Dom Monkhouse - Easy changes to make your workplace better

So I've spent most of my life in hosting. So when you go on the Internet and you look at a web page, whatever it might be, what it doesn't, what it probably doesn't occur to you is that has to live somewhere on a computer and Rackspace and PEER1 were both companies with lots of sheds full of air conditioning and computers, which is where the Internet lives.

Rackspace hosted 2 percent of the Internet. PEER1 did 1 percent of the Internet. And that's where I've spent most of my life. And it's not very exciting, what we do is pretty dull. And in terms of competitive space and commoditization, there are 33, 000 hosting companies around the world with more than 1 million worth of turnover.

So there's lots of people doing it. One man and his dog buy a couple of servers in your mom's bedroom. You've got a hosting company. And so to try and create some space in the market, it's, well, how do you compete? What is it you could be at? What, what is it you could go to market with? At Rackspace, I decided we would go to market with service.

Most people have a very low. Expectation of the service level they're going to get from their I. T. Provider much of that is drive from the I. T. Support that they get from internal I. T. At work, which tends to be completely crap and only your bank seem to hate you more than internal I. T. So people have people have a very low expectation of service and when we started Rackspace, our competitors were people like B.

T. And cable and wireless. They were big telcos who really are in the denial of service business. They see service as a cost. Rather than a way of competing. And so, really my story is this, I've got a series of sort of tales to tell, or stories to tell, or what have you, from the last sort of 15 years of building businesses, which really it's around how do you, and it's, I think it's very simple.

You don't start about the profitability. It's a great piece of work. A couple of books actually, Service Profit Chain, and then rewritten as the Service Value Chain. And basically they say, you can't go and generate profit. What you have to do is you have to start at the other end. And you've got to have a reason to exist, You've got to hire people who believe in your reason to exist.

You've got to make them happy. They in turn will, as a result of being happy at what they do, be good at it. Customers will be happy. They'll spend more money and tell their friends, word of mouth marketing and then you'll become profitable. And it seems to me that that's really, really simple and straightforward.

I can get my head around that. So that's what I've done. That sort of sums it up really. Happy customers, more profit, happy staff. In any order, it's just a circular thing and, and that's what, that's what I've done. The other thing I've done is something that Henry once pointed out to me that I'm good at, and that is, if I see something which is good and it works I'll steal it and I'll roll it out.

I'll try really, really hard not to forget it and many companies I go into either as a consultant or as an assessor, or in fact businesses where I've worked you see that there's a bit of the organization that does something really, really well, and the whole company used to do it, and then large chunks of it forgot it, and somebody calls that a Doctor Who moment in their business, where you turn around thinking that this is a way we did it, and it was great, and then all of a sudden it was too hard, or it was too difficult, or they hired some new people, and it wasn't written down, so, well, they just stopped, and so it's gone back to being shit again.

So this is actually, if you're a gent, and you go to Schiphol Airport, you go to the gents, and you realize they've got a fly in the porcelain, And the reason they've got that is because the architect of Schiphol Airport used to be in the Dutch Army, and in the Dutch Army, they put a red dot on the toilets.

Because if you give a bloke something to aim at, it reduces splashback 65%, and so your cleaning costs come down, and the toilets aren't quite so minging. So, this is a you know, but why doesn't everybody do that? And that's what, that's what I find amazing about, you know, building a company full of happy people to make more money.

Why doesn't everybody do it? Well, I'll come on to that. So one of the things that we did at Peir One actually, in answer to your question earlier about leadership and investment is we started ourselves on this journey in 2009. What? Just after I joined and I guess it was about making. It was about what we do.

What do we have to do to build a great company? And it starts with the leadership. Were we successful? Well, we sold the business in 2013 for 635 million. Which was the highest EBITDA multiple anyone had got from a managed services business. So from that perspective, it was success. What we did with the leadership team is we took the 14 people who really ran the business globally, and we took them off site for a whole week, once a quarter.

And we didn't talk about running the business. We worked on the relationships that those 14 people had with one another. Because actually, you can't fix the business unless the people at the top trust each other and are on the same team. And so, for example, the SVP of sales, his team is not sales, his team is the executive team.

And so that 14 people had to create a team, a global team and there are three, there are three legs to the sort of the trust model that we use. One is, do I think you're any good at the job you do? Because I can't trust you if I don't think you are. Do we communicate enough? Because I will never trust you if we don't and trust will break down if communication levels are low.

And the other one is, do I like you? Because actually, if I hate you, we're probably on the hiding to nothing on. So, you know, that was that was what we worked on when we went off site on one of the other things, which had a huge impact with something called no triangulation. So if Henry came to me and said, you know, came to me and said, Tim's awful.

