EPISODE #1:

How to Create a Company Culture for Goodness with Bryan de Lottinville

Or listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts

So you think the rapid growth of your purpose-driven company will increase your social impact. But how do you expand it without losing the unique culture that made it excel in the first place? If you are wondering how you can hold on to your positive culture and scale it up as you grow, this podcast is for you. Bryan de Lottinville, the founder and CEO of Benevity, the global leader in corporate social responsibility and employee engagement software, shares stories about how he started his B corporation and how he is scaling the culture as the business faces the challenges of breakneck growth.

Bryan is a master of “constructive disruption,” or changing the game in those industries and companies where he has engaged. He set out to revolutionize corporations’ approaches to corporate philanthropy.  His goal was to move these activities from a fund-raising and hand-out mentality to one that taps into people’s sense of yearning for purpose, meaning an impact in their lives. His dream was for the company is to become a catalyst for infusing a culture of goodness into the world. 

In this episode, Bryan talks about a topic near and dear to my heart: the importance of culture as a lever for successful implementation of strategy.  

Bryan maintains that the Benevity culture is unique and succeeds because they have intentionally invested in it. He admits that the company is challenged to maintain this special culture as the company grows.  

Here are a few of the best parts of today’s episode. Bryan shares what he has learned to help you develop, sustain, and leverage your company’s culture as you scale your business for increased social impact and profit. 

Here is a snapshot of a few things we talked about…

• How do you engage people around a vision? First you must have one! “Having one that is resonant, relatable, aspirational, and ideally somehow connects with people’s innate sense or desire for purpose, meaning, and impact is a big part of the ultimate ability to engage people. 
• Engagement is misunderstood. It isn’t about the perks such as a “slipper allowance.” Too many people confuse making employees happy with engaging them. It is really a misguided attempt to make people happy rather than engaged, which is where you get the slippery slope of the latest perk and “What have you done for me lately?” He refers to “necessary but not sufficient,” when he talks about compensation and benefits. “All else of that ilk being more or less equal, what do people want? They want differentiation that taps into something emotive and a slipper allowance is not going to get you there.”
• Everyone is responsible for the culture – it is not owned by HR nor by senior managers. “Culture is made up of a thousand little things. You must hire, promote, and fire based on your values. And  you have to view culture as a strategic lever and invest in it in a thoughtful and intentional way.”
• Leaders are responsible for modeling the culture. This is easy in the early days when you have a handful of people. You must be intentional about propagating the culture as people come in the door. Benevity has a BUF (Benevity Unicorn Factor) score that they use when recruiting. It consists of 10 or 12 attributes that they believe are critical to success in their environment. “Some of them are pragmatic, like gray matter and others are a function of who we are and what’s important, authenticity and adaptability and humility, some of the things that we just believe are important for our culture and business.”
• As the company grows there are a few  “evolutionary friction points” where people are acting on what they think the culture is but not executing it thoughtfully. Even if you’ve got success around some of these values and cultural orientations, you can’t just put them on the shelf and assume that they will guide in perpetuity.

If you are interested in more information, here are some additional links related to this episode:

1. Benevity’s  main website
2. The latest Benevity Labs Report: Of the People, by the People, for the People. This report reveals how employee giving is tied to politically charged events that are making headlines in the US: https://insights.benevity.com/home-page/2020-giving-trends-report
3. The Benevity Engagement Study. This report shows how employee turnover is reduced by 57% for employees most actively engaged in corporate giving and volunteering: https://insights.benevity.com/home-page/giving-volunteering-link-to-employee-retention

EPISODE #1 TRANSCRIPT

Kathy Miller Perkins:  Welcome to the Conscious Culture Cafe, the podcast that explores how you can lean into your purpose, live your values, and enhance your social impact through your work. I’m your host, Kathy Miller Perkins.

Kathy Miller Perkins:  Hello, all you business activists. Today, I’m joined by CEO of Benevity. Benevity is a B Corp that’s the global leader in corporate social responsibility and employee engagement software and the CEO and founder, Bryan de Lottinville, is with me today. Bryan is a lawyer by training. He was a mezzanine finance lawyer in an earlier life and did financing work for growth companies. Then after that, he took operational roles in a couple of companies. He helped them grow and sold them. He had some very positive outcomes.

Kathy Miller Perkins:  However, he says the first time he really thought about what he did for a living was when he was helping his young daughter with a school project. Let’s pick up with Bryan here. Let’s begin our discussion by talking to Bryan about that turning point. Bryan, tell us about your aha experience.

