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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. I'm super excited. Our guest today is the Chief People Officer of Zapier, Brandon Sammut. Brandon, welcome! And where are you joining from today?
Sammut: Hey, thanks, Kevin. I'm joining from Berkeley, California, U.S.A.
Kruse: So, Brandon, I'm normally from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but I've been in San Jose for a couple of weeks and am enjoying the nice weather. There were a coupe of air alert days, but I'm just looking outside at the mountains and everything, so I'm glad to be on your West Coast. It's awesome to be here.
Sammut: Welcome.
Kruse: So let's just start with Zapier. Anyone in tech obviously is familiar with your organization. For those who might not be familiar with Zapier, how big is your organization and in plain language, what do you do?
Sammut: Sure, Zapier is a 12-year-old company that started all remote and still operates that way. Today, we have about 800 folks in over 40 countries working together on one mission, which is to make automation work for everyone. Practically speaking, that means that we build and scale an automation platform that enables folks, without having to write any code at all, to build automations and abstract a lot of the tedium out of their and their organization's day-to-day work, so that the team can spend more time doing the things that humans do best.
Kruse: So, this is pretty remarkable because fostering a great culture is, I don't believe, ever easy, especially in a remote environment and growing as fast as Zapier has grown. How would you describe your company culture in just a few words?
Sammut: I think that Zapier's values describe our culture best. I don't know that they're the complete definition of our culture, but I think they represent the lion's share of it. Zapier has 5 values. They've been consistent for many years, and they are:
Default to action.
Embrace transparency.
Breathe empathy over ego.
Grow through feedback.
Very relevant to our mission, build the robot.
And so, if you put that into plain speech, like what is it, you know, when Zapier is at its best, what's the look and feel of how people are engaging with each other and how their work is getting done? You can just plain speak the values. Right? Zapier's culture at its best is a place where folks default to action and embrace transparency while indexing for empathy over ego, growing through feedback, and building the robot.
Kruse: Yeah, I mean, that's very clear. What are some of the ways you foster or sustain this culture? Any unique rituals or traditions related to your culture?
Sammut: Absolutely, Kevin, I agree. It starts, you know, actually even before folks join the company. The experience of getting into Zapier as a candidate for one of our jobs is where we really start normalizing and aligning on culture. And one of the reasons we find it so helpful to do it at that point is because we get to have an alignment moment. Zapier, for well over 90% of the folks that join the company, are joining their first all-remote company. They may have worked remotely a little bit during Covid, or even for, you know, a year and a half or up to 2 years. But there's a difference between being thrust into a remote environment for a temporary season and going to work at a company that is all remote, will be all remote, and has always operated in that way. At this point, 12 years to, you know, learn about this, and we're always learning about what it means to operate in this environment. We're not done yet, either. And so, as a candidate, you just want again, this is where default transparency comes in, you just want a lot of context. What is it like to work at a place like Zapier and, you know, the all-remote model? It's not the perfect match for every person. And that's actually okay for both people involved. For us, we feel really accountable for providing that information so that folks can make an informed decision about whether they want to continue getting to know us and potentially come work at Zapier. So it actually starts before folks take the job.
Now, when folks have their first day at Zapier, we have, I'd say, an unusually rigorous onboarding experience, and that's driven by exactly what you were getting at, which is the fact that the company is all remote, and it's, you know, almost everyone's first all-remote company. And so we do 2 weeks of intensive onboarding, including around a lot of the norms. How does work actually get done? How do we communicate with each other across almost every conceivable time zone in the world? That's great for the first 2 weeks. But one of the really neat things, and I experienced this firsthand when I joined Zapier, is that we actually trickled out some a lot of just-in-time ongoing onboarding content for the first 6 months. Onboarding at Zapier really is a 6-month experience. And interestingly, we use a lot of Zapier to automate those moments so that folks are getting that information, you know, when it's timely rather than all at once, and you can kind of lose track of it.
