E011 - The Secrets of Distributed Teamwork (w/ Arlen Marmel, COO & Co-Founder of Luna Park)

In this episode of the Employee Onboarding podcast, we speak to Arlen Marmel, the COO & Co-Founder of Luna Park.

Arlen's experience includes his time as General Manager at VRV, Marketing Distribution at Crunchroll (where he helped grow the subscriber base from 250k to over 2 million) as well as Hulu's Director of Customer Acquisitions & Retention (where he oversaw Hulu+ grow from inception to 5mil+ subscribers).

From the importance of thinking about onboarding as early as the interview process, to drinking your own Kool-Aid and being intentional about creating fun interactions amongst team members, this one is all about making distributed teams work smarter and stronger together. 

Don't miss it!

Transcript

Intro:

In this episode of the Employee Onboarding podcast, Erin Rice, the People & Operations Coordinator at Process Street speaks to Arlen Marmel, the COO & Co-Founder of Luna Park. They explore the importance of thinking about onboarding from as early as the interview process, drinking your own Kool-Aid and being intentional about creating fun interactions amongst team members.

Erin:

Welcome to Process Street’s Employees Onboarding podcast where we are unpacking great onboarding ideas and best practices from the world's, top HR practitioners and thought leaders, at Process Street that starts with our mission to make recurring work fun, fast and faultless for teams everywhere. 

My name is Erin Rice and I'm the People & Operations Coordinator here at Proces Street. Today, I'm joined by Arlen Marmel. Arlen is  the COO & Co-Founder of Luna Park. Luna Park is an online platform designed to engage distributed teams through interactive and collaborative ice breakers, social games, trivia and more. 

Prior to Luna Park, Arlen was the general manager of V RV and Head of Marketing Distribution for Crunchyroll, the world's largest streaming destination for anime, growing the business from 250,000 subscribers to over 2 million subscribers at the time of his departure. Arlen was formerly Hulu's Director of Customer Acquisitions and Retention for four years, where he oversaw Hulu Plus grow from inception to more than 5 million paid subscribers. Before joining Hulu, Arlen worked with various media companies such as NBC, Universal Fox, APA and ICM. Arlene graduated Cum Laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in American Studies at the University of Maryland College Park, and earned an MBA in digital strategy from the University of California Los Angeles Anderson School of Management. 

Thank you so much for joining us today, Arlen!

Arlen:
Thanks so much for having me here. And I feel like with that lead and I better deliver now.

Erin:

No pressure at all!

Arlen:

You are able to hit my whole resume!

Erin:

So before we dive in, I'd like to ask a very controversial question to break the ice: pancakes or waffles?

Arlen: Pancakes or waffles that's really interesting. So I don't know if this is a cop-out, but I'm kind of like a waffles for dessert pancakes for breakfast. And I also, I like to eat pretty healthy. So I've come up with some recipes where it's like pancakesque, but you kind of can use cottage cheese or bananas or stuff like that. And so it gets a little healthier for you. I probably eat more pancakes, but I do not mind a little ice cream on a waffle.

Erin:Nice. So you like toppings on your waffles?

Arlen: "Yeah, for sure. I like it as dessert.

Erin: That's awesome! 

Great. Well, now what we really came here for employees onboarding. I'd love if you could share a little bit more about how you ended up with Luna Park  and starting this awesome platform.

Arlen: Great. Yeah. So I think my Co-Founder and I, by the way I co-founded the company with Ben Anderson who previously founded a company called Amino. We made an observation pretty early on that pretty early on the pandemic, I should say that remote work was here to stay. If we can rewind our brains a little bit to that moment. A lot of folks were saying we'll be back in the office in a month or in a couple of weeks. And I think we were looking at the landscape saying, you know what? I actually think this may be a more cosmic shift in work culture. And we started to ask ourselves well, if we're physically distributed from our colleagues, what changes? And we felt that one of the biggest changes is our ability to connect and build relationships. You know, so much of our connection happens from just the physical proximity of being in an office with our colleagues. And when you remove that, it became pretty clear that like productivity is fine, right? It's really easy to jump on Zoom and Slack in these other tools and get work done. But what about our relationships? What about trust and empathy? When you join an organization? Obviously, we're gonna talk about onboarding today. When you join an organization, how do you get to know your colleagues? You lose a lot of the serendipity that comes from being in an office and just bumping into your colleagues at random and noticing, you know, somebody's got an Aerosmith t-shirt and you happen to like Aerosmith as well. And so we've worked really hard to try to re-infuse some of those opportunities, you know, for, you know, deepening pre-existing bonds, building new ones, creating trust and empathy. And again, putting that serendipity back into, you know, whether you're remote hybrid or just physically distributed from your colleagues.

Erin: Great. And so as a company, you all are really small still. Is that right?

