One of the coolest offices you'll ever see in your life... is a contact center in the Philippines.
If you're skeptical, so were we. But then we talked to today's Awesome Office guest Jaspar Weir, and it started to make sense.
Jaspar is the President and Co-Founder of TaskUs, a company that provides outsourced customer care and back office support for some of the most innovative companies in the world, including Expensify, Groupon, and Tinder.
We knew going in to the interview that TaskUs had a great culture, but we had no idea that culture is actually central to their business. In fact, Jaspar actually cites their commitment to culture as their number one competitive advantage. As such, he and the team have managed to create a Silicon Valley-style atmosphere, not just at their HQ located in the heart of LA's Silicon Beach, but also at their five facilities in the Philippines.
The results speak for themselves. What began as a 5 person outfit in a tiny office in Manila has morphed into a company with more than 5,000 employees worldwide. Even more telling, more than 70% of their new hires come from internal referrals - compared to the industry standard of 30%. Simply put, TaskUs is a company where people are proud to work, and even more are dying to work for.
And if you needed proof, here are a few photos from "Chateau Ridiculous," their jaw-dropping, steam punk-themed office in Manila:
As you'll learn in this interview, TaskUs' stellar culture goes so much further than whimsical office spaces. At the heart of it is a commitment to open, honest communication, personal growth, and constant learning.
Jaspar really brought the magic - so much that this episode runs a little longer than most. And if you notice a slight lilt in Sean and Jaspar's voices, it might be because this conversation took place on St. Patrick's Day, and the two celebrated the occasion with a glass (or two) of Jameson.
Key Takeaways
Recommended Reading
Links
This is episode is brought to you by the fine folks at SnackNation.
SnackNation is a healthy office snack delivery service that makes healthy snacking fun, life more productive, and workplaces awesome.
To try a free SnackNation discovery box (featuring 15 delicious snacks your team will love), visit get.snacknation.com/ao. You'll also receive a complimentary copy of the 2016 Ultimate Guide to Creating An Awesome Office.
Stop me if this sounds familiar:
You’re a brand new employee at a company that values teamwork and collaboration. Eager to prove yourself, you come out of the gate swinging. You do good work early on, and garner a reputation as a high contributor and team player.
This reputation results in more people from across the org asking for your assistance on all sorts of projects. You, of course, say yes (you are a team player, after all).
Before long, you feel yourself spread thin. You make a millimeter of progress on a thousand different fronts, but no significant progress on any. Your “priority” list is thirty items long. In an ironic twist, your early success has now undermined your ability to contribute at a high level.
The quality of your work goes down, while your stress level skyrockets.
It’s a surefire recipe for burnout.
Luckily for us, today’s Awesome Office guest has developed a solution - Essentialism.
Greg McKeown is a renowned speaker, author, and the CEO of THIS Inc, a company whose mission is to assist people and companies to spend 80 percent of their time on the vital few rather than the trivial many. His New York Times best selling book, Essentialism, is all about helping readers discover the disciplined pursuit of less - that is, helping them find their unique abilities and highest leverage activities, and realigning their lives to focus on making the highest contribution possible.
The concept of essentialism was inspired in part by McKeown’s experience working in Silicon Valley. What McKeown found was that the early success of these startups was actually a double-edged swored. It presented them with an overwhelming amount of opportunity - in the form of partnerships, new markets, acquisitions, and the like - which ultimately detracted from their ability to focus on the essential activities that made them successful in the first place.
In this way, success can actually become a catalyst for failure.
The experience lit a bulb in McKeown’s head, and the framework of essentialism - the disciplined pursuit of less but better - began to take shape.
This was an incredible interview, packed with tons of practical tips and engaging stories that will start you down the path of Essentialism.
Key Takeaways
Recommended Reading
Links
This is episode is brought to you by the fine folks at SnackNation.
SnackNation is a healthy office snack delivery service that makes healthy snacking fun, life more productive, and workplaces awesome.
To try a free SnackNation discovery box (featuring 15 delicious snacks your team will love), visit get.snacknation.com/ao. You'll also receive a complimentary copy of the 2016 Ultimate Guide to Creating An Awesome Office.