Bryan de Lottinville:  I remember it was occasioned by a question from my then-young daughter who was, I think she was probably six or seven, and she asked me what I did for a living, something to do with a school project. I remember maybe for the first time really thinking about what I did for a living and that the answer really, although it wasn’t the one I gave to her was “I fix up companies and sell them for as much as I can, honey.”

Bryan de Lottinville: I’m sure I gave her a much more mainstream response, but it got me  thinking about my professional legacy and really emphasizing that my actions and my intentions were not necessarily as aligned as I would like them to be. I always intended to leave the world a little better than I found it and make an impact.

Bryan de Lottinville: Unfortunately, to that point, had only made its way to writing the occasional check and attending events and the typical relatively superficial activities around giving back, so I poked around in the not-for-profit sector a little bit thinking maybe I could run a charity.

Bryan de Lottenville: I concluded pretty quickly, I had neither the skill set nor the patience for-

Kathy Miller Perkins:  I can understand that.

Bryan de Lottinville: … the governance model in that area. Then around the same time, I made an angel investment into a, going to be a consuming for good loyalty program that ended up failing miserably, but it did get me exposed to the landscape and some of the metrics that were the genesis for Benevity.

Bryan de Lottinville:  They had mainly to do with the extent of the manual centricity of the donation processing side of that world where this was 2006-ish and I think the then 300 billion in North American donation volume, less than 5% of it was done online. That’s now, I think, 410 billion and the number’s up to somewhere between 10 and 12%, so it’s growing but with a lot more technological lag than most online activities and other sectors have experienced. That was a significant opportunity for both constructive disruption and efficiency gains that would be getting more of the money that we think we’re investing in social issues, actually, going where it ought to go.

Bryan de Lottinville:  But the more notable stat, which actually hasn’t changed that much over all those years, is that of that then 300 billion, now 410 billion, around 5% of that, only 5% of that, comes from corporations, notwithstanding that social responsibility and expectations of consumers and employees and all of those other stakeholders around the role of corporations has been changing the role.

Bryan de Lottinville:  I started to wonder why that number was flat for so many years. The thesis was, which I think has been born out with some of our progress over the years, was that most companies were pursuing a handout mentality in this area, not an investment opportunity mentality. When times were good, they’d donate some money, when times weren’t… It was really, our goal with Benevity was to better integrate business impact and social impact in a, pardon the pun, as a sustainable way and that ultimately, if we could do that, we would drive that number up over time and create more social impact and also more investment and resources being brought to bear.

Bryan de Lottinville:   That was the why behind it and really, as we started to focus on the existing space, realized that the bar was appallingly low in terms of what was out there and the capabilities that were being offered to companies were relatively rudimentary and sort of grounded in fundraising-focused exercises, not necessarily engagement and passion-evoking functionality and exercises.

Bryan de Lottinville:  Then the definition of what companies were doing in this area was far too narrow. That’s why we use the term “goodness” and not “philanthropy,” some of these things that are trying to get at expanding this notion beyond the once-a-year arm-twisting exercise around fundraising for a corporate-chosen charity into something that’s more in the nature of tapping into people’s sense of yearning for purpose, meaning an impact in their lives and being something of a catalyst for infusing a culture of goodness into the world. That’s the Reader’s Digest version of why I started the company.

Kathy Miller Perkins:  Oh, that is really very interesting. So, the whole B Corp thing came later, I take it?

Bryan de Lottinville:  No, we were a B Corp right out of the chute.

Kathy Miller Perkins:  Oh, you were?

Bryan de Lottinville:  Again, I think we were one of the first B Corporations in Canada, a relatively early one overall. It was this idea of integrating business impact and social impact, which was a big part of the genesis for the company, the B Corp vehicle, or corporate status, was a manifestation of that that was formalized and would send a more than lip service message that we were not only talking the talk but we were trying to walk it as well.

Bryan de Lottinville:  I think ironically, I’m not a super big fan of the B Corp status in the sense that I don’t think it should be an exceptional organizational structure. I think it should be what all companies pursue-

Kathy Miller Perkins:  Yeah, I agree.

Bryan de Lottinville:  … and perhaps someday will, but in the meantime, a lot of companies pursue it for marketing purposes. That was never really the goal for us in really trying to align vision, culture, purpose, all of those things in as many ways as possible.