Arlen: Yeah, so we're probably about 20 people today. We're distributed around the world. So, you know, we drink our own Kool-Aid. We use our own product, obviously. As I mentioned, our objective is to help companies deepen pre-existing bonds and create new ones. And there's a whole bunch of ways that we can talk about that we do that. But yes, we are still relatively small, but we work really hard to ensure that we're globally distributed. So we serve a lot of different global teams and we look for global points of view. One of the biggest challenges that we face when connecting global teams is cultural boundaries, right? What might be interesting for a team in the US might not be as interesting for a team in Europe or Asia. And so we try to bring all those perspectives. And so when we grow our organization, we think really deeply about bringing folks together from around the globe with different perspectives in different backgrounds.

Erin: Yeah, that's actually something that I really sort of latched onto when we first started using Luna Park at Process Street was the little toggle of international games because our team is also globally distributed. So, being able to make sure that we're inclusive even in the games that we play, creating that engagement is super important.

Arlen: Yeah, honestly, it's one of the biggest challenges we face because there's no such thing as just like global culture, right? Regions have their own culture. And so sometimes we'll get teams that are very interested in engaging in activities that have a lot of cultural infusion, you know, let's say that you're a sales team in the pacific northwest or something like that or you're distributed around the US, you might be really interested in content that touches on US pop culture, and we can infuse that for you. But we also get tons of teams that are globally distributed. And so that's its own unique challenge to try to extract, you know, this kind of pop culture, cultural component and deliver experiences that can bring people together regardless of where they may be in the world. And I think in doing that, we have a unique advantage because we've built our own platform. So your experience whether we're talking about our live events, we run live events, 30-60-90 minute experiences, game shows, escape rooms, things like that. We also have an on-demand library where we run experiences. It's almost like a Netflix or Pelaton for interactive social engagement. Those are shorter experiences that are between say 5 and 30 minutes and they work for small groups. So as few as two people so that you can empower your team to more easily get together. And with this disadvantage that I was mentioning is that we've created our own platform. So we don't you know, use Zoom or Google meet. We think those are great tools for business meetings but not so great for social engagement. So we built our own solution from the ground up and it's a fully interactive platform right on Zoom. I, if you've ever gotten together with your colleagues, usually one person is speaking or two people are speaking and everyone's muted. And all you can do there is screen share. Luna Park is truly a fully interactive experience. So I can give you an example of one of our, you call the many games that I think is really globally appealing. And basically, if you're familiar with Guitar Hero, you'll understand this game. But I'll explain it nonetheless. Basically every team member is represented up on a board on the screen and they have to tap keys on their keyboard in sequence to advance a spaceship to planet Luna Park. So if you can imagine this for a moment, basically you're collaborating with your colleagues to tap these keys on the keyboard in sequence to advance the spaceship. So there's a lot of communication. Obviously you need effective collaboration and you don't really need any pre-existing cultural knowledge. And I think it's worth saying that one of the things that we found along this journey is that games specifically social games are an incredible way to connect people regardless of their background, regardless of where you may be from what differences we may have. Everyone has games in common and games actually mimic a lot of aspects of work. You collaborate in a team. You need different people to take a leadership role. You need to communicate effectively. You may reach a challenge and need to overcome that. And so we utilize these game experiences as you know, fun and surprising ways for team building. So, you know, a lot of times when people think about team building, they say, “I don't know.” We try to actually create experiences that your team will truly enjoy. But also in many ways it mimics work and it creates this trust and empathy that you might not be as conscious about. You might not recognize it as happening, but you leave with this warmer, stronger feeling towards your colleagues.

Erin: I hadn't really thought about games mimicking the same work habits. I had always thought about it more of like building fiber and trust, but you're exactly, right. It definitely is so similar. It makes a lot of sense.

Arlen: Yeah, Luna Park is a team-based platform and that's kind of part of our DNA. So when a group arrives on Luna Park, we'll randomize them into teams. And again, this mimics work, right? An organization isn't just one big blob. It's made up of teams. And you really don't want silos, you want teams that collaborate together. And so we randomize the organization. So that different people, you know, break out of those cliques and those groups like particularly with remote work, it's very easy to silo, right? You spend a lot of time working with and talking with the people you have business with on a daily basis. But then it becomes a lot harder to, you know, for the engineering team to connect with the accounting team and at Luna Park, we always make sure that we randomize different teams. In fact, we have a random pairing experience where we'll randomly connect folks across the organization. But again, I don't want to belabor the point but I do think it mimics work in a lot of ways to operate in a team and try to function at a high level, you know, across your organization.

Erin:
So going from two employees, sounds like you and Ben, to 20, tell me a little bit about the evolution of your employee onboarding at Luna Park.

Arlen:

Yeah. It's a great question. I think onboarding employees in a physically distributed world, is a really challenging experience. Because what I've discovered is, and, you know, you mentioned some of my previous experiences at companies like Crunchyroll and Hulu. We were based out of an office and in most cases, the vast majority of the employees were in office. And what happens, you know, when a new employee joins is they're very easily exposed to the broader organization. You know, a simple example is in both of those companies we serve lunch in, you know, you would go grab lunch. You would be exposed to a bunch of employees and it's really not an active effort on the part of the joining team member. Now, we may ask them to do some coffee chats and do a few things, but they very easily get exposed to the organization. In a physically distributed world, it's much harder for a new team member to get up to speed really quickly on who the team is and what all the working parts are, and get exposed to people outside of their group. And so obviously, you know, we use Luna Park ourselves. We drink our own Kool-aid to try to connect our team members. And we've found that when somebody joins the organization and you're able to have an experience with the broader team especially in an environment that's a little bit lower stress and lower anxiety. If I were to join the company, it was like, okay, you need to schedule 10 coffee chats with all these people. It's intimidating, you know, to reach out to everyone, find that time. It can be pretty stressful, pretty anxiety-inducing. Instead can I say, hey, we're all going to get together for 30 minutes on Luna Park and you're going to be able to see everyone not just in their sort of professional with their work face on, but, you know, kind of letting their hair down, showing a different side of themselves. It immediately breaks the ice and allows you to connect. 

