Distributed Workforce: Building Culture through Blockchain and Other Emerging Tech

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Omar:
So what is blockchain? Really, here's an overview in five minutes. In 2007, an anonymous hacker called Satoshi Nakamoto published a white paper that did something that had never been done before. It solved the double spend problem, and in so doing laid up the specifications for peer to peer digital currency unlike any other. But what's the double spend problem? Well, it's simple. Assume Alice raises cows, and Bob raises chickens. Both are expecting later this season. They meet one day in a market and we'd like to plan a trade, each promising future animal for the others. But Alice can't be sure that Bob hasn't already promised his future animals to someone else. And neither can Bob for that matter, simply, and neither is able to trust the other and without trust they can’t transact. This is typically solved by having a neutral third party, Charlie, serve as the intermediary. Charlie will carry a record of all transactions and therefore can establish trust between the two. In technical jargon, he provides a single source of truth, which is both convenient and efficient, but he also provides a single point of failure. If Charlie loses his book, or if he accepts a bribe, and people no longer trust him, then the entire system which underpins transactions collapses, like a house of cards.

The white paper for the first time ever devised a way to maintain the single source of truth, but decoupling it from the single point of failure. It did this by laying out three rules. The first, rather than only one person having a copy of the record, many people can as well.In fact, anyone who wants to can have a copy of the record. Second, rather than only updating your own record book, you come together with all of the other record holders and agree collectively on what the current state of the world should be, and modify your books at the same time. And thirdly, rather than maintain the record book in pencil you must do so in pen. Now, this is a metaphor. But ultimately what this translates to is the centralization of the ledger consensus underpinning every transaction and immutability meaning that you cannot go back in the past and modify existing transactions.

Okay, that makes sense. But how does this translate the technology? And I mean, what is a blockchain anyway? Before we make that leap, first think of each transaction recorded in the book, as held in a container with a couple of special properties. First, in addition to holding a transaction, each container also holds a pointer to the container that preceded it, if you can imagine that. But this isn't just any pointer. It's a pointer unique to the contents of the former block. Just as a fingerprint is unique to one's DNA. And since each block's contents hold the former block's pointer, each pointer is thus determined by all of the contents that preceded it. You can think of it the same way that once ancestors’ DNAs are encoded in each set of DNA that follows after them. In this way, we chronologically link these special containers, which are actually called blocks, and first create a chain of blocks, hence the term blockchain. For many, this is still a complicated step to make and rightfully so. That's why two years ago for 2018, we built a way for our attendees to learn about blockchain by visualizing it, and even physically interacting with it. Let's take a look.

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Omar:
For some brief context. attendees were given badges embedded with RFID tags. And as they walked around the venue in which forward was held, their locations were read by scanners and sent up to our nodes in the cloud, which are the record book holders of the previous example. The nodes then agree on the state of affairs as I'd mentioned prior, and update their books collectively. In doing so they add a new block to the blockchain. So what is this visualization that we're seeing? Each circular garden here represents a block, with each flower stamp being a transaction and each petal a validator, who is able to assert that this transaction fits with this state of the world and was appended onto the record books. But notice here that the transaction isn't a two person exchange of value as in the typical sense of the word, I transact with the grocer or store owner, but it's like the database sense of the word which is a change to the state of the world. The data encoded is not simply a transfer value, but rather the experience one was near to. Unless you see that, for example, Austin Wyant was at registration or Carl Hampson was at mower plus and so on so forth. This is also included in the color of the stamp. Notice how the transactions collapse to create a unique fingerprint of the block, which is then passed on creating the immutable chain. So when these three golden conditions of decentralization, consensus and immutability are met, one solves the double spend problem and achieves a blockchain.

The first use of this technology was cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin ripple, but the second generation quickly emerged that saw that actually the underlying architecture and three pillars of blockchain could be used for much more than just currency. And they began handling many other forms of digital assets. Let's highlight just a few of them. The pseudonymity and the permanency that blockchain provides makes it appealing to store medical records. INLAGS is doing this in Brazil, and the B3i coalition is doing this with insurance claims. The traceability that blockchain provides is being used to create digital twins To track electric vehicle parts as Volvo is doing or diamonds as every ledger is. In both cases, this is done to ensure sustainable sourcing. And then lastly, it's just one of three cases to highlight. The collective maintenance of data makes it highly appealing to supply chain management. Walmart and Merce have each championed blockchain with tremendous success in this space. They're both able to cut down massive costs and inefficiencies associated with working with siloed databases and lack of interoperability with data across the supply chain. So there's a quick blockchain primer. Now back to culture.

