David Tomás is a young entrepreneur and co-founder of Cyberclick Group, a leading digital marketing company. He likes talking about decision-making, new forms of creativity, personal and professional fulfillment, and how to build the happiest company in the world, which is the title of his new book. His company Cyberclick was named Best Workplace in 2014 and 2015. Follow him @davidtomas.
What interview question do you always ask potential hires and why?
How would your most recent boss rate you from 1-10, 1 being very poorly and 10 being very highly?
This question gives the potential candidate an opportunity to be reflective and honest about their previous job experiences. I always follow up with this interview by actually calling the previous employer, but this question provides you with some insight to how they feel about their own abilities and performance. It shows what the candidate is able to see regarding his or her past work experience, and how that affects job longevity and harmonious business culture.
What makes your company culture unique?
The value placed on employees, employee happiness, and daily employee satisfaction. Employees feel more valued, and in turn, perform better at work and as a team. We have a horizontal structure, ask employees to rate their happiness levels each day and enjoy frequent company-wide celebrations!
How can you make sure team outings or activities appeal as best they can to all employees?
Here at Cyberclick, we all decide together as a team on an activity or retreat location. We use simple platforms like Doodles to put up all the options that we come up with and then the voting begins. Everyone enjoys the voting process. It almost feels like there is an election going on with people starting campaigns for certain activities or retreat locations.
What’s your best tip for keeping a personal touch to onboarding and training as you grow?
Taking time to talk to and get to know your employees and keep that relationship growing. It is important to continue to build friendships alongside work relationships so that employees feel comfortable and able to share ideas and opinions, essentially fostering growth within the company, without fear of rejection, crossing “boundaries” or feeling threatened by job security. I meet with each and every team member once every couple months to go over their goals and discuss anything else they’d like to learn or improve.
What’s one quick, easy way any company at any stage can invest in their company culture?
Having a repeating “ritual” that doesn’t involve work. It could be something done weekly or daily, like a debriefing regarding what you did that weekend or a weekly get-together outside of the office. These things promote strength and unity as a team, not solely as members of the same company doing a job. We start our meetings by giving our “good news” from the past week and we frequently meet for drinks or dinner to enjoy, which ultimately builds a strong and powerful company culture.
Photos courtesy of Tomás.