I'll say that one of the things I've observed about our evolution is that when we were growing from like two to say 10, it's actually really easy to have kind of a personal relationship with everyone just by virtue of the fact that the team is so small and you have business with everyone on a daily basis and you're really able to create that connection. But as the organization has grown, it becomes a lot harder and we've identified this kind of missing link. So, you know, when you're in an organization and you're in an office, the most junior team member likely has exposure to the most senior team member. Let's say the CEO of the organization almost by accident, you can walk to the restroom, you can walk past them. You can kind of see how they handle themselves, how they behave. But in a distributed world, the only way for the most junior employee to get access to the most senior employees, to probably take an active role and schedule a meeting or, you know, reach out to them on Slack or something like that. And that's incredibly intimidating. It's frankly a little awkward and in some cases, it may not even be appropriate, but I think we would all probably say we'd like the most junior team members to have exposure to our whole team. And so again, with Luna Park, I think we find that, you know, somebody said to me recently I was asking one of our customers about the benefits of using Luna Park and they were enumerating all these benefits and they're a C-level executive at one of our companies, but they said to me, you know, one of the most important things for me, is face time allowing the team to kind of have some engagement with me in ways that feel comfortable for them. And so you're able to be in this environment that I think relaxes everything. And so we use that ourselves in, you know, on our own growth trajectory. But I will say it definitely gets harder as you go from, you know, zero, you know, 2 to 10 to 200, you know, as it kind of fans out, I made this point earlier about physical proximity in an office with a distributed team. The challenge compounds as the organization grows. And so it means as an organization, you have to work that much harder to keep creating those connections and to keep reinforcing them.

Erin: So, how do you foresee scaling that as like companies get larger and larger?

Arlen: Yeah. So, you know, with Luna Park and I'll speak about kind of the products that we've introduced, we started with our live hosted event. These were typically 60-minute experiences that allowed you to bring the vast majority of the team together. We call them high-impact experiences. It's an amazing way to get a large swath of your organization together synchronously for a little bit of a longer period of time. But if we're being candid, you know, the most actively engaged organizations can do something like that, maybe monthly, right? Like how frequently can you really carve out an hour of the entire team's time? And so we recognize that this is an amazing opportunity to kickstart. I talked about some of the benefits of being in this sync in space with your whole organization. But other tools are needed in the tool kit. 

So we introduced our on-demand experiences. These empower managers and other people throughout the organization to get together with smaller groups for shorter periods of time. So when a meeting ends early lunchtime, happy hour, whenever the occasion strikes, we allow you to more elegantly insert these experiences into the workday so that you can fill what might be dead time or, you know, even if you were motivated. There’s a lot of friction to getting together with your colleagues, and we try to message away all that friction so you can jump in here. 

But the third leg of our stool is our sort of Slack-enabled programs. We've found that Slack is a really it's obviously a really important space for not just distributed teams but teams in general. And so we're able, through our Slack App and our Slack integration, to connect with those teams. And we have an offering like random pairing where we're able to every other month randomly connect to folks in the organization. We give them a 10-minute game challenge and then they find themselves on a leaderboard with all the other teams at the company. So it just builds some internal comradery and ultimately, they'll find the company be on a leaderboard with all of our other participating companies. So you'll see some big names on there. And again, it's exciting to try to top that leaderboard.

 And so the way we think about this is that there is no one size fits all solution to connect distributed teams. And there's no one size fits all solution to stay connected as you grow. But it's definitely, you know, you have to be active in that process. And you have to recognize that different pieces of the puzzle are going to appeal to different people within the organization. Organizations are comprised of diverse individuals. Some may be really excited about getting together with the whole team for an hour-long experience, but some may be less so and it may be more appealing for them to get together with someone on a one-on-one basis.

I think for us, you'll continue to see us innovate on new experiences that enable teams to continue to recognize each other and build culture. Recently we launched a birthday and company celebration. But for Slack, where you're basically able to upload a list of all of your team members, birthdays, and company anniversaries, it will automatically recognize them. And in fact, you can customize it to match your company culture if you so choose. But we're always looking for these different ways and moments to continue connecting the team because, as I said, I think it takes a little bit more work in a distributed world to pick up the Slack that maybe the office kind of used to do for us.

Erin:

Yeah, it's almost like this intentionality around engagement. It has to be intentional, or it doesn't exist.

