Minding Your Business

Barcelona is home to hundreds of new startups every year, making for an ever-growing community of local founders who are faced with ever-changing business expectations. Technology and globalization have made it easier to build remote teams, yet they have also forced us to reassess workflow and productivity. While we are increasingly connected to clients and colleagues, these relationships are often distant and shallow, making us more independent and isolated than ever before.

Modern day founders are forced to innovate constantly in order to keep up with these latest trends. Each generation to enter the workplace has new notions on how to work, communicate and develop careers. For older generations, understanding the myriad new options available to digital nomads can be intimidating and confusing.

More and more people today are working remotely, enjoying flexible hours, working from home or cafés and touching base with their teams via video or instant chat. This is convenient and efficient for the individual, yet it can be a huge strain on a company’s culture and internal relationships, which raises a difficult question for founders and team leaders ...

How do you develop and maintain a team culture of communication when most members of that team have never even met?

There are several ways to build a strong culture despite a geographically dispersed business. Apps like Slack and Skype allow teams to stay connected, but we need to build on these systems to actively encourage a culture of open discussion, trust and regular feedback.

This isn’t an easy process, and there are many different ways of going about it, starting with honest communication within senior management teams to set the example for everyone else. According to entrepreneur and employee engagement expert Glenn Elliott, who built a $1 billion revenue global tech business where he was CEO for 11 years, it’s in founders’ best interests to make communication a priority. In his book “Build It: The Rebel Playbook for Employee Engagement,” he highlights various case studies that demonstrate how engaged employees with a shared company vision build stronger, more resilient businesses.

Undoubtedly, one of the best forms of communication is still face-to-face. In studies by Gallup and Harvard Business Review, it is highlighted that in-person interactions are far more beneficial because they result in better problem solving, increased trust, quicker decision making, stronger bonds and, in some cases, even long-term happiness. That means that regular face-to-face contact should remain a vital part of any organization, even more so in today’s increasingly connected world.

This is our focus at Utterly Events and why I founded the company three years ago. We facilitate opportunities for companies to meet face-to-face, strengthen their culture and celebrate their teams. We know firsthand the challenges that founders face and we enable them to build cross-functional/regional relationships in an interactive and engaging environment.

The most effective way to get the ball rolling is to have a budget in place for team days and offsites. This doesn’t necessarily mean an all-employees trip abroad, with an endless program and an open bar tab. (However, I wouldn’t rule it out if you have the budget!) Instead it can be as simple as quarterly team days, with ice-breaker activities and ideally some form of training or education. In addition to developing bonds between team members, team days are the perfect opportunity to build excitement and motivation by addressing future plans or newsworthy company updates.

As long as it’s frequent, consistent and encourages in-person contact between people who wouldn’t necessarily have much contact, team days are certainly a step in the right direction toward better communication. In my experience, on both my own team and the companies we plan events for, after just a few years of incorporating team days into an annual schedule, I’ve found that all of the teams tend to be much stronger and more cohesive.

Building your own network

I am fortunate enough to have met many founders with businesses of different shapes and sizes. Across them all, one of the top three priorities is maintaining company culture, especially as those companies scale up. However, there is another major aspect of communication that founders, more often than not, don’t take into consideration: maintaining their own communications and support network.

Being a founder — especially a founder without co-founders — can be a lonely existence, one that’s been exacerbated by our increasingly isolating digital environment. I see this in most of the other fellow founders I work with. They have no bosses nor overarching structure to guide them because they themselves are responsible for all aspects of the business. They dedicate their lives to nourishing and growing that business, which often results in a lack of social interactions with friends, family and people outside of their industry.

Obviously, this does not apply to everyone. However, most successful founders that I meet rely on and cherish their network. I would encourage anyone, founder or not, to work on developing a circle of support, whether it’s made of family, friends, professional contacts or all of the above. Some of the most valuable networks are peer-to-peer, developing relationships with other founders at a similar level. After all, it’s very reassuring to know you can lean on people who understand what you are going through because they’ve been there themselves too.

No matter the country, industry or business model, founders face similar problems with company culture, communication and management — problems that are best discussed, well, face-to-face! But where?

At Smiling Barracuda, a club launched by Utterly Events for “overworked, underpaid” founders, members get access to a platform from which they develop valuable connections with experts and peers alike. To date, Smiling Barracuda has connected founders who are about to fundraise with finance directors and other founders who have gone through several rounds of fundraising — both successful and not — for advice and support. We’ve also matched founders with grant writers to help win awards and government funding and we’ve welcomed universities and wider initiatives to support research and provide internships. All this, in addition to workshops in which we encourage open discussion on topics such as remote working, which is still a relatively new concept that most of us are still trying to figure out how best to manage.

Thanks to Barcelona, where Utterly was founded and where our core team currently operates. Barcelona is still building the kind of centralized startup support system that cities like London and Berlin already have in heaps. To compete with those big tech hubs, we aim to create a foundation of trust among local founders and their businesses through in-person events. By encouraging them to develop a trusted network of other like-minded people, their knowledge and inspiration will spread among their employees, partners and Barcelona’s startup community at large.