How Turo Scales and Sustains a Start-Up Culture (Even as It Grows from 400 to 800 Employees)

Ever wondered how a booming tech company maintains its original start-up vibe while doubling its workforce in just a year?

Step inside the dynamic world of Turo with Lorie Boyd, the Chief People Officer at the largest peer-to-peer car-sharing platform. From unique cars for weekend getaways to ensuring a stellar workplace culture, Boyd sheds light on Turo’s rapid evolution and growth.

• Turo’s culture: From grounded and expressive to bold and driven. 
• Cultivating leadership: For leaders at Turo, growing their people is the primary job responsibility.
• Feedback loops: How Turo effectively gauges employee sentiment and follows up with actionable solutions.
• The pivotal role of self-care: A peek into the company’s culture initiative, Positive Intelligence, and an emphasis on holistic self-growth.
• Book insights: How "The Art of Gathering" inspired Turo’s approach to in-person gatherings in a post-remote work world.
• Growth and the future: Turo’s ambition to stay nimble and its determination to uphold its cherished company culture amidst rapid scaling.

What is The Culture Code?

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. I'm really excited because our guest today is the Chief People Officer of Toro, Lorie Boyd. So, Lorie, welcome! And where are you joining the show from today?

Boyd: Hi, Kevin, it's great to be here. I'm joining you from my home in Los Angeles Hills, which is about 40 miles south of San Francisco, where we have our headquarters.

Kruse: Perfect, near headquarters. So, welcome. Now, I travel a lot, so I'm familiar with your organization, your company. For those who might not be familiar with Turo, how big is your organization and in plain language, what do you do?

Boyd: Absolutely, happy to share. We were founded in 2009, so we are the world's largest peer-to-peer car-sharing marketplace. And if folks don't exactly get what that is, the shorthand of it is basically the Airbnb of cars. We have an extraordinary selection of amazing vehicles on our platform that you can book from your neighbor down the road, your family in the town you're landing in. So, if you want a Maserati to go up to Napa this weekend for wine tasting for your husband's birthday, or you need a big minivan to transport all the cousins coming for Thanksgiving to Tahoe, because you don't own a car that big, we have all different types of makes and models available for you to book. So you get the car you want for the adventure you want, and the host makes money. The cars are sitting underutilized about 95% of the time, and this is often one of the most expensive assets people have, aside from a house. So, why not put that car to use and generate income? Many folks have found that this is a great side hustle, but some have also built it into an amazing business.

Kruse: Yeah, Lorie, what a concept! I love what you said there. For most of us, even if we have one car, it's not utilized, especially now that so many of us are working from home. So to be able to make some money and let someone else use the car for a while is great. And you don't even know this, but I'm actually outside Philadelphia, and on Monday, I'm arriving in San Jose, California for a month. I've got an apartment there for business reasons, and I like this idea. I'm going to look into getting a Maserati to drive up for a long weekend in wine country. And if I do that, I'll take a selfie in front of the Maserati, and I'll let you know it was your idea.

Boyd: Excellent! Well, and you could mix it up. You could have a Maserati one week, a Jeep the next week, a BMW the week after that, and a Volvo wagon the week after that. So it's whatever adventure you want. We've got a car for you, that's for sure.

Kruse: So, company culture is fascinating. You have a strong company culture, and every company, though, is unique, and a lot of times you just sort of know it when you see it. How would you describe your company culture in just a few words?

Boyd: I would say that for us at Turo, we definitely have a lot of what people commonly call the Silicon Valley company culture. It's a very collaborative group, a very down-to-earth and humble group of employees. We have a very supportive, innovative approach, always pushing the boundaries, wanting to make the product and experience better for our hosts and guests. But when it comes down to it, we went through this huge exercise of rethinking our values. We had a couple of core values that we had, and we just went through an exercise last year where we asked our employees, "How would you describe our culture?" Because we felt it was time to take another look at that. And we came out with four values. The four values are that we are grounded, we are expressive, we are bold, and we are driven. These company values are our North Star, guiding us in decision-making and day-to-day behavior. We infuse them throughout the entire employee experience from recruitment and onboarding to reward and recognition and performance. So, our values are really core to who we are, and we feel that it's each one of our obligations and responsibilities to model them day in and day out in the workplace.

Kruse: I love it that you went right to the employee base to get feedback and reset the values. What are some of the ways you foster or sustain this culture? Any unique rituals or traditions related to your culture?