Arlen: That's exactly right. And so, one of the ways that we try to capitalize on that intentionality is we'll create experiences for all sorts of occasions. You know, it's a great hook like it's one thing to say, why don't we just get together with our team today? It's another thing to say it's May the 4th. It's that Star Wars holiday, why don't we jump into that experience? And that's a great way for some teams that love Star Wars.

We do things for, you know, for everything from the kind of lighter stuff like May the 4th, you know, to things like Mother's Day, St. Patrick's Day, Valentine's Day, to DEI concepts like Black History Month, API and we have pride right around the corner. We've created some ASL experiences. So we're always looking to create more inclusive experiences and experiences that can kind of latch on to some meaning in the moment, which again is just a great reason, you know, what? Why don't, we get together with the team on Friday, it's a birthday or something like that. And so, you know, we certainly have a lot of general interest offerings. But we also try to create these offerings that allow for a leader, an organizer within an organization to have a little bit more of a hook and a little bit more of a reason for that.

Erin: You mentioned that you guys drink your own Kool-Aid. So tell me a little bit about what the cadence is for a new person joining your team.

Arlen: So typically, even before somebody will joins our team, part of the interview process, we'll actually invite them to a Luna Park experience because it says a lot about who we are as an organization, you know, we create experiences that deliver serious value for our customers but are also light-hearted and quite a bit of fun. And we're looking for individuals that can understand, that can wrap their head around that. Luna Park, in particular, is a really interesting marriage of content creation and software. And so we need people that can understand that and appreciate that. 

I think every organization has their own unique culture and their own unique DNA. And we're always looking to bring people into the fold that have a unique perspective but also that can appreciate what we do. So we often get excited, and I know your question was about onboarding, and I'm kind of talking a little bit about the interview process, but I think it's relevant because it starts before we even bring them into the fold that we find people that not only delight in what Luna Park does, but often we'll start to say, you know, I wonder if you did it this way or I have a little bit of feedback on what you were doing there because that tells me that we've got a critical thinker in the process that's interested and engaged. And so that kind of starts before we hire. And typically, we get excited about those types of candidates when we do bring them into the fold.

One thing we do is we will often bring the whole team together in a Luna Park experience. And so again, it's a really wonderful way, low-stress, low-anxiety for those team members to get connected to others. I talked a little bit about our random pairing offering. So we activate that, and new team members will be able to, you know, connect with other individuals in the organization at random. But again, for us, I think one of the biggest components is really trying to ensure that there is connectivity and access. And we've found that what we do via our own platform is a really great way to enable that the newest person on the team can immediately have sort of low-stress access to our CEO or to myself. And also, as I said earlier, to kind of see us in a different context for us. 

Onboarding isn't just about, okay here's the paperwork, here's how we do things. Of course, that's a part of it, right? Every Monday, you have to fill out what, your weekly status, and Notion. And there, there's a bunch of things like that. But I think another key component is getting to know your colleagues in a way that isn't so formal and isn't so tied to the business piece. 

I think back to an experience I had at Hulu where, which I mentioned, was in a physical space, and we would park across the street from the office, and I would cross the street. And I remember one day one of the senior leaders on the team was skateboarding to the office, and I remember thinking like that's such an interesting, you know, I'm seeing this person, and it instantly turns them into a human, right? But that's a lot harder when we're on Zoom all day. 

Maybe I have a virtual background, and all you see is me from the neck up, and you don't really get all of that additional context. But then if we jump onto Luna Park and we're playing a head-to-head game and the CEO's been brought on stage. We actually just did this earlier today, we were testing next month and we played a new game experience that I'll preview here where we had to get a couple of volunteers on stage, and then they had to on one breath count as high as they possibly could. And it was a competition at the highest. And so you can imagine it sounds quite silly. You can imagine, you see people, you know, the mask comes off a little bit. Everyone gets a little more relaxed. There's a lot of giggling and a lot of laughing, which, as we know, it's scientifically proven that teams that play together are more productive, feel more connected, and enjoy their work more. And so we really try to infuse those elements of play, those elements of fun and access, which is, you know, a word that I've repeated a few times but I think is really critical into our onboarding experience alongside some of those other things where on Monday you have to do this and on Wednesday we need you to do this, and we want folks to get up to speed and of course, depending upon your role. So, we just brought a sales leader into the organization and they shadowed me quite a bit to better understand what I do but certainly, the Luna Park experience is a big part of that onboarding component.

Erin: You take “work hard, play hard” to a whole new level.

Arlen: Absolutely. I mean, you know, we have a tagline: Make work play.

Erin: Yeah, and that's human development, right? That's, from pre-school aged, you know, humans all the way up to those that are graduating out of the workforce, everybody needs that playful side.

Arlen: 100 percent. And I don't want to get super deep here, but we spend the vast majority of our waking hours working, and I am a firm believer that it might as well be something you love and enjoy. You know, you talked about my previous experiences. I've always optimized. I like working on products that make people happy that make people smile. I like working with people that I feel stimulate me that are highly intelligent but that are also fun to be around. I really don't want there to be a, you know, of course, there are certain things that are more appropriate and less appropriate in the work environment, but I really don't want there to be like “work Arlen” and “personal life Arlen.” I want to be myself, and I think sometimes we need a little bit of help, right? Especially because in a work environment, it brings together so many unique personalities, so many people from different backgrounds. And so it inherently makes you a little bit more sensitive to what other people might respond to. 

