Having Claude Silver on was not only a highlight for the podcast but was also an opportunity to draw from someone who is living and breathing a Culture of Kindness in an organisation. As the Chief Heart Officer of Vayner Media she is setting the precedence of a culture that at its heart is kindness led by its founder Gary Vaynerchuk (Gary Vee)
So the question I knew I had to ask was, what are you doing in actions to sustain your culture?
“I'm going to mention a very big one that is actually pretty easy to implement. What we've chosen to do, while we're all at home on Zoom, is we've started a programme which happens to be called 1:37pm. Every day at 1:37pm, East Coast time, we've asked everyone to take 15 minutes off, literally 15 minutes off, get a cup of tea, get breakfast, wherever they are in the world. And we are supplying them with entertainment content, academic content, any kind of diversity inclusivity education, and this is all on a closed YouTube channel. Whether it's Gary interviewing will.I.am or Novak Djokovic, or I might be interviewing Robin Williams' son who has a mental health initiative in LA. We might have employees come on sharing their side hustles. And the best part about it is the chat that happens in this enclosed YouTube that has brought us closer together while we're so far apart. It's really almost like a competition. Who gets on first, who's saying hi first, you know, who's making some joke? It's just really fun. And anyone can do it. You can do it on Slack. You don't need any big tech.
The purpose of it was to bring people together and to give them a timeout, we've asked for no client meetings, no phone calls. Just take 15 minutes for yourself, get up, do some jumping jacks, whatever you need to do. We've now had going on for almost two years and it's working well, really well. And today, I know we're going to be speaking about our Superbowl ads that we just had, and how the performance went there.
Listen to the full podcast to find out what else is being done to nurture a culture of kindness and what they have learnt from things that have not only gone well, but also learnt from things that didn't work as well.