Boyd: Right. So, part of that is, as I mentioned, during onboarding, all of our new hires. I actually delivered that session on culture at Turo. How we behave and how we treat one another. So I walk through that portion with the new hires, so immediately right off the bat, they would have had some questions during their interview process about how they reflect our values, but we really instill them and make sure that they fully understand them during onboarding. But it's also things like when we have our company updates every two weeks. We're always mentioning the values there. We have designed reward and recognition and we're working on a new company-wide level award, if you will, that aligns with the values as well. So different ways for us to weave it in and out. But I think, culture-wise, what we really love to do is gather every six months. We fly in all of our employees. So, we currently have employees in six countries, about 868 folks strong at the end of the year, and we bring them in every six months so that we can gather together in person. And we either do that here at our San Francisco headquarters or at our office in Phoenix, Arizona. It's a week-long program where various leaders talk about what their teams have done, and what they're looking forward to doing in the next six months. But again, culture and the values are constantly woven throughout all of these presentations. And then, of course, in the evenings, we have lots of team-building activities and lots of fun.

Kruse: That's great. I'm really curious about what you're doing to develop and support frontline managers because Gallup and LEADx research suggest that about 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?

Boyd: You're absolutely right that the relationship that an employee has with their manager is the most important relationship in the company. And so, we have been very, very clear. I would say even our CEO has gone as far, and I do all the time, to let people know that if you are a people manager, that is your number one job in the company. It isn't to deliver soft, high-quality software. It isn't to do better marketing. It isn't to make sure our accounting numbers are all tied up at the end of the month. It is that you are here to develop and support your people on your team.

So, we make that very, very clear to folks how important their role is. Now, the way we support them is through a number of training sessions. And so, a lot of these were initially done in-house, but we are of the size and scale now where we are able to bring in third-party folks. And so, we have partnered with LifeLab to come in and do our Core Manager 1 training and our Core 2 training.

The Core 1 really focuses on coaching and how to provide feedback, and how to ensure productivity, having effective one-on-one. So, just those table stakes again, the basics on management. But then the Core 2 really goes into strategic thinking, as you know, meeting mastery, like pulling all these people together, and let's make sure it's an effective meeting, and we're getting accomplished what we want to, and how to lead your team through change. That's another area as well.

So, we do invest a lot in that. But we also again do a lot of our own training. Whether it was just one yesterday, for example, on compensation conversation because we do our salary benchmarking here in the summer. And so, we want to make sure that all of our managers are equipped not only with just the knowledge of how we compensate, but through what our compensation philosophy is, how we level folks, what the budget looks like, all of that good stuff.

But they need the skills in being able to deliver the news to their employees about what their salary increase is for the year. And so, we do types of preparation like that as well.

Kruse: And, Lorie, just so much good stuff in your answer, and just for our listeners. How do you solicit feedback from employees about the culture and their engagement (e.g., engagement or other surveys, town halls, ?)

Boyd: Yes, exactly so. What I was fortunate to have inherited here is a culture of engagement surveys where the leadership does really care about what our employees have to say. So I was glad that I didn't have to convince our executive team when I arrived here 5 and a half years ago. The importance of this.

So we do use Culture Amp for our engagement surveys. We survey our employees every 6 months, and it's crucial. I think folks need to understand. It's one thing to survey your employees, but you actually have to take time to deliver the results to them, and to show them what action you're going to take, because there's nothing worse than employees completing a survey and wondering what happened with that. Where did that information go? Where did I, did they hear me?

And so we want to make very clear to our employees that yes, we've heard you. So we take time again after each semi-annual survey, and this usually occurs at our turbo week. I deliver those results. Here's what you all had to say. These were the things that were significant action items for us. And here's how we plan on addressing it, and we make it very clear to our employees as well that some things we can change overnight. We hear you and yes, I can go change that tomorrow. Some things take a while, and to ask for their patience. It isn't that it's falling on deaf ears. But some of these changes take a year, year and a half to happen. And so we want to update them and let them know where we stand with respect to some of those action items.

But we deliver the results as a company, and then we also ensure that our people, leaders, and department heads all share with their department because the way the engineering team's feeling may be different than what the marketing team is feeling versus the overall company. So we don't want to clean up the results, we want to really get in and understand what's working, what isn't, and to learn from those organizations that have high engagement scores. What are they doing over in that team that we can learn from and help support this other team who might be struggling in that area.

So we're very excited. We have an engagement score. We have 88% participation in our surveys. And that is fairly consistent. And we're consistently scoring in the mid-eighties now for overall engagement for the company. So I think our employees understand their matter, their opinions matter, and we hear them, and we will take action as quickly as we can. Sometimes it takes us a little longer, but we hear them.