But I think this Notion of playing together of having a little bit of fun of seeing people relax, you know, if you only see the senior leaders of your company being really serious, speaking seriously, talking about business subjects, it's gonna color how you perceive them, but they're humans as well. And so we just create a space where you can see your colleagues in a more human light. And I think there's a lot of power and benefit to it.

Erin: There are tons of companies out there that are globally distributed, that are 500 plus employees. And the only interaction that some people even get with that C-suite leadership is that all hands and it's sometimes All-Hands can be, you know, kinda serious.

Arlen: Yeah, no question about it. And I think we try to create a lighter environment where there can be more cross-level exposure which again, I think, is much more difficult. You know, I kind of alluded to this earlier, but I recall from my previous experiences being in the same physical space as my colleagues you can always tell the more junior team members that were kind of more interested in connecting with the C-level folks, and they would just kinda cruise by the desk and wait for a moment and sort of say, hey, how's your day going? That opportunity does not exist at present, you know, on Slack or on Zoom or something like that for a Casual encounter. And I think that that's a real challenge. 

There are many benefits to being a distributed organization. We're able to tap talent from across the globe. We're able to be productive 24 hours a day. We get so many different perspectives. There are so many elements that I love about it. But one of the biggest challenges is learning through osmosis. How do in particular, more junior team members learn from more senior team members that have more experience when they're not just kind of sitting next to you absorb in a way. 

So back to the point you made earlier about intentionality. I think you have to really do this more consciously. And one way to create and start or stimulate that is to build relationships to help drive connection and to give people an opportunity to connect with some of those more senior folks or just frankly people out of their day-to-day org, right? If all you're doing is stand-ups with your core team and communicate with your core group in your Slack channel. Well, not only is that tough for those team members in their personal growth, but I think it's actually it's limiting for the organization. 

A lot of magic happens when accounting goes over to engineering and asks a particular question and learns a little something they didn't know about how the business works, and we really don't wanna lose that. And so there is this risk of siloing in multiple ways. By org, by seniority levels that I think happens when you're distributed organization. And so you have to be more intentional. I think Luna Park is one tool in the arsenal of how leaders can infuse this sense of serendipity back into the organization. And frankly, a little bit of fun which I think goes a really long way.

Erin:

And then when things are tough or hard decisions have to be made or, you know, conflict happens, do you find that changes things for your team?

Arlen: Yeah, it's a really great question. I mean, I wanna be honest here. I don't think we're immune to conflict or challenges within the organization, but I do think if you were to measure, I think our empathy levels here are a little bit higher than average because we spend a lot of time playing together. Now. You know, I hear from organization. Sometimes it says something like, you know, we can't prioritize games during the workday, you know, we have work to do and I try to explain, you know, that it's that investment right in a little bit of play and a little bit of connection, that actually pays massive dividend to all that work that you were talking about. It makes the team that much more productive. It creates better connections. And I think it can to your question diffuse certain challenges. So, I think we're not immune to it, but I do find that our team has pretty high empathy levels for each other. We also just see each other. A good bit like empathy is born out not just from verbal communication but also sometimes just from seeing people and seeing them in a different light. And I think it can be hard if you don't bring your organization together with some regularity, whether it's a smaller group or a larger group. If you just only see somebody when you have a conflict and that's the only time you ever speak. It's really problematic. So, I think you need to balance those moments of challenge with moments of connectivity and to bring the conversation full circle. We talked about how games and play mimic work a lot. So it forces us to figure out how, you know, I gave an example that might have sounded a little bit silly before about a good tar hero style game. But that is a way that we figure out how to communicate and collaborate with our colleagues. And you can see different challenges arise in those games themselves. And, you know, what we do might sound a little bit light-hearted but there are certainly moments where for example, the host will bring a team on stage and one of the most interesting things I see is often when you say, a, something like, hey, what's going well, or what's the key to your success? Somebody will say, you know, it's about my team. I haven't actually worked together with a lot of these folks in the past but, you know, so and so actually knows a ton about this thing. And so and so has a really quick finger and can spell quickly and all these different things. And you're like, okay, people are honoring and respecting aspects of their colleagues and there's no question that, that's gonna pay dividends down the line when the inevitable tough moments come up, you know, during the workday the work month, the work here...."

Erin: Or even how can we utilize this very unique talent that's not on a job description that wasn't on this person's? Resume into, you know, a benefit to the company?

