Anneke Jong of Reserve gave an epic masterclass on building a great culture at the LAUNCH Festival last week. Wanted to capture the essential takeaways here.

Ruthless Welcoming – all about onboarding and consistency

1. Everyone meets the foxtato
2. Make docs for everything – if you find yourself repeating things, write it down
3. Playbooks for every role – at Reserve, a GM for a new city is given a playbook outlining what their first 3 hires and 25 restaurants should look like

Ruthless Sharing – share the wheel vs. reinvent it

1. Role-specific national summits
2. Role-specific weekly video hangouts
3. Role-specific emails lists and Slack channels

Ruthless Camaraderie – one team, one dream

1. One-hour values & vision session with each new team member during onboarding
2. Monthly all-hands town hall – remind everyone of the shared North Star, not just what’s changing but what hasn’t changed
3. Standardized, easily accessible KPIs sent out weekly (Reserve uses Looker for the dashboards)

Many of these are very simple, straightforward things to do, but when you put them all together they add up to more than the sum of their parts. They help create habits that reinforce the culture you are trying to build, and they help maintain that culture as you grow and bring on new people.

And if you ever get a chance to see Anneke give a talk, do it – outstanding presenter, hope to see her back at the LAUNCH Festival again next year.