I hate him. I can't work with him. He's an idiot. He might just be ranting at me, and that's fine. I can say, Look, I'm not getting drawn into this discussion. I understand you might have to blow off some hot air, but I'm going to give you 72 hours to have that conversation with Tim. Otherwise, I'm going to tell him that's how you feel about him.

And that is really hard. I tell you, that's hard. But, if you don't do that, then people don't have difficult conversations. Right? So, if you have a direct report, ever, if you've had one, there will be times that their performance is crap, and you don't tell them you think it's crap. So you never get to find out why.

They never get to find out that you're dissatisfied. It just goes on. So that was really hard. And once we got it at the executive team level, then we rolled that down the organization, and that had the biggest, biggest impact. That, that having deliberate, difficult conversations was the biggest change we made in that business.

So you shouldn't hire everybody. I think if I think about a job ad, there's a great great book I read, I can't remember the name of the title of it now, for the But, the thing at the end, there was a chapter on writing job ads. And it said, if you treat a job ad like a date, or if you treated a date like a job ad, you would be the most unsuccessful dater in history.

Because, if you think about most job ads, it says, the first third is about me, the second third is about the job, and then the last third is about you. And if you did a date like that, she'd just, she or he would just get up and walk out. Because talking about you for at least an hour is probably a bit dull in the date.

What you should do is, is most of the time you're not after people who are unemployed. You're after somebody who's in a job and isn't, as finding it slightly less frustrating than they would working for you, assuming you're a good employer. Therefore your job ad should be, what is it that you love, what is it that slightly sucks about where you are?

Because it doesn't, it sucks much less here. Right? And it should be that you should be targeting your job ad to try and pull somebody in, Because they want to work at you, you're more attractive. It shouldn't, and that way you can you reduce the number of applicants, but you get better quality applicants.

But you've got to know who you're trying to hire, because then you can go out and sort of write a job ad around trying to pull them in. And one of the things that I do is, is the first, there's a couple of bits of things I do. One of, is certainly when I hired the team at PEER1, the first 50 people I hired were the best core team I managed to build.

And that first 50, if you're building an organization, are absolutely critical. Because after that you don't get a chance to hire anybody. They're all gonna do the hiring. And if you've hired people who aren't very good, they will hire other people who aren't very good. And you get a cascade of morons. But this was what I do is I get a blank sheet of paper as I do telephone screening and, you know, read the CVs, scan them quickly to make sure they've got some skills of something.

Graduates, it doesn't matter cause they're expert on everything. So you just have to take that for read. But what I do is I give people a blank sheet of paper and a packet of coloring pencils. And I say, Spend 10 minutes. Draw me a picture. What motivates you and inspires you? I leave the room, let them get on with it, come back in and then I spent 20 minutes talking to him about the picture.

And so this is an example of a good picture. You know, this is somebody we hired into a team leader role. They like challenges. They like bringing people with them. They've got a sunny disposition. You know, they just tell you everything. I mean, they tell you stuff about, you know, their husband, their wives, their parents, their kids, their house.

You know, where they went to school, what they want to do when they retire. I mean, everything. One guy even told me he had a drug habit. He wasn't, I don't think he was going to tell me that when he came in. That wasn't on his plan. But, I said, why did you leave the job? Was it all sex, drugs, and rock and roll?

And when we did, when we ruled out it wasn't. Anyway. You can see that. So, and people just sort of open up. And they can't, they haven't prepared for it. So, it becomes really, and the thing is, I don't want to hire dull people. I want to hire people that I want to go to the pub with. At least for a pint and a half Because they're not going to get more exciting when they talk to our customers.

They're going to get this is them selling themselves. This should be when the, and I want people who, who are interested in something. I don't care what it is. So here's another thing. This is about rules. I hate rules. HR in particular. But so this is the thing is, is if you had no rules, people wouldn't come to work naked.

You just have to accept that some people are going to be good enough without you having to tell them what to do all the time. At PEER1 we had a pool table. And I remember one of our customers, Ian, who, who runs a business which is in the Sunday Times best places to work came round and I was showing him round the office and we got to the pool table and he said, what are the rules?

And I said, it's fine, look, they're on the wall here, British 8 ball, so that people don't argue about whether it's two shots when you miss black or whatever it might be. And he said, no, what are the rules? I said, Ian, I have no idea what you're talking about. And he said, when can people play pool? And I went, well, whenever they like.

And he went, well, why don't they play pool all day? I said, well, because they've got jobs. And, and the people they work with would notice if they played pool all day. And they'd do something about it. And it's just this idea that as a manager, my job is to, my job is to sort of make sure that people turn up and do shit.