Arlen: Yeah, absolutely. We're talking a lot about intentionality here. I don't think there's a senior leader at an organization out there that wouldn't say, I want my team to feel more engaged, more connected to be more productive. But those things don't happen by accident, right? It's like saying, I want to be in better shape but I don't really want to go to the gym or eat better. You know, there are surefire ways to do this. And I think, senior leadership needs to prioritize the things that lead to higher engagement, happier employees, more productivity. And I think that does relate to quality time to connection to intentionality around how we gather as a group. If everything is just about work and just about deadlines and did we hit our goals and did we miss our goals? Then people are going to treat it that way and more of a transactional way. And this is something I definitely hear from distributed teams, then it's easier for team members to leave. They feel less connected and I, well, I think it's a two way street. If an employee feels more like I'm just serving a particular role, I'm not a full person. I'm not embraced as a full person here. Then they're going to feel more comfortable saying, I don't want to do this job anymore, but, what if we can, if each of us things back to our own experiences and the things that kept us in organizations, you know, part of it is autonomy and feeling like I'm working on something that I'm excited about. But part of it is also having relationships with your coworkers feeling like, you know what I mentioned, we spend an incredible amount of time and work feeling like this is a space that you want to spend time. And so, I think that there are a bunch of things that we can all do that really enable our team members to feel more connected, to feel happier to have greater trust in the mission, but it doesn't happen by accident. It happens through intentionality and through serving your employees and prioritizing the things that will lead to those outcomes.

Erin: So, it sounds like Luna Park takes a very hard line on engagement from even the interview process in order to continue that engagement and their employee life cycle, but then also to keep them there. Retention of employees is probably the one thing we haven't talked about but might be the most important.

Arlen: Yeah, I definitely agree with you. I think Luna Park starts in the interview process because I think that's where culture starts, right? We look for people that want to invest their time, that see this as an opportunity to build something special and unique that care about the product, right? We're not just looking for somebody that has a very specific skill. Let's talk about engineering for a minute. We've met some incredible engineers, but sometimes in some of those initial conversations, it can feel like, well, they're an incredible engineer. They, they like the salary for the role. They're willing to do this job. I think that's not really what we're looking for. And so, it's funny that you asked me about retention and I'm talking about hiring, but I think it starts back there. It starts with the culture of your organization and making sure that there's a match between the team members that you're bringing on and the product that you're building and the culture that you're trying to cultivate. And I'm not saying that the Luna Park model is the model for every organization. But I do think whatever your respective culture is, you should make sure that you're bringing team members on that might stretch, bend, push that culture. But aren't totally divorced from it and aren't saying, you know, I don't really like to, you know, if your team gets together every Friday and they say, I, you know, I don't really like doing those kinds of things. I'm more of just a clock in, I do my job and I clock out. Then I think bringing that person into the organization is a real question. There may be a role that they're better suited to somewhere else that does that their culture is more like that. But if you have 20 people on the team and 19 show up to your Friday thing, and one doesn't, it's gonna change the dynamic and it's gonna feel a lot different. So, I do think retention starts upfront. But I also think along the way, you know, I talked a little bit about treating people, you know, as their whole self, making people feel human, feel valued, giving them autonomy, ensuring that you're giving people an opportunity to really express themselves and to communicate. But we certainly as Luna Park, we work really hard to build cross organizational connection to keep the organization. And again, we're in the relatively early days and so it might be easier for us than larger organizations. But we try to keep a pretty flat organization today, create opportunities. For access that don't always feel so charged. A lot of what Luna Park provides is taking the stress and anxiety out of connecting with your colleagues and we live and breathe that not just like peer to peer but up to the founders of the organization and whomever you may want to connect with. So, I think it really does start before you bring someone on and it's not ongoing process. I don't think you can ever just say, well, this sort of runs itself. You know, we don't have to worry about it. I find that too many maybe too many organizations out there respond to these kinds of cultural connectivity questions when they do an NPS survey and they get bad feedback and it's like we need to stop the bleeding. But really back to my kind of being healthy analogy. You probably should be taking walks every day, you know, and it doesn't have to be two hour long walks. You might just want to get out there for 10 minutes and get the legs moving. And it's kind of building those muscles, building those habits that can prove really valuable if you're kinda like we got a bad score on our NPS survey. Let's do our once annual hour long experience. I worry that your next NPS survey isn't going to be much better. It doesn't really solve the problem, right? It's a little bandage. So you do have to be intentionally, you do have to build those muscles throughout the year.

Erin: Yeah. You mentioned really focusing on a flat organization. I don't know that all of our listeners know exactly what that means. I'd love you to elaborate.

Arlen: Yeah. So as an earlier stage company, one of the things that we've really prioritized is trying to not create a hierarchy for as long as we possibly can. And frankly, it creates a lot more work for myself and my co-founder because it means that almost everyone in the organization reports to one of us. But it also means everyone else is completely flat and the benefits of this really at our stage are around communication. So we're able to move really quickly and communicate things really freely. And everyone has access to Ben or myself. And so, you know, as an early stage company, one of the biggest advantages you have is the ability to move quickly, you know, frankly to out maneuver some of those bigger maybe stage organizations. And so keeping a flat organization really helps us maximize our speed. It does create more work I think the co0founders or the founders of an organization, but I think it's really beneficial at an early stage. Now, I'll also say as we grow, this model is going to break and we need to be really in TUNE with when you feel that people need more guidance, more management, more oversight and how to make that transition. But I think at present, it's really set us up for success in these earlier stages of building the company.