Our biggest embarrassments. Our darkest fears. Our greatest failures.
They are the things that lurk in the back of our minds, loom heavy in our consciousness, and haunt our dreams. They cause us pain, anguish, and shame.
It’s tempting to think: If only I had a time machine, a chance to go back and do things right.
But as today’s Awesome Office guest Rob Bell illuminates, to do so would be to deny one of our greatest assets.
With a little time and perspective, these moments have the potential to be our greatest sources of personal strength. In fact, these trying, troubling, or just plain cringe-worthy times are actually the force that shapes us into who we are today.
Named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2011, Rob Bell is a former pastor and New York Times bestselling author of the books Love Wins, What We Talk About When We Talk About God, and The Zimzum of Love. His newest book, How To Be Here is all about learning how to pursue and realize our dreams, live in the moment, and joyfully do the things that make us come alive.
Rob is also an award-winning podcast host, speaker, and a sought-after business consultant, and was featured on Oprah’s 2014 Life You Want Tour. We spoke to Rob about the value of our failures, how to build and lead great teams, and a whole lot more.
Key Takeaways
Recommended Reading
Links
This is episode is brought to you by the fine folks at SnackNation.
SnackNation is a healthy office snack delivery service that makes healthy snacking fun, life more productive, and workplaces awesome.
To try a free SnackNation discovery box (featuring 15 delicious snacks your team will love), visit get.snacknation.com/ao. You'll also receive a complimentary copy of the 2016 Ultimate Guide to Creating An Awesome Office.
Discovering your purpose almost always involves making some hard choices.
First and foremost, there’s the opportunity cost – saying yes to your purpose necessarily involves saying no to something else.
So what happens when the opportunity cost is a college education, and what if following your gut instinct means that your parents might disown you?
This is exactly the choice that our Awesome Office guest Mike Zhang had to make early in his entrepreneurial career.
Today, Mike is the CEO of The Drip Club, a booming e-liquid retailer whose mission is to be the Coca-Cola of the vape space. At just 25, he has multiple companies and a solid exit under his belt.
But before his success with Drip Club, Mike was a student trying to juggle his coursework with the obligations of a growing airsoft e-commerce business.
Less than a semester into his freshman year at UC Berkeley, Mike realized that he couldn’t give his all to both school and his company. Deep down he knew he had to choose one or the other. Against the advice of friends and family, he chose to drop out of college and run the business full time.
A successful exit a few years later eventually put his parents’ anxieties to rest, and Mike learned the power of trusting his gut instincts.
Mike shared what he learned during these formative experiences, as well as the role of gut instinct in business strategy and the benefits and challenges of partnering with friends.
Key Takeaways
Recommended Reading
Links
This is episode is brought to you by the fine folks at SnackNation.
SnackNation is a healthy office snack delivery service that makes healthy snacking fun, life more productive, and workplaces awesome.
To try a free SnackNation discovery box (featuring 15 delicious snacks your team will love), visit get.snacknation.com/ao. You'll also receive a complimentary copy of the 2016 Ultimate Guide to Creating An Awesome Office.
There’s a reason why films like Office Space and cartoons like “Dilbert” strike a chord with so many people:
The modern employee is plagued by a dystopian vision of what work (and therefore life) has to be.
This vision depicts a world that is soulless and monotonous, that deprives of us of our energy, creativity, and joy, and in which our job feels more like a transaction than a calling.
But as today’s guest Shawn Murphy uncovers for us, this dystopian vision is a choice, one made everyday by both leaders and employees alike.
The upside? Shawn reminds us that there’s another choice – the choice to say, “I want something more for my team, and more for my own life.”
Shawn Murphy is the author of the Optimistic Workplace and the CEO and founder of Switch and Shift, an organization that focuses helping organizations bring more humanity to their workplaces. Through his consulting work and his writing, Shawn teaches people how to make that choice and unlock the transformative power of optimism in the workplace each and every day. We are grateful that he shared this wisdom with our Awesome Office community.
Key Takeaways
Recommended reading
Links