By Nix Eniego
If you drop in to the Sprout Solutions headquarters on Mckinley West at the end of a workday, you’ll notice an interesting pattern: Whenever a team member gets up to go home, someone nearby will stand up and walk their coworker out into the hall and wait with him or her for the elevator. The two colleagues need not even know one another that well, and that’s sort of the goal of the whole thing: You’re supposed to use the five minutes to catch up and learn more about one of your teammates who you may not regularly interact with. That way, when you do work together, you’ll already have some rapport.
This whole process occured organically. No one announced that the practice was mandatory, owing to some hot company in Silicon Valley doing it to great result. In fact, outside of us at Sprout, we are not familiar with any other firms, in the Philippines or abroad, who do anything similar. It just happened. Our CEO and founder Patrick Gentry did it first, someone thought the practice was cool enough to follow, and soon the whole office was seeing to it that coworkers always had someone walk them out. To the extent that there was any formal effort involved, it was only our collective celebration over a ritual that had emerged so spontaneously. This kind of spontaneity accounts for how all of Sprout’s culture began.
Unfortunately, how rituals and culture develop at Sprout is not the trend in tech. Increasingly, companies in Silicon Valley and even here in Southeast Asia are institutionalizing culture. In some instances, the responsibility falls to a chief culture officer, while in others, it becomes a part of the mandate of human resources. I believe that centralizing culture to a single person or department, as though it were nothing more than a simple administrative task to manage, is counter-productive to companies that pride themselves on their people focus. If you really cared about your team members, you would not define culture from the top-down and assess how people live up to – or fall short of – your cultural standards and norms. Instead you would turn over culture to your team and let them collectively decide what’s important to them and how they wish to express it.
This is the experiment we’ve been running at Sprout since I joined the company as team member number seven in 2015, and it’s one I’d like to call “organic culture.” If founders love organic growth (i.e. when customers flock to their product or service on the sheer force of word of mouth alone), they should also love organic culture: Your team members are so excited over how something is done at your organization that they cannot help but share and spread the ritual.
Producing a strong organic culture, ironically enough, takes effort. For starters, you must create an environment where people feel comfortable enough to pitch their ideas, knowing that even their most off-the-wall suggestions will be taken seriously. This can only happen when people begin seeing ideas leap into life. Last year, for example, one of our interns felt the energy level of our general assemblies could be much higher, sort of like a sport’s rally. She confided in a colleague that our general assemblies would be much better if they were themed, with team members dressing up in appropriate outfits. Plus, it would be cute. Sure enough, by the next general assembly, everyone had bought into her idea: Team members showed up in emotion-based costumes inspired by Pixar’s Inside Out, some directly, like joy, sadness, fear, anger, and disgust, and others more loosely, like kilig or hugot.
The Inside Out theme did not relate in any way to the message that Patrick would share with us that day, and it did not need to: As the intern had predicted, dressing up had raised the energy level of the room by several notches, elevating the general assembly from a simple information cascade into a team- and morale-building activity.
From then on, all our general assemblies would follow a theme, and this happened without any additional process. We did not circulate a memo about the practice, nor did we allocate a section about it in our employee handbook. As happens in the case of organic culture: It just grew on its own and became a monthly tradition. People’s costumes began to be even more elaborate (some of those by our developers incorporated custom electronics and hardware), the prizes for best dressed became grander, with winners spinning a wheel-of-fortune to the roars of their supporters, and the overall pageantry reached a level where it could rival Panagbenga parade.
That Sprout’s most beloved traditions emerged from the team, rather than as an initiative of HR or a decree from a chief culture officer, just goes to show the value of organic culture: When you put it in their hands, it becomes a kind of clay: They can make anything.