Kruse: Incredible engagement practices again. Let's unpack a little bit for listeners when we do survey work. The first number that jumps out to me is participation. Right? Even before everyone wants to look at the score, what's our score? You know, what's the scale of one to 5 or what percent are engaged? I look at participation because if it's low, it means either they just don't care. They don't even care enough to answer the survey. So they've already checked out. They're disengaged, or they don't trust you. They don't believe that it's anonymous, or whatever it is. They're afraid it's going to blow back on them. So 88% is incredibly high. And I hope everyone heard the distinction you made when you do engagement surveys. You definitely have to get back to people with the results. Otherwise, they'll get disengaged. Whoa! What a waste of time that was! But you don't have to solve every problem. People are realistic. They know they're not always going to get what they want. They understand things might take time. They understand there are limited resources. They just want to know they've been heard. So, boy, if there are some quick wins, great. But otherwise, hey, Kevin, that's a good idea. But it's not going to make the short priority list now, and we're going to revisit it in 6 months. Okay? Great, I see you read my comment. You heard my idea. It's being evaluated. That's all people ask for, so congratulations on these practices.

Boyd: Thank you. Yes, we receive thousands of comments. So it's one thing for people to complete the survey, right? Just agree, strongly agree. But we get thousands of comments each cycle that we run this, and those comments, each executive team member reads every single verbatim that are provided to us by our employees. So they know that we have heard them, and the entire leadership team has heard them. So that's, I think, what is really important, as you mentioned. Some things we can get to pretty quickly. Sometimes we are educating ourselves as leaders or department heads of, "Wow, this seems like a gap in education," especially when it comes to human resources and our people ops team. People may be asking for a certain benefit, and we're like, "Hmm, we actually do offer that benefit, but I think we need to highlight that a little harder in orientation. Or maybe we need to have lunch and learn to just remind people about all of the great things and resources that we have." So it's very enlightening sometimes to understand where the gaps in employee knowledge are.

Kruse: Yeah, that's a great addition. I remember once at a very large company there had horrible scores on learning and development, like career opportunities, learning, development. And everyone said, "You know there's no training, there's no opportunities." And all it took was sort of this 1-hour focused session in this large department to say, "Okay, well, we have tuition reimbursement. We have the Online Learning Library. We have this live catalog. We offer Job Shout. We are." And all of a sudden there was just this flip chart of, you know, 2 dozen things. The next time they did the survey, that number was very high. They didn't change what they were doing. They just communicated it more clearly.

Boyd: Right. Well, kind of on the flip side of that, again, when we were starting out as an organization, you know, a smaller organization that didn't have as many financial resources, we did get that feedback from our employees of, "I don't feel like TRURO is really investing in my learning and development," and that just kind of blew my mind because I'm a startup person. I've been at Salesforce early on. I was Zendesk early on, right? I'm used to these startup high growth companies and we don't always have the budget. But you're at these types of companies because this is exactly where you learn a lot. It's day-to-day. It isn't necessarily going to a professional conference that's going to boost your learning and development. It is the projects that you're able to tackle, the autonomy that you have to make decisions to have an impact. That is where you really grow and stretch to build a career.

And so what we did in response to that is we have a weekly update that we use Via Lattice for, a performance management platform, where you answer a couple of questions each week. What did you work on last week? What are you focused on for the coming week? Any hurdles or challenges that I can help you with as your manager or anything else I should know? And we added a fifth question, "What did you learn this week?" Because if you didn't learn something, that's probably an issue. "Oh, I learned how our marketing gets better ROI on the SEO spend. I learned how the Toronto operations are tackling some of the trust and safety issues. I learned about how the financial accounting team is preparing for the audit." You're always learning something. And so we put that question in there so that people specifically at the review cycle timeframe can go back and see that breadcrumb of trails. Look, you did actually learn quite a bit over the past 6 months. So sometimes it is providing the resources and reminding them of all these great tools and channels that we have for learning. But it's also what you're learning here on the job.

Kruse: Yeah, it's great. Related to culture, are there any special initiatives or results you’re most proud of?

Boyd: Well, I think when it comes to culture again, our Turbo Week, you know, and we do have, it's all the day-to-day things as well. We have Slack channels where people come together, whether it's all not just work-related, right? We come together as human beings, people, because I believe that's where the foundation really starts. If we get along as people, then all the other challenges in building this business will become a little bit easier to navigate. And so we have things like the Home and Garden Channel, where people are talking about plants or a music channel or the Star Wars Channel. We have a Corgi channel where we all put pictures of our dogs and things of that sort. And it's just really, really great fun and a fun way to build community.

But aside from that, I think, you know, in our Turbo Week that we hold semi-annually as well, one of the things that we did this past year when it comes to culture is we really empowered our leadership team here that are all our directors and above. So directors, senior directors, VPs, SVPs, and the C-level. And we really wanted to engage them and really bring them to the forefront of people management, in particular. Because we realized that the 11 members of us in the C-suite, while we model the values day in and day out as much as we can, we can't be in every place, in every location, and we can't be the sole cultural flag bearers within the company.

