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Welcome to The Culture Code podcast. On this podcast, you’ll learn how to grow, shape, and sustain a high-performance culture with the CEO of LEADx, Kevin Kruse. From designing and delivering highly effective leadership development programs, to measuring and improving the employee experience, you will understand what it takes to cultivate a thriving company culture. Through interviews with Chief People Officers, deep dives into key topics, and recordings of our invite-only community sessions, we bring you cutting-edge, data-backed insights from the most desirable companies to work for in the world.
Kruse: Hello everyone, I'm Kevin Kruse. Welcome back to Culture Code. Our guest today, whom I'm very excited to introduce, is the CHRO of Exabeam, Gianna Driver. Gianna, welcome! And where are you joining us from today?
Driver: Thanks, Kevin. I'm super excited to be here. I am joining today from the San Francisco Bay Area.
Kruse: We were talking before I hit the record button about the amazing weather you've been experiencing out here. I've been able to enjoy a bit of it. But you know, people will often discuss why they pay all these taxes in California - it's the sunshine tax, the weather tax, right?
Driver: Totally, and we do pay a lot in taxes. So, we get a lot of sunshine, thankfully.
Kruse: For those who might not be familiar with [your company], how big is your organization and in plain language, what do you do?
Driver: Yeah, so we're a global company with around 700 employees. When I talk to my mom, I explain cybersecurity to her as us being in the business of making the world a safer place. We have a variety of tech tools that utilize AI and machine learning. They help organizations understand when there's been a threat, whether it's an internal bad actor or an external individual or group of folks. Our technology helps organizations quickly comprehend breaches and then isolate and mitigate the exposure. Because if you think about it, every second that information and data are breached and exposed, it incurs liability costs, etc., for organizations. So, we have some truly amazing products that help companies keep themselves, their data, and their data safe.
Kruse: Yeah, incredibly important. How would you describe your company culture in just a few words?
Driver: Yeah, so I would say we are an organization of really dedicated, hardworking, fun-loving professionals. We pride ourselves on being inclusive and authentic. Personally speaking, I find our culture very inspiring. I love the fact that when we gather together, we have impassioned individuals who come together. We're able to put our heads together, think differently, and come up with new solutions that many of us didn't see individually. But it's the collective power that's incredible. That's where the magic happens. And I'm just so excited that it's part of our culture.
Kruse: Now you mentioned, you know, fun and working hard, inclusivity. What are some of the ways you foster or sustain this culture? Any unique rituals or traditions related to your culture?
Driver: Yeah, well, I'm actually gonna answer your question, but I'm going to add on to that as well and say it's important to note that culture is something that is very dynamic. I think of culture as this living, breathing part of an organization that's ever-evolving. It's ever-changing. And it's this beautiful thing that every person in an organization impacts, whether that's in a big or a small way. Every single person in a company impacts its culture. So, I think it's important that we think about culture as an active, ever-evolving part of who we are.
To answer your question about what are some of the specific activities, initiatives, and things that we do at Exabeam to really nourish our culture: I mentioned the fun aspect, and I want to underscore that because I think a lot of times in organizations, there's so much focus and emphasis on productivity, output, ROI. And that is incredibly important. I am not minimizing that importance at all, but we are also very intentional about spending time and energy on the fun aspect.
Examples of that are every month, we do this thing called a Mix and Mingle, which is a Zoom-based global gathering of individuals. We celebrate milestone moments in employees' lives. We give company updates, business updates, and things like that. But it's a very fun and festive type of atmosphere. We answer questions, hard questions, check-in questions, all of that.
We have these things across the organization that we introduced about a year and a half ago called "Thank You" Days. And those are days where the entire global company takes the day off. Because it's all too often that during vacations, people take time off, have a wonderful recharge, and then they come back to work and open their inbox, and it's overwhelming - the number of messages that have come in. And so by the time you get to the bottom of your inbox, you're ready for another vacation because it's just been exhausting. What we do is we offer these "Thank You" Days that allow everybody company-wide to take a moment to hit pause. And because we're all doing it collectively, that helps us manage. Then when we do come back together, we don't have inboxes that have exploded.