Kruse: Yeah, I was taking so many notes on that because at LEADx, we're all about overcoming the knowing-doing gap. You know, it's like so much of whether it's a new hire orientation or training program, so much of that is left on the scrap heap floor and not applied. This idea of spreading it out over 6 months seems really powerful. And, Brandon, I want to go off script a little bit because it's interesting. The hottest topic still right now in HR and human capital is this whole concept of bringing people back into the office. Do we do 2, 3 days hybrid, remote-first, etc.? I mean, do you just find those conversations and questions sort of cute because you've been fully remote from before the pandemic? It's just not even an issue, right?
Sammut: That's true. I mean, it's something that we don't have to navigate in quite the same way at Zapier. I have a lot of empathy for that though. You know, at my last company where I was also the chief people officer, we were hybrid before Covid, and we were navigating what our new normal was going to be like. And so, you know, this is what most management teams are working through today. I have a lot of respect and empathy for that. As I've talked with other CEOs and chief people officers and companies that are working through this, the things that seem to differentiate the teams that are having a pretty good go at it and the ones that are struggling actually, again, you're going to hear me say the word "alignment" a lot, because I think that's key for most of this. You know, again, I don't know that there's any one work style model, whether it's all remote, hybrid, all in one city or globally distributed, that is objectively the right model. It's just not the case. This is about matching. Just like we're trying to match candidates to jobs and folks who already work here to new opportunities to grow in the company, this workplace model thing is also ultimately a matching exercise. The teams that I see having the most success actually start with deep alignment on the management team. You might not be surprised, but some folks may be surprised at how many management teams don't agree on what to do. A saying a mentor gave to me that I really hold onto is, "the level of alignment within an organization can never be greater than the level of alignment within the management team". So, if the management team isn't aligned on something like its return to office approach and leaves the room not aligned, it just gets more and more messy from that point throughout the organization.
Kruse: That's really powerful, and I'm going to encourage you to keep coming back to that theme of alignment, because I can see this is going to be a theme for our interview. 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?
Sammut: Sure. Well, you mentioned, you know, how larger companies typically have a larger team dedicated to this. Zapier, and this is again credit to the team from before I joined, had already made an unusually large investment in learning and development, including leadership development. Again, Zapier has just under 800 people. Today, we have a 7-person learning and development team. I know a lot of really good companies, great companies who do some really nice work in L&D, who, for a company of their size might have a 2, maybe 3 person L&D team. Part of the reason we invested this deeply early on is because of the all-remote model and all the additional normalizing training, nudging, and coaching that we think needs to take place to make an all-remote model really work in practice, not just in name. So that's thing one.
And then, as it relates to manager enablement, slash, leadership development, there are a couple of things. One, and this is another alignment moment. Being a manager isn't for everyone. And so, you know, we've given some real thought to why people, you know, develop an attraction to becoming a manager. And when we listen and really talk with folks, you hear some things that are super helpful and on point like, "Hey, I think coaching and developing people gives me a ton of energy. Amazing. That's an interesting signal that a management track might be really good for you, and you might be really good for the people that you're gonna lead." But sometimes you hear things like, "You know, at XYZ Company, the only way to get a meaningful pay increase is to be on the management track. On the management track, you get all of these additional learning opportunities. But if I become a higher-level IC or individual contributor who doesn't manage people, I don't get any of that stuff. It feels like a two-tiered system in terms of development opportunities." When you hear stuff like that, it makes my ears perk up. Let's make sure that doesn't happen at a place like Zapier.
And then one really practical thing that we do that I had never seen before until I joined Zapier is that before someone applies to be a manager at Zapier, we actually have a bit of an experience that folks go through. We provide a ton of visibility, so there's a little default transparency moment here, about what it's really like to be a manager, especially if you're considering it for the first time. We include some examples of things that managers tell us aren't super fun about their jobs, if you haven't done it before, as well as some things that experienced managers deeply appreciate about being a manager, for example. And we do that in part so that folks can make an informed decision with more context than they would ordinarily have about whether they want to pursue that track in the first place. So that's the first thing that we do.