At the time, we were still using Sources and we had an internal Monopoly money called Solstice Bucks. The idea is pretty straightforward. David is crushing it on his client project. Because of him, his team is moving at a much quicker pace and they're in fact going ahead of schedule. His supervisor gets a paper Monopoly money from office management and gives it to him. David's ecstatic, he now has enough money to go to the swag store and buy what he has been waiting for for four weeks. So David is rewarded and continues the good work and feels seen, validated, and acknowledged by his team for years. This is how we recognize one another. But then we grew and we grew some more. And teams began to commute to client sites more and more and offices spread across the world. And the physical handoffs, the timelines, the ease of management, they all became growing pain points to the point where this system was under threat. We had to adapt, but we wanted to think outside the box as well. So we turned to blockchain and the technology we use to prove business vaulted forward, and we directed it inwards to drive cultural value internally. Our solution was KinCoin.

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Omar:
KinCoin is a blockchain-based peer to peer rewards and recognition platform that extends what we've just seen in Solstice books in myriad other directions. The idea was to ingrain recognition into our daily lives by making it a fluid, frictionless, fun, and even social experience. By adopting blockchain, we've made it extendible. This means that our sister companies and clients can join and even build their own Apps, thus creating a rewards token ecosystem. Or just join into our existing system and exchange coin with one another. Let's take a look at how it works. Users download progressive Web App on their device, and then they log in using Google single sign on. There's no registration required. On first login a behind the scenes job generates them a profile and a wallet which is all they need to interact with the chain. Once a user is in, they'll see a list of the most recent transactions. As you can see, each has a message which varies from genuine appreciation. To jokes, to Happy Birthday, and so on. Even if one isn't sending coins, it's nice to open it up and see what's going on. Then notice the two coin bounces. Gold is the amount that someone has received from their peers. This is what can be used to buy swag. Silver is their daily allowance to givet to their peers. Smart contract determines this amount behind the scenes acting like an automated central bank. Gift givers trigger the gift flow. And here I'm giving David Ansen some coin. He’s the current tech lead on KinCoin, and he's doing a great job. So to meaningfully recognize his hard work, I'm in fact going to give him two of my personally earned gold coins as well as a heartfelt message. Once the transaction succeeds, I get a notification in email and the lead receives a Slack message. Just like that the transaction is there for all to see.

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Vicki:
Thank you, Omar. Thank you, everyone for joining us today. My name is Vicki Manazzi and I'm the head of employee experience of our Buenos Aires, Argentina office. I've been lucky enough to be a part of this organization for the past close to five years now, having witnessed and being a part of myself to many of the cultural changes that we've been through. So to kick us off today, I think the first question that I would like to ask the group is, what is it that comes to your mind when you're asked to define culture? I actually had to look that up. And the first definition that popped up in Google was that a culture is the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively. But the most meaningful question is, how do you actually achieve the collective portion of culture when you have distributed workforce?

If I had to define organizational culture, I would say that it is the values, the mission, the purpose of our organization, through the action of people. Culture is not something that you can place in a box but is actually created through employee experience. We breathe out of the bar culture every single day. And it's actually a key driver of employee satisfaction, engagement and performance. The benefits of a positive block culture are just endless. But the other question is, how does this actually affect your business? What does it mean to your business? Gallup’s recent studies show that organizations actually have much stronger performance and higher engagement when they actually treat employees as the stakeholders of their own future and their company's future. Engaged employees are not just looking to go to work. They're looking to do fantastic work. Highly engaged business units show up to a 41% reduction in absenteeism, a 17% increase in productivity, but it doesn't really just stop there. They also show a 10% increase in customer ratings and 20% increase in sales.