Kathy Miller Perkins:  That brings me to the question that I have, a feeling, it’s not even a relevant question, but I’ll ask it anyway, and that is: How do you engage employees around your vision? Is that something you do during the hiring process or are employees just naturally attracted to your vision or does that happen afterwards? How does that work for you?

Bryan de Lottinville:  I read the questions on that page briefly before the call and it was saying, “How can companies engage employees around a vision?” I thought, “Well, first, you need to have one.”

Kathy Miller Perkins:  Well, yes, exactly.

Bryan de Lottinville:  Having one that is resonant, relatable, aspirational, and ideally somehow connects with people’s, I think, innate sense or desire for purpose, meaning, and impact is a big part of the ultimate ability to engage people around that, which is a long way of saying it can’t be words on a wall or a slide on a deck, it needs to be a resonant and actual vision and it needs to have differentiation and uniqueness, as in my parlance would what I seek is in every working environment I’ve had is constructive disruption.

Bryan de Lottinville:  It’s hard to get people engaged around a message of incrementalism, so having one articulating it and then building a culture that supports it in an authentic and consistent and top-down bottom-up sort of way is probably as important as the vision itself.

Kathy Miller Perkins:  Right, I bet. Was that difficult to do? Tell me about that. Do you find …?

Bryan de Lottinville:  Well, it happens very naturally in many companies in the early days, right? When you have a handful of people and, ideally, you’ve got a core of those people who are the leadership, if you will, that are modeling the behaviors and the ethos and the culture, so it’s relatively easy in the early days and becomes much more challenging as companies grow, especially when you grow at the speed that we have grown.

Bryan de Lottinville:  We have, from very early on, tried to be thoughtful and intentional about propagating that culture and helping people understand as they come in the door who we are, how we roll, what the likelihood of success looks like for them given the values of the company, so we’ve got a number of little pieces.

Bryan de Lottinville:  For what it’s worth, I don’t purport to be an expert on culture, but what I do know is it’s a thousand different little things, it’s not one or two. We have a little thing that we do as part of recruitment, for instance, the BUF score, the Benevity Unicorn Factor. It’s really just the illusion of science around trying to glean from the interview process how a person scores against these 10 or 12 attributes that we believe are critical to success in our environment. Some of them are pragmatic, like gray matter and others are a function of who we are and what’s important, authenticity and adaptability and humility, some of the things that we just believe are important for our culture and business.

Bryan de Lottinville:  That’s one of many ways in which we try to be thoughtful and intentional about communicating. I’ll get into this in maybe some of the other questions, but alignment is extremely important with culture. You can’t just have, as I said earlier, there’s just the words on a wall and then not recruit, hire, promote, fire consistently with those things.

Bryan de Lottinville:  I think it’s been, to answer your question, it’s been relatively easy because we’ve invested in it in a thoughtful, intentional, consistent way. That doesn’t mean the culture hasn’t evolved and changed a bit and will continue perhaps to over time. We borrowed from best practices that you trip over, the Netflix-type stuff, the Airbnb thing, some of the progressive companies that are out there. We don’t necessarily borrow fully in every area because we’re unique and you’ve got to do what’s right for your company, your city, your culture, whatever it happens to be, so we don’t have a slipper allowance.

Bryan de Lottinville: I mean, there is a lot of that out there in the guise of employee engagement and it’s really a misguided attempt to make people happy rather than engaged, which is where you get the slippery slope of the latest perk and “What have you done for me lately?”

Kathy Miller Perkins: Yeah, I wonder about that. I think about some of the companies that are famous for the perks that they give their employees and wonder if that really has anything at all to do with engagement. I’m a psychologist by training and some of the research in psychology, you probably are aware of, it says that really, it’s intrinsic motivation that makes a difference. It’s not money, it’s not that people don’t like it, but that’s not what that grabs people’s imagination and gets them engaged in what they’re doing. It comes from inside rather than from the perks. I’ve been wondering myself about why these companies think that way. Very, very confusing to me.

Bryan de Lottinville:  Well, it’s because, I think, in part, we have the Drucker and other driven sort of ethos that if you can’t measure it, then it doesn’t really exist. Some of the issues around what is engaging for people are amorphous at best and very difficult to measure and to cost and to do some of those sorts of things, so the things that we revert to tend to be the more easily measured things like employee benefits and books and then we survey them on whether that…

Bryan de Lottinville:  But if you try to survey someone on how meaningful work attracts them, for instance, to get to your second question, that is a fluffy HR-y for most management people to try and get their minds around.