The second thing that we do to make sure that we're matching folks into manager jobs well is making sure that we're providing, you know, effectively as many of the same opportunities as possible in both the manager track and the individual contributor track. For example, we provide coaching to everyone in the company. We have a peer coaching program at Zapier, which is again, the first time I've seen something like that. Everyone can get a peer coach at Zapier, at all job levels, all roles, all locations. And we also have an entire program designed to train folks to become peer coaches. So you have this two-way learning opportunity. I can train to become a coach, which can be really meaningful for me, but I can also be coached myself. Now, at more senior levels in the organization, we also have an external coaching program with professionally certified coaches. And importantly, that's available to everyone at that level and above, regardless of whether you're on the management track or the individual contributor track. And that's just one example of some of the things we're thinking about to make sure that virtually all the same opportunities are available so that folks don't feel compelled to be a manager just to unlock that if an IC role is better for them. And all of that, Kevin, is just before someone actually becomes a manager. So there's all kinds of other stuff we could talk about if you want to keep going in terms of how we actually then grow and develop managers themselves.
Kruse: Well, I think it's insightful that you went in the direction you did, and it's a great reminder for our listeners.
How do you solicit feedback from employees about the culture and their engagement (e.g., engagement or other surveys, town halls, ?)
Sammut: You bet we do it in a few different ways. A couple of these are in the category of usual suspects, but they're important. So, you know, one of the paradigms that my team and I talk about as it relates to talent and culture work is we try to balance learning about the hot new thing with doing common things uncommonly well. The first thing I would mention is engagement surveys. Doing common things uncommonly well is what we aspire to. Most companies I can think of do some form of this. That doesn't make it unhelpful just because everyone else is doing it. It's about how we're doing it and why it's a good fit for our organization. We do two primary engagement surveys each year that cover roughly 30 topics. One of the filters we use for the questions is, what are we going to do with the answer? Are we going to prioritize it? If the answers to those questions are yes, then more likely than not, especially if it's related to our talent priorities or company priorities, it's going to go on the survey. One thing I've learned is that while changing the questions can lose the ability to track trends, it's important to ask the questions most relevant to understanding the business and tuning up the culture. So, engagement surveys are one of the ways we measure. A connection to manager effectiveness, as we were talking about earlier, is that we're fortunate to get manager-specific information. We ask questions about the company overall, but we also ask questions about how managers are interacting with their teams. They use that data to tailor development opportunities and address any issues.
Another method that I think gets overlooked when measuring culture and understanding the employee experience is just talking with people. Matching a structured tool, like an engagement survey, with a listening tour can be effective. This is something I learned from a mentor. I get to meet with two or three of my teammates from all over the world every week, thanks to automation we've set up at Zapier. Other leaders do the same. While it's scalable because of automation, it's not overly scientific. Surveys are great, but they're no substitute for being in daily and weekly conversations with the people to whom you're accountable.
Kruse: Yeah, the value of quantitative as well as qualitative data is a great reminder. And I like the way you're really scrutinizing the questions because it seems like too often, these engagement surveys are just additives.
What book would you recommend that your colleagues read? (or podcast, video, etc.)
Sammut: So, the book that I would send to our folks is one I hope that a meaningful amount of our folks read last year. The book is "Atomic Habits" by James Clear. James was a speaker at our last customer conference, and so some of our folks have heard of it. But that's the book I would send, and the reason why is because of how powerful and pragmatic the "Atomic Habits" paradigm is. It's been helpful for me too. I can be a perfectionist, and I think a lot of us, whether we call ourselves that or not, can experience a lot of anxiety at work. This paradigm of atomic habits really breaks down to very small, tangible things and powerful ideas that we can use to help us shed perfectionism and procrastination. And, you know, developing these powerful ways of thinking and doing that can make a big difference over time. One of the concepts in the book is all about habit stacking and how, as you start to develop a habit, you can build on it, and it becomes a bit of a virtuous cycle.