When digging together, those behaviors of highly engaged business units can result up to 21% greater profitability to your business at the end of the day. Statistics are just speaking for themselves. Promoting positive coworker relationships has to be considered a must when creating a new business strategy, especially now, taking into consideration the fact that we're moving to a different world after COVID. When there's a lot of uncertainty, there's one thing that we know. Listen, leaders, we'll be required to actually build completely different ecosystems for people interaction. Where physical space was once the liaison, digital playground NOW must emerge and going a little bit back in time, just thinking about when everyone's heart surgeon general office was open. This was probably close to the end of 2014. We actually faced an urgent need to redefine our culture. We're at the time getting our steps into becoming a multinational firm. But this meant so much more than that. We were actually required to replicate and multiply what our headquarters in Chicago had done more than successfully. We were required to build a culture that resulted in amazing products built by amazing people. How were we supposed to do that? And what we ended up realizing is that we had to create a space. We had to create spaces for people to share.

And we started doing so. We had “lunch and learns” where people shared their favorite food. We talked about national holidays, we started building social activities. We started sharing lab projects. Sharing became just a natural thing for us. It just became organic to the organization and it became our very own version of a cultural big bank. This big bank had one very meaningful result: we ended up with the best of each world. And you'll see as I speak, some pictures that just represent that change in our new world where there were a lot of costumes that were shared. Halloween is not typically celebrated in Argentina, although everybody knows about Halloween, it is not really our thing. Halloween actually became our favorite time of the year. And our office actually won the Best Costume Contest for two years in a row. We started celebrating the Fourth of July, people started eating in front of us in our Chicago and New York offices. We started finding those spaces for interaction to happen. You can even see one of our UX principles from Chicago providing a lesson on North American history.

(00:14:03.06)

Vicki:
Thank you, Omar. Thank you, everyone for joining us today. My name is Vicki Manazzi and I'm the head of employee experience of our Buenos Aires, Argentina office. I've been lucky enough to be a part of this organization for the past close to five years now, having witnessed and being a part of myself to many of the cultural changes that we've been through. So to kick us off today, I think the first question that I would like to ask the group is, what is it that comes to your mind when you're asked to define culture? I actually had to look that up. And the first definition that popped up in Google was that a culture is the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively. But the most meaningful question is, how do you actually achieve the collective portion of culture when you have distributed workforce?

If I had to define organizational culture, I would say that it is the values, the mission, the purpose of our organization, through the action of people. Culture is not something that you can place in a box but is actually created through employee experience. We breathe out of the bar culture every single day. And it's actually a key driver of employee satisfaction, engagement and performance. The benefits of a positive block culture are just endless. But the other question is, how does this actually affect your business? What does it mean to your business? Gallup’s recent studies show that organizations actually have much stronger performance and higher engagement when they actually treat employees as the stakeholders of their own future and their company's future. Engaged employees are not just looking to go to work. They're looking to do fantastic work. Highly engaged business units show up to a 41% reduction in absenteeism, a 17% increase in productivity, but it doesn't really just stop there. They also show a 10% increase in customer ratings and 20% increase in sales.

When digging together, those behaviors of highly engaged business units can result up to 21% greater profitability to your business at the end of the day. Statistics are just speaking for themselves. Promoting positive coworker relationships has to be considered a must when creating a new business strategy, especially now, taking into consideration the fact that we're moving to a different world after COVID. When there's a lot of uncertainty, there's one thing that we know. Listen, leaders, we'll be required to actually build completely different ecosystems for people interaction. Where physical space was once the liaison, digital playground NOW must emerge and going a little bit back in time, just thinking about when everyone's heart surgeon general office was open. This was probably close to the end of 2014. We actually faced an urgent need to redefine our culture. We're at the time getting our steps into becoming a multinational firm. But this meant so much more than that. We were actually required to replicate and multiply what our headquarters in Chicago had done more than successfully. We were required to build a culture that resulted in amazing products built by amazing people. How were we supposed to do that? And what we ended up realizing is that we had to create a space. We had to create spaces for people to share.

And we started doing so. We had “lunch and learns” where people shared their favorite food. We talked about national holidays, we started building social activities. We started sharing lab projects. Sharing became just a natural thing for us. It just became organic to the organization and it became our very own version of a cultural big bank. This big bank had one very meaningful result: we ended up with the best of each world. And you'll see as I speak, some pictures that just represent that change in our new world where there were a lot of costumes that were shared. Halloween is not typically celebrated in Argentina, although everybody knows about Halloween, it is not really our thing. Halloween actually became our favorite time of the year. And our office actually won the Best Costume Contest for two years in a row. We started celebrating the Fourth of July, people started eating in front of us in our Chicago and New York offices. We started finding those spaces for interaction to happen. You can even see one of our UX principles from Chicago providing a lesson on North American history.