I can go on and on about this, but let me just succinctly say a couple of other quick bullet points. We invest a lot in our learning and our growth. We think that feedback is a continual and iterative process. We also spend time and energy investing in what we call ERGs - Employee Resource Groups. Currently, we have seven of these. These are employee-run associations or circles, if you will, that help to not only celebrate cultural and life experience differences, but also educate. We have an LGBTQ+ one, an Asian American Pacific Islander one, and a number of others. These have really done a lot to foster a strong culture amongst our teams and people.
Kruse: Let me ask something a little off-script here, but it's great to hear all these initiatives. I'm looking to put them in context. Where has Exabeam landed in terms of, you know, going back to work - hybrid, remote? What kind of workplace are you encouraging?
Driver: Yeah, Kevin, I love the off-script question. That's good. So we are what we call a remote-friendly, hybrid workplace. We do have offices across the world. That said, we don't require people to come into the office. We encourage it and we try to organize various activities and initiatives in the office, so that when people do come together, they have pointed, directed projects and activities. These could be happy hours that we organize, on-site offsites, brainstorming sessions, and more. We're very deliberate about how we spend our gathering time.
However, we do have individuals who live near an office but, for various personal considerations, don't come into the physical office. On the other hand, we have individuals who live in places where going to an office wouldn't even be an option, as they were hired as remote employees. They may come into the office during events like QBRs or sales kickoff events. So, we are a hybrid organization, and this approach works well for us. We love it.
Kruse: Great. One topic I'm passionate about is leadership development, especially frontline leader development. 70% of engagement is correlated to the manager, and front-line managers touch more employees than any other leadership group. What are some of the ways you develop your front-line managers?
Driver: So, this is a very hot topic for us right now that we're spending a lot of energy around. I love this question. We've recently finished our leveling process across the company, and that's a process where we go through and we work with managers and leaders to map everyone by job family into a leveling matrix, if you will. The next step, and this is the current step that we're in, is around building out competency-based career paths. And so that then allows us to say, if you are an engineer Level 1, here are the specific expectations of your role: competency-based skills and expectations. Here's what an engineer Level 2 would look like, or Level 3, or Level 4. So, we're literally right now in the process of building that out for all of our job families across the global organization and it will look like anyone in the organization will be able to go on to our cloud-based career path-having platform. We use a great tool called Lattice, and they'll be able to see their specific job family. Also, every job family across the company allows for career progression in your own role, but also internal mobility. Let's say I am a marketing person and I'm thinking about moving over to sales. Well, I'll be able to specifically look at the career ladder and matrix for the roles I'm interested in and engage in a conversation. So, that's kind of a foundational component.
On top of that, we're also spending a lot of energy in creating management training and leadership training programs. Earlier this year, we launched a pilot program for our high-potential, high-performers. And that culminated in a really value-adding capstone project at the end that we're still using many of those takeaways in our business today. What we're doing is we're now scaling that and expanding it because it was so successful. So, that's something where in cohorts of about 15-16 people, so relatively small, leaders will be able to come together and talk about real-time situations that they want to discuss. We're also doing some additional goal-setting exercises. How do they create psychological safety? How do they lead with vulnerability? Those types of modules are part of this as well.
Kruse: On that theme of employee engagement as it relates to culture, how do you solicit feedback from employees about the culture and their engagement (e.g., engagement or other surveys, town halls, ?)
Driver: Yeah, so, you know, I think there are multiple metrics and things to look at. A lot of organizations will say, and I don't disagree, that attrition data is something that's important. That's true. I like to say that it's a bit of looking in the rearview, because attrition information has already happened. If you want to really understand sentiment and engagement as it pertains to real-time today and also start to extrapolate predictive, you know, curves, then I think surveys are a wonderful way to do that.
So we do an annual engagement survey, which gives us a wonderful high-level view of what's going well, and also areas that we need to work on and do better. We couple that with pulse surveys, which are not the behemoth of all the questions that come in the annual survey. The pulse surveys are more curated, depending on what the annual survey showed us. These are more curated surveys that could be 2, 3, or 4 questions, and they're very topical. It could be about benefits, pay transparency, or some of the learning modules that we're rolling out additionally.
