# Webinar report: Creating a common culture across 12 different time zones **Jonathan Davies** 37 mins read --- Miro’s head of people AJ Josephson joined us for an online fireside chat to discuss the intersections between HR and Internal Comms, the challenges that hyper growth presents to culture, and the practical tips that we shared around novel ways to engage people remotely. AJ had been at Miro for 18 months and is responsible for the implementation of a strong shared culture. The company grew from 230 to 460 people in the span of a year, so this wasn't a small challenge! Watch the recording or read on below to find tips on developing an intercultural understanding, how to find values that resonate with an entire company, cohesive onboarding and many more. Fireside chat: Creating a common culture across 12 different timezones from Happeo on Vimeo --- **Jonathan Davies:** Hi everyone, good morning, good afternoon, depending on which time zone you're in. AJ you're in San Francisco so it's morning for you, isn't it? **AJ Josephson:** Probably the earliest. **Jonathan Davies:** Absolutely. To everybody coming in, I will be repeating this throughout the webinar: if you've ever joined one of our fireside chats or webinars, you know, that I rant this all the time, chat is opened during the entire fireside chat. I encourage everybody to talk and react to each other. We always have some lovely knowledge sharing going on, definitely engage with each other and with AJ, and myself. We also have a separate Q&A section, which is where you can ask your questions. Now, as always, this session is meant to be completely interactive. I ask two opening questions, just to set the mood a little, because it's fireside chat after all. After that, it's all up to you. Any burning questions that you have about HR at one of the world's fastest growing companies right now, well, AJ is going to be your man. **AJ Josephson:** Definitely, excited for this chat and looking forward to the questions. Anything I can share about Miro's crazy last 12 months, the good, the bad, and definitely the ugly, more than happy to share here. **Jonathan Davies:** Nice. Great opportunity here to talk very openly about the human side of business and culture, and how that meets organizational ends during some crazy times with scale. Miro just got their series B financing of $50 million in April, if I'm correct? **AJ Josephson:** Yes exactly. **Jonathan Davies:** That's a big injection to grow from. How many people are you now AJ? **AJ Josephson:** We are 460 right now. On February 1st, versus when we started a year ago, we were 240. We've pretty much doubled for the year already, and we haven't started Q4 yet. It's been a crazy time to have that kind of growth going through COVID, being around the world. It's been really rewarding, but it's been a tough year to be the head of HR. --- **AJ Josephson:** Definitely one of the big challenges, and I think my view is really informed by when I spent a lot of my twenties in a youth development organization called AIESEC. That was all about developing intercultural understanding amongst young leaders and basically what that was doing with exchange programs and live conferences was having people from around the world sharing their worldviews, and educating each other. It kind of taught me that culture is real and people see the world really differently. I think that's important when you think about creating a common culture across 12 time zones, which is across multiple continents, it's really important to remember that people see the world differently and come from different perspectives. So, firstly, do you want to actually create a culture that respects and includes people from different cultures? Or, do you want to create a culture in one place and implement that around the world? I don't think one's bad or good, but it's a different strategy. A lot of tech companies are really California companies. I live in the Bay area, again I've worked for them beforehand, Salesforce, Dropbox, great examples. They have a strong culture that is really rooted in California, and then they articulate that and export it around the world and they train people on that kind of paradigm and values. For us, we're a third in the US, we've got a hundred people in Amsterdam. We're a half in Russia right now. We have people with lots of different ways of relating social identities, political beliefs, values. What we chose to do is to be global in the sense of recognizing that diversity and including all those perspectives. And then create a culture to help make people be able to collaborate effectively across those differences. We have very specific values and very specific collaborative norms, that help people know how to interact even if you're talking to people who've never been to each other's countries, even if you're talking to people who've never met someone from Russia or the US before, they can still connect and collaborate effectively in Miro. --- **AJ Josephson:** It’s great to be here and to share and kind of pull up for air a little bit. I'm hoping I can share with the group some real answers about what it's really like. I don't want to give you just spin. Although I know there's a lot of Comms people here who can advise me on how to communicate better, so I’m open to feedback, but I want to give you some real answers, let you know what we've tried to do, what the big lessons learned are, what I wish I knew a year ago. Maybe some of the things that the Miro team has done well, that maybe people want to emulate. Before going to these details, let me give a quick introduction to myself and Miro. Before what – why Miro? Everyone feels the pain of being distributed and working from home, and the challenges of keeping informed decision making, getting on the same page, creating together. That's really the challenge that Miro grew out of. We're a key part of the remote tool stack. Generally my day is filled with meetings with Zoom plus Miro plus Slack. That's our real toolkit. Miro fills that online collaborative, white boarding sign. It's like a launched shared document or infinite canvas on which you can put any ideas, frameworks, other documents for ideation, decision-making planning, product development, agile workflows, that whole thing. We're lucky to have the important challenge of being a big part of what's happening in the world right now, which is helping people stay connected, giving literally millions of people a little sense of normality in how they're working, and even the job security that comes with that. --- **Jonathan Davies:** Amazing. First off, thank you for also wanting to be very open about talking about all of the things you've learned, and the things that you want to do differently. I'm definitely looking forward to touching upon that. I know we talked a little bit about it, so that's going to be a fun topic to discover, but I think first, we need to set the stage a little bit, because we already said this webinar is about creating a common goal culture across 12 different time zones. --- **AJ Josephson:** We did just close out, we do an engagement survey every six months and we have a number of factors that we assess on, and we track over time. We try to keep them pretty narrow. We're not looking for 50 factors. We're looking for like 12 factors. We can really see if there's a shift in them. I think when we look over this data, we see some highlights - nearly everyone in the company feels proud that they're part of Miro, which is wonderful. They feel a strong identity, our scores around job satisfaction, around sense of inclusion, around expectations, around their manager, are all very strong and they're kind of key measures that I'd be tracking. If we dipped on those things, I'd be very concerned, and would jump in. The way we use this data is, we get it, we report back to the team, and we say “hey, here's a bunch of themes that people are asking to change”. And they're saying, “Hey, we're interpreting this as if we change X, I'd be even more engaged.” Then we invite employees to discuss those areas, so that every team gets together and discusses their own team engagement scores. Then we have cross-company teams coming together to discuss these different themes. If people identify career progress as a pain point, then we'll have a team discussing that. Also having our employee resource groups, for different minorities and underrepresented groups come together to discuss their perspective on this data set. --- **AJ Josephson:** There are definitely differences in how people feel comfortable sharing. I think any solution needs to provide the, the learning nerd word for this is scaffolding, different levels. You can pick from people who want something a bit easier to answer for them, well actually, what I consider easy to answer is not easy to answer for everybody. Let people know, let people choose how deep they go. --- **AJ Josephson:** We have a really creative team who are iterating on this model. My favorite thing we've done is like office speed dating. Getting everyone together and doing five or seven minute chats in little groups, and we give them a bunch of cards to play with, with questions on them. --- There are lots of kinds of employees, lots of kinds of needs, and serving, trying to be creative in how you serve those different needs with data is kind of my key advice.