about alignment—values alignment, motivations alignment and skill set alignment. For values and motivation, every company is different, and you have to find out what you stand for. Motivation is hugely important, because motivation proves if someone really cares about the problem we’re fixing and if they’re really going to be proud and excited.
In some ways, Gusto every six to 12 months is almost a whole new company because there are a bunch of new people. So a lot of the puzzles that I think about are around scaling: What’s right for a 450-person company vs. a 50-person company? At 50, I was the one that could talk to everyone: I made every offer; I onboarded each person. That doesn’t scale.
It forces you to revisit the question of what is right for this next phase of Gusto, not just what’s worked really well in the past. And that matters in hiring, too. Who is the right person for this role, for this next phase of Gusto?
I do welcome workshops every two weeks with every person joining Gusto. They’re mostly a discussion around our values, our mission, and our market. I tell everyone this is how I connect to these values and this is why I care about the problem we’re trying to fix for small businesses. And you’re here because I know you also care about it because that’s why you joined. This is my company, this is your company, we’re all equity holders—this is our business.
At every welcome workshop, I play a video clip from Steve Jobs. It’s a 1995 video clip where he talks about how the world around us was created by people that are no smarter than us and how we can change this world, we can improve it, and we can make our mark upon it. If you poke life, it will poke back.
What’s your role in leading culture?
I think the first one is introspection—understanding yourself, understanding your motivations and your values, as well as having a sense of what you stand for and what drives you.
Second, I think it’s really important to realize that my role is to be of service, to be a steward, to go enable others to do great work. In our org charts, I’m at the bottom—I’m here to enable and empower others.
And then the third is being ok not knowing something and being ok being wrong at times. I would call this “growth mindset”—constantly wanting feedback and realizing that everything we do can get better. There’s no top of the mountain. It’s just a continual climb to improve.
My leadership style is to make sure that everyone at Gusto understands what our due north is—our purpose, our mission—and have that be baked into our hiring. But from there, I’m a steward. I’m a guide to help us navigate that journey.
What habits help you lead?
Introspection. Every day, I either try to garden or go on a run. It’s very therapeutic and invaluable to realize, especially in nature, all of the things that are much bigger and broader than us. Exercise is great because it’s a repetitive action; you can have the mind wander. Daydreaming is really valuable. It’s not a time of being in control to look at an email or to respond to a message or to speak about a specific topic. I try not to have anything smartphone related 30 minutes after waking up and 30 minutes before bed.
More professionally, at least monthly, I go through how I spend my time and how it was aligned with how I intended to spend my time.
How do you individually reinforce culture?
I think even prior to that is making sure that there’s an alignment around what the goal is and what success is. So, the heart of that conversation is the one-on-one that happens between the individual and their manager. At Gusto, you talk to your manager, you share with them what goals you have, they share with you the goals the company has, you find alignment, and you get feedback. And when something is successful, there should be really strong validation of that.
How do you corporately reinforce culture?
A number of ways.
When I join meetings, I go in very deliberately making sure people understand whether I’m the decision-maker or if I’m there to give input. It’s important to clarify that because people tend to be biased in not wanting to disagree with a leader. I think it’s really important if the leader is not the decider or just is giving an opinion, it could definitely be wrong. We’re all just people. I’m not going to have all the ideas—I want people to agree or disagree and push back often.
Early on, we would do something called a “work-cation,” which was the whole company spending a week in an Airbnb and basically doing a hackathon. We would choose projects on the first day, organize into teams, and then do presentations on Friday of what we worked on. We would also go hiking and do outdoor activities.
With the larger company now, we do something we call “Gustoway.” It’s something we do annually, and it evolves every year. Last year we did it at a Boy Scout camp and it was mostly a set of workshops, plus just relaxing, having a campfire, and enjoying being in nature.
I think these things should feel really organic. It should feel like a community—these are people that care about each other and we want that to feel natural and to create these different programs to augment that.
Where do most Leaders go wrong on culture?
I think a very clear pitfall is thinking that the way others do something is the way you should do it. It’s an interesting dynamic. As an individual, what makes someone most successful is doing it their own way. In school, if you’re going to study for an exam, it’s all on you. Once you understand your best way to study, you can be successful—but there are many ways to study.
You need to lead your culture according to what’s important to you.