Kruse: One of the simple changes that really impacted my life from that book was stacking. Next to my coffee pot are my vitamins. So now, I certainly don't miss my coffee in the morning, and that is anchored to the vitamins which then triggers other things. I've got a whole morning stack. Shifting gears again, you know, what is something that you know now that you wish you knew on day one when you first became a chief people officer? Or, what advice would you give to someone just getting into the role?
Sammut: Yeah, a really big moment for me is realizing that no one expects you to know it all. One of the most confidence-inspiring things you can say is, "I don't know yet, but here's when and how we're going to figure it out, and I'll get back to you then." I was pulled into my first chief people officer role earlier in my career than I was expecting. And when you have those crucible moments, there can be this temptation to feel like you have to know everything. But you really don't. It's not what people expect. They just expect that you will figure it out and be transparent about the difference between the things you know and the things that you don't.
Kruse: And in your CPO role, now, I mean, with all the craziness in the world, the economy that we're all faced with, but also the unique things inside Zapier, what are you focused on for the year ahead, you and your team?
Sammut: Sure, there's one strategic level thing I'll mention, and one thing within it that I think is worth mentioning based on what we're doing as Zapier overall with our customers. So the number one theme for Zapier, as it relates to talent, is what we call growing our talent density. And what does that mean? Well, that means that every single person in the company has an unusually specific and impactful role as well as the context and the tools they need to do it at a high level. If that sounds simple in words, I think it is in words. But it's a rare and special thing if you actually pull it off, and that's why we're going after it. And I think it's a really nice map for Zapier in particular because we are in the business of automating the stuff that humans often don't like to do anyway. Right? So it's like, you know, we use a lot of Zapier at the company, and that's one way we can grow talent density. But there are all these other things that we're working on in pursuit of that as well. Now, one of those things that we haven't talked about yet relates to AI. So this year, from a workforce development point of view, we've started to focus a lot on making Zapier the place where folks learn how to put AI to work for them. It's a really powerful thing, you know. We don't know exactly how AI is going to shape or reshape jobs in the years ahead, but we have a leading sense at Zapier that this is a skill worth developing. And we want folks to say all these years from now, long after they're at Zapier, that Zapier is the place where I did the best work of my life. In part because Zapier helped me understand how to make AI work for me in my daily job, but it also prepared me to be kind of amazing and super marketable in all the things I did after Zapier.
Kruse: That's getting me inspired. With AI in particular, that's clearly a focus area for you in your role and on your team. And with human capital, is that area also what you're most excited about in general for the company and its evolution in the years ahead?
Sammut: You know, arguably, yes, and the good news is it's not the only thing, but it integrates. So it's not AI as a shiny object, or like this thing you do on the side. What we're seeing is that AI can help us assist our customers in solving some of their biggest opportunities and challenges with Zapier. One of the amazing things about Zapier's products is that you can do so much with them. But for someone just starting to use Zapier, that can also be a problem, which is: where should I start? What should my first zap (that's what we call our automations) be? What should my next zap be? And with AI, especially with all the data we have on how folks have had success with Zapier in the past, you could see a world where we can start to recommend, right? What is that first step? What could your next zap be? And so on. And that'd be really powerful for our customers. And what I love about that approach as we continue to work through it is that it's an integration of AI into our core existing reason for being, the place where we already know we provide a lot of value for customers.
Kruse: Your company was already doing a tremendous job of automation and helping people get their time back long before the General AI came out this year. I'm really excited for what's coming. We at Lead XI have easily a dozen or more zaps, especially in our sales and marketing stacks. So on that note, Brandon, thanks for the great work you've been doing. And thank you for giving us your time today. We're talking on a Friday afternoon before a long weekend, so special thanks for spending some time with us and giving advice and insights to your peers. Appreciate the time.
Sammut: It was fine, Kevin. Have a good holiday weekend. Thanks.