Bryan de Lottinville:  The reality, and there’s a bunch of data that supports a lot of this thing, is there’s this very powerful little statement called “necessary but not sufficient,” and that’s how I view employee benefits and compensation and all of that stuff. But if you say all else of that ilk being more or less equal, what do people want? They want differentiation that taps into something emotive and a slipper allowance is not going to get you there.

Kathy Miller Perkins:  Right, right, right. I take it your turnover must be pretty low?

Bryan de Lottinville:  It is. It’s so low that it worries me a little bit because that’s not necessarily always the goal. You don’t want to make employee retention perfect because the fact is your company’s growing and evolving and the needs are changing and people don’t always change at that same pace, but we have very, very low rates of both employee and client departure. I’m more convinced that the client retention metric is the more important one.

Bryan de Lottinville:  That’s an interesting piece about some of these things, Kathy, is one of the things that we’ve started to invest in in the latest phase of our culture, if you will, is making sure that as new people come in, they’re not misinterpreting some of the values and messaging that has been around.

Bryan de Lottinville:  We’ve been very successful, for instance, building a culture that is really focused on client service and responsiveness and passion. It’s a big part of one of our key metrics is to have our RFOBs, which is Raving Fans of Benevity. Sometimes, that goes from an orientation to, “Wait. Well, the client asked for this, so I have to say ‘Yes.'” Especially when you’re trying to disrupt an industry, you don’t necessarily want to be saying “Yes” to every question, especially if you don’t understand the why behind the question, getting to the forward sort of “If I’d asked them, they would have said, ‘Build me a faster horse'” sort of thing.

Kathy Miller Perkins:  True.

Bryan de Lottinville:  We have a few of those evolutionary friction points where people are kind of subscribing to what they think the culture is, but not necessarily executing it thoughtfully, so we have to continue to… Our humility as an attribute. I heard someone say, “Well, you’re not allowed to be confident.”

Bryan de Lottinville:  Well, that’s not what humility is. It’s really about, in our context, self-awareness and growth mindset and a willingness to take feedback constructively and not necessarily need to be the smartest person in the room and some of those sorts of things. Even if you’ve got success around some of these values and cultural orientations, you can’t just put them on the shelf and assume that they will guide in perpetuity.

Kathy Miller Perkins:  How do you do that? That’s a leadership question, I guess: Who owns the culture? Is it you? Is it Human Resources Group? Is it everybody? How do you view that? How do you go about making sure that the culture is maintained and interpreted right by new people? I interpret that to be leadership, really.

Bryan de Lottinville:  Yeah. I don’t want to take too much credit for it because it is a company-wide thing ultimately. It’s definitely not an HR or, we call it “the people team,” here, but it’s sort of like an architect and a house, who builds the house, who maintains the house, who might renovate the house, things like that.

Bryan de Lottinville:  I really think that our leadership, and I’ve been really fortunate because one of those companies that I was exposed to early on had a tremendous corporate culture that was a product of a very charismatic, if not somewhat tyrannical, prototypical entrepreneurial leader, so I got to see some very positive and some negative manifestations of culture in a growth company and evolving context. I’ve been able to borrow some of that. Part of it was just the importance of it and the power of it.

Bryan de Lottinville:  At that company, we really had no business winning business because we were wildly more expensive than most of our competitor. But back in that world, people came and visited the factory, if you will, and interacted with people and just like at Benevity, there’s a palpable vibe here that is compelling to folks and I have certainly been the chief proponent of and protectorate, if you will, of the culture and the importance of it as a strategic business lever when more conventional MBA-trained folks, for instance, might not see that as the lever that it is.

Bryan de Lottinville:  When you look at the hundreds of iconic corporate brands that we have, the ones who have not come to us through word of mouth from an RFOB at some point along the line is very, very small. It continues to be an extremely important part of our growth and success, so it needs to be invested in just like any other asset. It evolves over time and things like that.

Bryan de Lottinville:  That’s why I say it’s it’s absolutely critical that that get invested in a top-down sort of way, but ultimately, for its success, it needs to be democratized and propagated horizontally and vertically for it to be part of the company’s success, if that makes any sense.

Kathy Miller Perkins:  I take it that you’re a fairly flat organization or not? I don’t really know your structure at this point.

