The average American will spend 90,000 hours of their lives at work. That’s 3,750 days and more than 10 years if you’re only working 8 hour days and only working for 30 years — and who is actually doing that? Unfortunately, with numbers like those, nearly everyone has had a soul-sucking job where they have worked hard and felt underappreciated. At the end of the weekend, too many people have sat at home with the Sunday Scaries, dreading the Monday morning commute, whether that’s from the house to the office or from the breakfast table to a desk at home.
Does it really have to be so defeating?
Work is often challenging, frustrating and even hard. But it doesn’t have to feel like a punishment for growing up. At Journeyage, we believe in the pursuit of building the world’s most transformative workplace experiences for every human on the planet. That might seem strange considering that our product is an online training system. But when we got rolling in 2019, we decided to do things a little differently. We knew that if we were going to build an amazing product that offers irreplaceable training experiences, we would need to start by creating an irreplaceable workplace experience for ourselves.
We’d like this to be a blueprint for businesses. Creating an incredible employee experience will help you gain a competitive advantage. What are some of the things we’ve done to do this?
First, we decided that the most important thing we could do is establish a purpose that we could wake up to infinitely. For us, we exist to Love and Learn. We want to spread love in everything we do, whether it’s building our product or interacting with our customers. For us, that means when a customer has a baby, we send a gift. When an employee has a family emergency, they get as much time off as they need, no questions asked — and probably meals or groceries delivered on top of that. We want to love everyone we come in contact with, because business is about relationships and relationships thrive on love. We also invest in learning on a professional and personal level. Our team members each receive a stipend to learn whatever they want: making pottery, cocktail-mixing, stained glass creation, horse riding, the reading materials of their choice … whatever. We also work hard to reflect on our customer experiences and learn from and with our customers as we move forward together. And we end every week with a Lunch and Learn, where we learn more about a topic together, whether via a presentation from external folks or from someone on our very own team.
After getting the learning and loving down, we also clarified our company values and how we can demonstrate those values through our own behaviors. We’ve codified those into well-documented practices that we collectively work to hold one another accountable to, especially when we get to recognize those being lived out. Failure is okay, too, and that’s why one of our most important behaviors is “owning our F’s” by identifying where we’ve missed the mark. Risky? Nope. We know that we’re all human and bound to make mistakes. It’s essential to learning.
Finally, we found a great way to communicate these values to our new hires. Our “Field Guide” is how we use our own platform, empowering new hires to learn the Journeyage ways quickly, supporting especially their first 90 days of onboarding.
In the end, we decided to focus on our people above all else — over even our product in some cases! This has led us to establishing the right team in pressing forward, achieving summits we could have never imagined possible. Priorities matter, and these are just some of the ways we’ve gone about focusing on those we find most important of all.
Would you like to learn more about how to build an amazing culture at your company? We’d love to learn — and love — with you.
For more information, visit www.journeyage.com.
Lisa Glenn Nobles is the VP of Operations of Journeyage.
