This company proves that happy people are worth more in tough times

The most valuable asset a company has is its people

First published on
Jun 10, 2020

When forecasts, targets and financial planning fall away, the most valuable asset a company has left is its people. And as video tech company Vidyard discovered during the recent pandemic, a collaborative and positive company culture could be the difference between flourishing and failing.

In fact, it was a legacy of building a strong people culture dating back to its start-up days, combined with a well-established sprint process, that ensured co-founder Devon Galloway could rely on everyone in the business to pull together during a critical period. 

“When [the coronavirus situation] came to a head, I said to Michael [Litt], our CEO and my co-founder, ‘It’d be really nice if we could do something to just help the customer base out as they transition to work from home. We say that video is ‘the next best thing to being there in person’, and now that being there in person isn’t the way things are going to be, people are going to be forced to make this adoption, so what’s our role in the world to help with that?”

At this point, Vidyard had been working on a new version of its product for almost a year, with the launch planned for more than a month later, at the end of April. But Galloway knew what needed to be done for the business and its customers. They had to launch as soon as possible.

Bringing forward the launch of a technical product by a month is quite an ask at any time, but with well-established videoconferencing apps such as Zoom and Google Meet offering free access during the crisis, missing the moment could mean being swallowed up by names with greater brand recognition and bigger marketing spend. 

In other words, the company would lose out on more than just a month’s business. It would arrive late to the working revolution it had been positioning itself to lead. 

Galloway knew that his team, like everyone else, had been hit hard by the most drastic change in living circumstances in decades. But thanks to that collaborative culture, he also trusted them to come through. 

“I just started asking some questions,” he says. “I felt the answers would be ‘that’s just too crazy’; that we’re a team of 200, we’ve been working on this thing for a really long time, we’re concerned about confusing our clients, concerned about how do we put it on the market; that everyone’s really worried about what’s going on with their own family and life and coronavirus. But the reaction every time, every single person I brought it up with, was: ‘How can I help?’ and ‘Sounds awesome’.”

That’s the sort of gung-ho attitude all the best start-ups need, but by the time a company is at scale-up stage, with 200 employees, it’s all too easy to start behaving like one of the behemoths, stymied by process and slow to react. For Galloway, though, hanging onto a lean-in approach is at the heart of the company’s success. 

“Everyone said, you know, there’s going to be some stuff that’s not perfect, but we’ll roll up our sleeves this weekend and figure it out. So the whole engineering team was working almost exclusively from that Friday afternoon till Wednesday on getting this out. We know we’re not a medical device company, we know we’re not doctors and nurses, but across the business, people were pretty inspired.”

Inspiration alone does not make change happen — and this is where that intense sprint process comes in. At Vidyard, they call it “fire drills”.

“If we’ve got a crazy idea, or we see something crazy in the market, or we see a crazy customer opportunity that we need to react to, we roll up our sleeves and do it,” says Galloway. “So the approach is ‘we’ll figure it out’, as opposed to ‘well we can’t do that’, or ‘that’s too crazy’.”

Of course, to run a company at such a consistently frenetic level would be chaotic and demotivating, so these sprints are established enough to be understood, but rare enough to inspire a sense of collective occasion, achievement and reward after each one, helping employees feel more deeply invested in the company. 

“There’s what I would almost call company ‘lore’ around them,” says Galloway. “Like, ‘Remember when Tyler Vincent pushed that product out at 2am from a Tim Hortons because his wifi went down at home but he had to get it out the door?’ That is a big part of creating this culture, so when the next fire drill comes around, people still talk about it. And I think there’s some excitement in being involved in those crazy stories — a bit of ‘that’s going to go down in Vidyard history’.”

Something else that will go down in Vidyard history is the result of this particular sprint. Within a week, the tool was being used by 200 customers, while its existing one-to-one communication tool saw customer acquisition rise from 3,000-4,000 a week to as many as 16,000 new sign-ups in a week. 

“We’ve seen a huge lift in demand through COVID-19, with our major usage KPIs up 400%,” says Galloway three months on . “We’ve added 2.8 million users and 20 million viewers since March 1.”

Yet without that heroic effort from Galloway’s whole team, the timing of this pandemic could easily have seen his customers migrating to the bigger-name video players such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet. 

For Galloway right now, the success is less about numbers than about proof that business can do more than follow a traditional roadmap. He admires other businesses that have, in these unusual circumstances, ripped up their strategies and changed tack to meet the new needs of their customers — and to find new customers — and he sees Vidyard as part of a bigger movement of “everybody pulling together”. 

But it’s also evidence that by being able to act at the right moment, on the turn of a dime, a company can bake itself into the long-term needs of business continuity, becoming a need-to-have, rather than a nice-to-have. And that happens not by chaining employees to their laptops and monitoring their every move, but fostering a company culture of trust, collaboration and inspiration. 

That’s not just good karma. It’s good business too.

Explore more

Latest thoughts

Giving a team the inspiration and technique to scale ideas
“Brilliant, astute, knowledgeable, and witty.

Phil grasped our business challenge with incredible speed and led us to rethink how we do business.”

SARAH MASON – CMO, COSMOS
REPAIRING A BUSINESS-CRITICAL RELATIONSHIP
“I’m not sure, but Phil might be a magician.”

JULIE BISHOP – CO-CEO, IT NATURALLY
Getting change past the post in a complicated context
“Transformational for both my personal and professional growth.”

STUART WILLIAMSON — CHIEF CORPORATE AFFAIRS OFFICER, THE JOCKEY CLUB
Instilling accountability to help a great team do great things
“Real smarts, and the external perspective we needed.

We are now securing industry standards of margin.”

NEIL CRUMP – CEO, AURORA HEALTHCARE
COMPREHENSIVE STRUCTURAL CHANGE
“Incredibly responsive and empathetic to our specific challenges and ambition.

Phil inspired and challenged our leadership team to ensure that our transformation had our people at its heart.”

Darina Garland, Co-CEO, Ooni
Enabling a Board to work to its full potential
“His years of experience allow for a highly credible, disciplined and empathic approach.

Phil offers the right balance of push and encouragement.”

VIV HSU – PARTNER, JBI
rarr
larr