Erin: And it sounds like going back to the way that you all interview that sort of created even before they join the team, that sort of flat organization.

Arlen: It absolutely is so. Myself and Ben play quite a meaningful role in the interview process for all team members today. We also often introduce projects into the interview process. I think it's a really great test so to speak, in the sense that sometimes I see candidates that are really excited about the role. And then we say, well, we need to do a little project here and they lose interest and that’s okay. I'm not passing judgment on a candidate that doesn't want to do a project. I'm just saying they may not be a great fit for our organization because it tells me either maybe you weren't as motivated for our company or maybe you felt that it's a little too much work for you and the reality is in an early stage company like ours, there is going to be a lot of work. There are going to be unique challenges and unique surprises that come up. And so it does tell me something along the way. And so we do introduce projects. We tend to include a broader swath of the team. So we try to get a good number of team members involved in that interview process especially in these early stages. It's really tough if you bring someone on and you go up, we hired someone new, everyone, meet the new person. I think that can feel quite awkward and doesn't really respect the culture that we've built across the organization. And so we try to get more people involved in that interview process. Now, we're also respectful of the candidate. We don't want to overwhelm them with tons and tons of interviews, but we do try to give them an opportunity to kinda see what the team is about, get a feel for it and connect with our team members in whatever way we possibly can.

Erin: And trust the process, right? That helps you sorta find the right candidate for each role.

Arlen: Absolutely. I think it's not lost on me that we're talking so much about the hiring process. When you talk about engagement retention. I find that really almost everything comes back to and there's no perfect foolproof system, but a lot of it does come back to, did you bring the right person into the organization? A lot flows from that. Great hires can really elevate these processes. They can elevate other team members. And I talked a little bit earlier about bringing people into the fold that push and stretch your culture. You know, we like to bring on people that I mentioned when we bring them to the game even before we hire them, we ask them if they have critical feedback. We like that. I like for somebody to come through and say, you know, we ask people after our onboarding process. Is there anything you think we could have done better? We recognize we're an early-stage company. This is a living, breathing organism. This process is, you know, we have not cracked the code. Where did we fall short on your onboarding process? And we are looking for people that have a point of view, right? And if we hired the wrong person, there are certain personalities that will probably say it was fine. It was okay. But we really want somebody that's going to be able to say here's, how I would improve it. And I think that starts with hiring the right people, but also asking the question and creating an environment where that new team member feels comfortable to respond to that question. They don't feel like I don't know, you know, are they gonna be upset with me?

Erin: Yeah. That's exactly what I was gonna say. That is, then, how do you take that feedback in the interview process from this brand-new person that doesn't even have a job yet? And that, I think, is the most critical part creating this space where people want to give feedback. 

Arlen: Yeah, I mean, look, I think vulnerability is kind of like inherent in what we do with Luna Park. When we started the company, I was the first host of our live events. It's a lot to put yourself out there in that way, even founding a company, I post all the time on LinkedIn. And sometimes I think in my head, this is probably annoying for my colleagues, people, and, you know, I'm putting myself out there and saying, you know, Luna Park this and Luna Park that, and you're putting yourself in a really vulnerable position that I think is inherent with, you know, building a company. But I also think that if you infuse that into everything you do and you show yourself not as okay. I'm this, you know, boss that is invaluable. I am, you know, one of the co-founders, I have strengths, I have weaknesses. I'm gonna show you myself in a variety of different facets of my personality. And I'm gonna create a space where you feel comfortable speaking to me as a human. Now obviously, again in a work environment, you want it to be respectful. You want there to be a certain kind of discourse, but, I want our team members, new, veteran, otherwise to feel really comfortable Sharing feedback with us and giving us constructive criticism if they feel that we've fallen short.

Erin: So at the beginning of this, you mentioned that Luna Park was born out of this lack that was existing in this new pandemic world and now post-pandemic world kind of what is the future you think of Employee Onboarding? And how does this continue to evolve this combo of our personality at work and our personality at home?