And it's not my job. My job is to motivate them and inspire them. And they need to turn up and do shit, otherwise they'll get fired. You know, but anyway, that's One of the things I did is I created an email address called Alias stupidrulesofPEER1. com I said to people, and I suppose it goes in a way back to the sort of Doctor Who moments, Because in the organization at the time I don't know, we were about 50 people in the UK, You just get as you grow, you just get people not quite all on the same page with what the rules are, what you're allowed to do, what you're not allowed to do. In fact, some people might even have some good ideas about what might make a difference to some customers. And so I just said, send me all the things and do it. Reply all in this case so that we can sort of start, you know, people can chip in so you don't.

So people aren't duplicating effort. And in the UK, I got 40. I paid a tenner. 10 pound M&S voucher for every one people sent in. That was great. We fixed them all bar one, because you can't load balanced Plesk, and I understand that none of you know what that means, but that's fine. All of the others we got fixed.

So one person said, why don't we pay credits proactively? We have been doing for two years, in the new office, why is there not going to be any car parking? There is. So there was lots of stuff that weren't rules, that were just sort of information. When I rolled, when I took over, there the global role, and there'd been not quite so much communication in the past with the team.

I managed to get 350 which actually took me three months to work our way through, and that turned into 90 self improvement projects driven by the team, just asking the team. And so, there is always plenty to do, and the team always have a good idea about what will make a difference for customers. One, Facebook, or just one of the things that I, this, this is a sort of personal rant really. I used to run an IT services business in London. And I used to go and see MDs of businesses and they used to say, how can I change the router or the firewall so staff can't look at Facebook on the way in? And I said, oh, we've got a solution for that. We've also got chains. So you can shackle them to their chair and I think you should take, take their mobile phones off them as they come into the building in case they waste their time talking to people as well.

And some people didn't think I was joking. And it's just that. It's just that, honestly, if that's how your people are, well, you know, I don't think your business is ever going to be amazing. I just think it's about trust. One of the things that we did here, this is PEER1. This is about employment, I guess.

Look, it's hard to get good people. And when I was in London, I was living in London, working in Farringdon. And I said to people that I was going to go and open an office for a Canadian business in Port, in Southampton. And they all said I was mental. Because, you know, how could I get good people in Southampton?

It's sort of like, you know, once you leave the M 25, you know, the quality of staff goes off a cliff. I wanted to do it actually, because running businesses in central London, even good businesses like rag space, we had staff turnover in the low mid twenties, and that was too high. You have to keep re retraining people.

Customer relationships in particular have to keep getting redone, and that drives customers mad. Why is my account manager changed three times in six months? So I deliberately took it to Southampton, having spent some time with Dell, who'd moved to Glasgow and had found underemployment in Glasgow.

People in a bar wanting to become account managers. They were good, but they'd moved back to Glasgow for whatever reason. So we put it in Southampton, and then if you want to become an employer of choice, you have to do something that makes you stand out. Now, so this might not have got the coverage it did if we'd opened in London, but we opened in Southampton and for two weeks we had journalists and film crews in the office.

We got Sunday Times had us covered, Metro had us covered. All the national papers in the U. K. covered us. We're in the Daily Telegraph's list. Fifteen coolest offices in Europe, not Google. That was a slide that we put in so that I - just said I'd quite like a slide in the office. I've wanted a slide for ages.

It's just good fun. You go down and you can't help but smile. And so that's from the first floor to reception. So if somebody came to visit me, I just jump on the slide and pop up at reception and say hello. We don't have, the business doesn't have a receptionist. It has some colored feet that you go in and you sort of sign in on an iPad.

Because I think reception is one of those, you know, honestly, what a terrible job. Normally sitting out there isolated from everybody, cold. Terrible, so we didn't have one. We re jigged all the desks every two months. So for one rotation you sat with your team, so all sales sat together, all finance sat together.

And then for the other rotation it was random, sometimes. Other times it was deliberate, but we mixed people up. Because otherwise you turn up new, and you sit on the edge. You know, and there's a group of six people who've worked together for ten years, and, you know but actually I managed to, I talked to a guy from P.

W. Consulting who had done some research and he said if you get a pod of sort of six or eight people, they, any, in anyone, in anybody in the business, in your head, are six, the six people you go to in your company to get shit done. And what will happen over time is those six to eight people who share a desk will end up with the same six to eight people that they go to to get shit done.

If you mix them up, across, you know, then people end up with much broader, you know, sort of building synapses through the business. New people get to, to know how to get things done. So this was great fun. It had a pub, it had swings. The decision to put the pub in was made when I wasn't there.

They had a site meeting and I wasn't there so they decided to put a pub in. And that's fine. That, one of the things that I did is to give people leadership opportunities. We had a social committee that did events. We had a charity committee. We had an office rebuild committee. You know, anything that didn't need me, I wasn't part of.

We would delegate the budget. People who are interested. We even had a group of people who looked at our T's and C's and benefits that I didn't. They did. They care about it. Frankly, I couldn't care less. You know, a bit like the John Lewis thing. Your benefits have to be great, but what benefits matter to staff?