We have all-hands meetings every month where there's a pretty robust QA process that happens, and we use a tool called Slido, which allows us to crowdsource questions. We can upvote questions, and it's up to employees if they prefer to be anonymous or have their name associated with their question. What's nice about that is it allows us to truly get a sense of what's on people's minds. I think a lot of times in conversations that are 700 people big, it can be intimidating and kind of scary to say, "Oh, I've got this question and I'm not sure if anyone else has the same question." But with technology, we're able to really hear and listen to the thoughts that are on people's minds.
We do a number of in-person events as well. So, sit-down type of meetings and conversations. Sometimes those are small groups, sometimes those are larger groups. I've just come from our EMEA office in London, and we had a wonderful, robust conversation with people asking about the things they care about, and it was wonderful to hear. These are the concerns on their minds. And then on top of that, our HR business partners are pretty active in the groups they support. So they're kind of a go-to resource for understanding what the engagement and sentiment is like.
Kruse: Gianna, you've already in this conversation talked about so many really cool, impactful programs. Related to culture, are there any special initiatives or results you’re most proud of?
Driver: You know, I would say, "Oh, gosh! I love so many of them, Kevin. You know, I think that our monthly mix and mingle goals have really done a lot to bring our people together because, you know, in all hands meetings – in fact, we had one earlier today – they're wonderful. They tend to be so expensive in the content, in the material, right? We're looking at the competitive landscape; we're looking at how we're doing against our roadmap; here's how we're faring in terms of our plans on the product side. Like, there are just so many items and topics."
"What I love about these mix and mingle goals is that these are employee-focused times each month where we're talking about the employee experience. Yes, we are talking about things like performance review time or time to enter goals into the system. However, we're also spending time building connective tissue amongst ourselves. And at our core, we're humans first and employees second. The mix and mingle goals really allow us space to be human with one another, be ourselves, and just connect. And that's fun."
Kruse: What book would you recommend that your colleagues read? (or podcast, video, etc.)
Driver: I might send them a truckload of books. If I had to choose one book that I ensure every person on my team has read, because we usually will do workshops on this, it's "Dare to Lead" by Brené Brown. That is a powerful, powerful book that has just created such an amazing sense of community. And it highlights the importance of vulnerable leaders in the workplace. It's been a game changer for me and for many people I know.
Kruse: Brené Brown, her work has—I mean, I read a lot, but her book "Daring Greatly" was one of the most transformative, even for me personally. What skill or behavior do you wish your employees did more of?
Driver: Yeah, yeah, there's this quote that says, "The fear of failure has killed more dreams than failure ever will." And there's a similar quote that says something along the lines of, "What would you do if you knew that failure wasn't an option, right? If you could certainly succeed?" So, the wish that I would cast in my wonderful spell on folks would be to work without fear of making mistakes. Dream, and dream big. Yes, that does mean that failure and mistake-making will happen. And that's okay. And not only is it okay, it's necessary for being successful.
Kruse: Hmm, my last book was on goal setting, and that's one of the secrets. What excites you the most about your company right now?
Driver: Hmm! I'm going to take that question two ways, Kevin. So the first way, I'll speak on the product side. So we've got some really exciting new releases and product launches that our teams have been working really, really hard on. In fact, in September, we have an event that we call "Spotlight" that we're going to go live with and share, in a more public fashion, some of the innovative threat detection, incident response, and cybersecurity stuff. That, I think, is just really, really exciting. But a thing outside of that that makes me really excited about the company is our Employee Resource Groups. So, all of our seven, soon to be eight, by the way, we have a new parents' one that is in formation right now. All of them are coming together in October for Global Diversity Awareness Month. And we have a number of really innovative educational celebratory programs that the ERGs are sponsoring and putting on in a cross-functional way. And I'm just... I'm so excited about bringing that to Exe. And just the enrichment and engagement that that's going to bring at the company. So super, super stoked.
Kruse: Yeah, it's exciting stuff, Gianna. Thanks so much for spending so much time with us, sharing what's going on, building a great culture. You're going to inspire a lot of peers with some of these things. They're going to steal your best programs, which I know you have no problem with. We all have to help each other, right? So thank you so much for the time today. And best of continued luck.
Gianna Driver: Thanks so much, Kevin. My pleasure.