Arlen: Wow, that's such a great question because I think there's so much discourse out there today about future of remote work, future of distributed teams. And the reality for me is whether you are in an office, whether you're a hyper team, whether you're remote team, this Notion of being distributed, some of the organization likely working from different spaces than some core office. I think it is pervasive, you know, I really feel like this is something that has fundamentally altered in terms of the way that we work and we really need to continue to learn. And I don't think there's like an immediate answer right now, right? Like prior to two or three years ago, almost everyone went to an office, you know, save for a few pretty unique organizations, almost everyone went to an office every day. And that's what we call it work. And we did it that way for like a couple of 100 years. Now we have this new thing going on and I think now that the pandemic over everyone's kind of there's some this talk of return to normal S, or, but I think the reality is we're building a new way of working. And I think we're still learning and there's still tons of opportunity. I mentioned earlier that, I think it's incredibly clear that we can be highly productive even if we're not in the same physical space as our colleagues. I think there's mountains of evidence that suggest that. But there are a lot of other questions about employee engagement about retention. And, you know, the sort of average life span of an employee in this world. And what I suspect is that hiring recruiting, onboarding, the best talent in the world isn't getting any cheaper, right? It's it's either staying the same or it's getting more expensive. Because now that everyone has access to town all over the world, there's no more geographical boundaries that allow you to tap into the best people in Tulsa where the best people in. So right now everyone got access to everyone. And if the employees are spending less time with your organization, that creates a real cost and balance. And so if we're spending as much or more on hiring training, recruiting team members, then we better be spending as much or more on engaging and retaining them. And we used to spend a lot of money on offices and lunches and snacks and different things to engage our team members. And I know it became a cliche, you know, the Google ping pong table and things like that. But there are reasons there is science behind getting team members to spend quality time together and you can't, pull the bottom out of that and say, okay, great. Well, we're going to save money on the office and everything is going to be just as good as it was before. There are new systems, new methods. And I don't report to say Luna Park is crack the code. You know, I think this is a journey that we're on and we're learning and I think intentionality purpose know certainly a lot of what Luna Park is founded on is really creating connection through social games. I think over time you'll see us leading more into purpose of connection, purpose of conversation, enabling team members to better understand the results of this time in tested a, and I think really what's gonna help is creating stronger feedback loops around senior leadership, understanding how the investments that they are making in their culture in team connection in strengthening those muscles are paying dividends for productivity. And I think that's really the magic cycle is understanding how those investments, you know, pay off and recognizing that the more you invest probably the bigger the pay off, but it's hard to really connect that at present. And I think that's where a lot of the work that we're gonna do and probably a lot of the work that other organizations are gonna do to really help enable distributed teams to be as high functioning as any team in the world...."

Erin: Yeah. I can speak from my own experience. The best ways that I've grown individually, both professionally and personally, were when I had the most connectivity engagement with my direct manager and I was more willing to hear constructive criticism. I was more open to hearing it, and I was quicker to grow because of it.

Arlen: Yeah, there's no question. I would say the same for myself. You know, I've been very fortunate to have worked for some incredible managers, to have worked on some incredible teams. But I also recognize that in those incredible teams, there was a lot of investment all around. You know, I had an amazing experience at Hulu, and there was an incredible amount of investment. We had this ratio in our HR team. I can't remember what the exact number was. But for every couple of people in the organization, there was an HR person, and it was because they were investing a tremendous amount in ensuring that the organization had opportunities to connect, that we had different ways of building relationships, but there was tremendous intentionality around where snacks were placed in the office and where gathering spaces were located. And I think we need to bring that same thought process and that same intentionality to distributed teams.

Erin: So, one last question before I let you go, what would you say is out of all the amazing benefits that we've talked about in employee onboarding, what would you say is the most important whole moment that you can create for an employee in the onboarding process?

Arlen: A really good question. I think most employees come to the table with this expectation that there's a bunch of steps that they have to follow to join this organization. But the other thing that new employees bring to the table is a lot of enthusiasm. And I think too often we don't capitalize on that enthusiasm, you know, they come in raring to go, and it's great for organizations to have that fresh blood, that shot in the arm, but especially in a distributed world, sometimes that energy might stay in a really small bubble. They connect with one person, they connect with two people, they connect with three people, and those people get the benefit of it. But maybe the broader organization doesn't, and so I think really giving people an opportunity to connect with the organization. And so it's two-way. 

So, the more senior team members, the more veteran team members can post off a little bit of that fresh enter and excitement and remember why your company is such a great place to be. And then the other way that new team members can feel like they got access and exposure and maybe created some relationships early on or at least the seeds of relationships that can pay dividends down the line that aren't just with their core team. But across the organization, you know, a high-functioning social network is not disparate bubbles. It's a lot of connective tissue across the entire organization. And I think the absolute best moment to make that happen is in the early life of a new employee when they're as engaged and as motivated as they might ever be a. And so I think creating that two-way conversation so that the veteran team members can capitalize on that energy. And so that this new team member can hopefully plant some seeds for some long-standing relationships is probably the biggest opportunity you have in the onboarding process that's.

Erin: So true. I hadn't thought about that. We talk a lot about bottling that energy, but it's so true.

Arlen: Absolutely. I mean, I think for me, you know, when you're doing anything that is challenging, that is long term, you know, I feel so lucky to be working on Leona park, but some days you wake up, and it's harder than others. But I'm always reminded when I talk to a new employee that's joining the company, this is incredible. I've never seen anything like this. This is amazing, you know, and similar energy that we get from our customers as well. And it's that kind of energy that I wanna make sure that the entire team has access to. But I also want to set up those new team members for success, right? Relationships are critical to employee tenure, employee happiness, an employee’s success. You talked about your own experience; certainly, mine reflects that as well. And I think those early days are the moments not just to explain to them how we handle Notion and how you get onto Slack but to plant the seeds for those relationships that will hopefully last years, if not more...."

Erin: Yeah, that's so great. Well, thank you, Arlen, so much for spending so much time with me. I really appreciate it. This has been lovely. We could probably do this for two more hours, but I know you have a company to run.

Arlen: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed it. I appreciate it. And thanks for joining us on Luna Park. Hopefully, we'll see you on Luna Park pretty soon.

Erin:
Yeah, very soon.

Outro:

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