How do I know? I'm not staff. I run the place. So, I would try and delegate that down and create teams of people to get on and fix those things. This is One of the other things that, it's hard. Creating a good business is hard. I mean there was something the other day that I looked at.

There's Malcolm Gladwell's talked about 10, 000 hours, the effort you need to put in. But really if you look at lots of things, you know, Tiger Woods or somebody like that, it's four hours a day for ten years, right? I mean, this is, you know, if you want to be world class, this shit is hard work and needs dedication and focus.

And if you don't, you know, just gonna be a bit shit. So you know, here's one of the other things you can do, though which is good, which was my happy check. Every Wednesday at I. T. Lab, people will get an email saying, How are you? And that would come through to me. Nobody else. And so if you were sad, I could pick the phone up and find out why you weren't happy.

And I rolled that out at I. T. Lab, and I took it with me to PEER1. And I might be on the other side of the world and somebody just say they were sad and I could either ping them an email or jump on the phone and say, what is it? And that was just quite often, you know, they didn't have the resources or we were asking them to work too long hours or that some customer, you know, being abusive, whatever it might be.

But, you know, it's just at the moment you get it. Have you had a bad day? And that gives me the opportunity to sort of reach across and see what I can do to help people out. I have a thing about values. Because there is Enron. Fantastic business. Integrity, respect, and excellence. Honestly, I don't think you should have integrity, respect, and excellence in your values.

Because I just think you should have them in your business. And I don't think you need to write them down anywhere. But you know, I was looking at an industry the other day, And There were five companies I looked at, And they all had integrity in their values. Five competitors.

Absolutely couldn't put a paper between them based on their values. And, and you can't, you can't make the business feel unique or the staff feel energized about working there. If when they look at something like the values, it just looks the same as everybody else. Okay, I'm moving on quickly. One minute.

I work, I've been doing some consulting in the business. And it's been so long since I'd seen broken chairs in a conference room. And I'm working there, and I've been there for two weeks. And it seemed to me that I was the only person who noticed that there were broken chairs in the conference rooms.

Or whiteboard markers that don't work, and then people put them back. And to me they're just signs that the business is just fundamentally broken. There's something wrong at the core of this business that somebody, anybody, don't care who, walked in and went, broken chair, I'll go and fix that. They don't, they walk in and go, oh, broken chair.

The broken chair guy hasn't been in again. And he just, that, there, that's honestly, it's funny, but that's the difference between going in as an assessor or an outside into a business and going, this is a good business or there's something wrong here. Clive Woodward wrote a book called "Winning"; About Winning the World Cup and he talked about the difference between not winning and winning, 99 2003, was negativity.

And he wouldn't pick a player who was negative when they were down at half time. And, and I think that can be absolutely debilitating in the organization. It's another one of these difficult conversations. You've just got to tell people they're miserable. And they've got to sort their shit out. Just, if you have miserable people, and they don't get it together, get them out.

Honestly, five times more corrosive than happy people are positive. Just whinging on all the time. Can't be dealing with it. Get rid of them. Couple of books that I just think, I wish I'd read this one before I started. But this is the guy who set up and owns and runs Patagonia. Fantastic book.

It's sort of the life lessons that he picked up along the way being running a multi, multi million dollar business that he wish he'd known at the beginning. And I think it's fantastic. First break all the rules. Some of the things in here are counterintuitive and that's why the, what's, that's what the book's about.

You know, for example, if you're a sales manager, or if you, if I take a retail example. So something that Tesco's or John Lewis would do, they'd know where the, where the best retail space in their store would be. So, you know, end of an aisle normally. And you'd get a 20 percent uplift for stuff when you put in the end of an aisle.

And so you put your best selling line there. Because 20 percent of your best selling line is the most money you can make. Then when we have people, we do it differently. So, if you're the manager of a sales team, often you'll see managers spend the most of their time with their least, their worst people.

Because they're trying to get their worst people up. They'd actually be better off spending 80 percent of their time with the 20 percent best people And improving them, improving their performance. And so, you know, that's just one of the things in that in that book that talks about what the great managers know.

And the average managers haven't, it hasn't occurred to them. Here's a book I listened to recently. Lensioni's done some written some good books. Five dysfunctions of team is one that we worked through at the executive team at PEER1. But this is about the core purpose, mission, vision and values.

And I've done some work with a business of consulting with at the moment, and we've come up with a new core purpose. For this IT service business. And it's, God, now I've completely forgotten what it is. Fearless Champions of Better is the core purpose for NovaScope. But you can't tell anybody because we haven't rolled it out yet.

You know, that actually goes to the core of their business. It goes to the way the executives lead. It's how the, how the key staff work. If we'd all read The Advantage before, we'd have done a better job or more quickly of coming up with that and the core values and core purpose.

So that one was, that one's very good.