And so we really wanted to empower the director-plus folks to feel like they are the ones also in this journey with us, in leading their departments, and how they figure out solutions on the product or within the work environment. That they need to also feel like strong cultural flag bearers as well. So it's this leadership team that we pull together, and we now hold on the week that we gather for Turbo Week. We carve out one day before, where we only meet with the director's-plus. Not only talk about people and culture matters, but also product initiatives, financial targets that we're looking at to really make sure that they are fully well-versed in the business and in the people and in the culture, so that they can continue to message to their own team.

Kruse: That's a big investment of time and shows the importance, tells everyone the importance of the culture work. What book would you recommend that your colleagues read? (or podcast, video, etc.)

Boyd: Yes, so the one that I read fairly recently was this book called "The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters." And this is by Priya Parker. And I was coming to this. I'm so happy I found this book because we had just come off the whole Covid, you know, working remotely for about 2 years, and now we were. We had always been an in-office culture and our employees, we heard very loud and clear from them. They love the flexibility of being able to work from home, and they did not want to be forced to work back in the office, even though we've had flexibility in the past, right? You didn't have it. You weren't pulled to your desk by anything like that.

And so, you know, from her book, I really felt that it really helped me message our employees why it is important to gather in person again. We have flexibility. People want to work fully remotely. That's totally fine. But the fact that we gather to celebrate, we gather to question, there's just something very different from being in person versus being remote and on Zoom, and everybody being in little boxes. So I felt like that book just gave me a lot of really great ideas on how to structure gatherings instead of the way we've done it in the past, to really make sure we have moments that matter and are meaningful, that are worthy, as we discussed earlier, worthy of people's time. So I felt that that was a great resource for me.

Kruse: And where? Is it remote first, or have you gone hybrid? What's the expectation?

Boyd: So we landed in that we're pretty much hybrid. If folks. If we left this up to our leaders, we didn't want this to be a mandate from our CEO or from the people operations team. We wanted each business leader to figure out what works best for them and their teams. And there are some roles that can be fully remote, and there are some that require being in the office. And so we left that up to the leaders. So it's a hybrid.

Kruse: So this is kind of a fun one. What skill or behavior do you wish your employees did more of?

Boyd: Hmm! Let's see. I have to think that the one that I think folks could work on more here at Truro is the area of self-care. Just, you know, we give so much to try and produce a quality product, a quality experience for when you book that car for our guests and for our hosts, that this is a great income-generating platform for them. We give so much to our employees. We give so much to our spouses, our children, our dogs, that I just don't know that we always give enough time to ourselves.

And so what we actually invested in, this is another cool kind of culture initiative, is we partnered with this group called Positive Intelligence this year, and we made a significant financial investment to offer this program for every single one of our employees who wanted to partake in it. And we're glad that we've had hundreds already do it. And basically what it is, is a lot of reflection about you going through this exercise of what are your saboteurs? What are these voices, these negative voices kind of going on and pre, you know, kind of keeping you from being your best self and having better relationships, not just at home, but at work.

And so we've received rave reviews about this for employees. And so what I encourage them to do through this process is to be selfish, to take the time to invest in yourself. And so I think that's the big headline: invest in yourself, whether that's self-care or the learning and development cause. We do now provide a stipend of $2,000 per year for each employee to go and do coursework that isn't just on-the-job learning. But be selfish, invest in yourself. Take care of yourself. Sleep right. We're all building these high-growth companies. We need to sleep a little bit more, even though there's a lot on our plates. So I think it's self-care. Be selfish.

Kruse: That's great. Final question. What excites you the most about your company right now?

Boyd: For me, it's our growth, the growth trajectory. I mean, last year we more than doubled the size of the company, went from 400 and some to 800-plus employees. So that was really incredible. And it's not just the growth, but how do we scale culture as we grow? And so the big mantra for us this past year has been, how do we stay small while growing big? We love our culture, we love the relationships we have. We love being lean and nimble. And we don't want to become a bloated, bureaucratic, inflexible organization or culture.

So as leaders, we're all keeping that top of mind, how do we stay small while we grow big? So that's my greatest thing that I'm looking forward to is seeing how the culture that we've had, that is so special to us, how do we maintain that? It has to evolve by nature, it does with each new employee that we bring on board. It's a dynamic group, right? And so it will change. But how do we stick to our core of who we are as we continue to grow big.

Kruse: What an exciting challenge! And you obviously have a great foundation to build on and have a lot more in place than most organizations your size, I think. So congratulations on all of that success, and thanks for spending some time on a Friday afternoon with us.

Boyd Thanks, Kevin. It was a pleasure.