Bryan de Lottinville:  I would say we are fairly flat. Part of that is by design, part of it is the speed at which we’ve grown. I do happen to believe that companies, as they get larger, part of what challenges their ability to sustainably grow and innovate is the introduction of “professional management” and hierarchies and approval processes and all of the conventional and well-intentioned efforts to be more predictable and replicable and scalable. Some of those things sometimes translate into more bureaucratic. We get to see it in our client base because we’ve got these huge, huge companies take months and months and months to turn the boat a little wee bit.

Bryan de Lottinville:  We’re trying to stay not so much flat, but agile and nimble. Those two are sometimes connected. But when you have, when you have 500 people, it’s a lot harder to be flat than when you have 20.

Kathy Miller Perkins:  Well, sure. Right.

Bryan de Lottinville:  Then people crave structure and predictability internally and execution plans and goals and all of these things that requires some more conventional and structured planning and process, so it’s something of a delicate balance.

Kathy Miller Perkins:  Boy, it sounds like it.

Bryan de Lottinville:  I had made two notes: What does leadership look like in a purpose-driven company? We did talk about leadership. My first thought when I read that question was that it hopefully is diverse as to gender, ethnicity, ethos, background, education, some of those things, but that the common element would need to be authentic passion and commitment to the power of the vision and the culture of the company. That’s what I think it looks like.

Bryan de Lottinville:  Then the other point was, I don’t think we actually covered, how does meaningful work attract employees?

Kathy Miller Perkins:  We did.

Bryan de Lottingville:  I’m not convinced that meaningful work in itself is sufficient. It needs to be bigger than that, perhaps.

Bryan de Lottinville:  By the same token, I think that any work in any industry can be infused with a sense of meaning and purpose-

Kathy Miller Perkins:  Yes, I agree.

Bryan de Lottinville:  … without necessarily subscribing to the shared value where you know some of those more macro sort of contents.

Bryan de Lottinville:  In other words, if your workplace experience conveys a sense of meaning and purpose that will endure to the sense of affinity that a person has to their employer or their company. We get to cheat a little bit at Benevity because have both a meaningful work in a macro sense, but we have more vocal expressions of passion around the stuff we do, ironically using our own software to give back and volunteer on these per purpose-driven behavioral initiatives and things.

Kathy Miller Perkins:  Oh, really? Oh, that’s very interesting.

Bryan de Lottinville:  Yeah, we have north of 90% participation rate in the use of our software and giving and volunteering and missions without a sneak of arm-twisting. It’s just, again, part of the culture.

Kathy Miller Perkins:  90%. Wow.

Bryan de Lottinville:  Yeah.

Kathy Miller Perkins:  Wow. Bryan, I have so enjoyed talking with you today and let me see if I can summarize a few of the things that you said that can be takeaways for our listeners. First of all, you said that “In order to get people to buy into a vision, first you have to have one.” You said, “It has to be relatable, aspirational, and more importantly it has to connect with the employees’ innate sense of purpose and meaning and their need for having an impact.”

Kathy Miller Perkins:  Second, you have to build a culture to support the vision. You said that “Culture’s important as the vision itself. It has to be top-down and bottoms up, has to be authentic, and much more than values placed on a paper on a wall.” You said that “You must be thoughtful and intentional about the culture, especially as the company grows. As people come in the door, you have to let them know who you are and how you roll.”

Kathy Miller Perkins:  Then you said, “Culture is made up of a thousand little things. You must have hire, promotion, and firing based on your values, and you have to view culture as a strategic lever and invest in it in a thoughtful and intentional way.”

Kathy Miller Perkins:  One of the most interesting things you said, in my opinion, is you suggested that “We not confuse employee happiness with engagement.” You suggested that “While perks, such as the slipper allowance, may make people happy, that will not engage them in an emotional way where they commit to their companies and to their jobs.” Finally, you suggested that “The key is an authentic passion and commitment to the vision.”Kathy Miller Perkins:  Thanks again, Bryan, for all that you bring to me and our listeners. I hope to see you again soon.

Bryan de Lottinville:  I’ve really enjoyed chatting, Kathy, and I look forward to reading your book.

Kathy Miller Perkins:  Fascinating for me. I really appreciate it very, very much. Thanks for your time.

Bryan de Lottinville:  Okay. I hope we’ll talk again soon.

Kathy Miller Perkins:  I hope we will, too. Thanks again, Bryan.

Bryan de Lottinville:  Take care. Bye-bye.

Kathy Miller Perkins:  Bye-bye.

Kathy Miller Perkins:  Thanks for listening to The Conscious Culture Cafe. If you liked what you heard, connect with us at millerconsultants.com. You can access the show notes and receive our free materials. See you next episode.