What does it take to retain your people? Beefree has retained almost 97% of its employees over 5 years. Why do they stay? Massimo Arrigoni, CEO of Beefree, and Enrica Lipari, the People and Culture Director of Beefree’s parent company, Growens, share 5 secrets to a high employee retention rate.
Let’s Start with Some Context
Beefree passed $10M in ARR in 2022. In 2023 and beyond, they’re still growing in double digits. They have almost 90 people working directly for the company, plus 10 group-level support people from Growens.
A Survey: Why Do People Stay at Beefree
A few months ago, they sent out a survey to everyone at Beefree, asking them to pick the top three reasons they have stayed at the company. As you can see in the chart, money is at the bottom of the list. Of course, it’s important, but if you’re competitive with everyone around you, it doesn’t differentiate you.
What did surface were three things:
- The culture
- Their way of working
- The colleagues
The human side of the business is the reason people value a company. Part of this survey was an open-ended prompt. Tell us in your own words why you stay at Beefree. The answers that surfaced over and over were:
- Culture
- Flexibility
- People
Culture
How do you define company culture? One definition of company culture is the rolling average of everyone’s behavior in the company over the last three or so months. Behaviors are the core of that definition. The core pillars Growens and Beefree are founded on:
- Trust
- Care
- Open-mindedness
- Passion
Since behaviors make the culture, it made sense to define the behaviors linked with each of those values intentionally.
For example, open-mindedness means people who follow these behaviors, are open to other people’s perspectives, are excited about learning new things, etc. And then there are decisions you make every day. Beefree believes operating principles can help you make those decisions.
Beefree’s 5 operating principles are:
- Best-in-class. Everything you do has to be among the best in the world.
- Always us first. You have to be very heavy users of your own products.
- Truly helpful. When there’s a new initiative, ask yourself, “Will this help our customers get value from our product?”
- Remote together. Invest money in getting people together if you’re a fully remote company.
- Work in public. This means defaulting to transparency. If trust is one of your core values, you can’t be afraid of showing the work, even if it’s not fully baked.
When you default to transparency, it leads to awareness, awareness leads to alignment, and alignment leads to better-performing teams. What does this look like in practice? Beefree asks people to use an open Slack channel instead of a private message or email unless it’s confidential.
Flexibility
The second word of the word cloud was flexibility. Almost everyone was in the office when Growens started about 10 years ago. If you weren’t, you were the exception. In 2015, Beefree was established in the U.S., and for many reasons, they decided it needed to be a remote-first company.
So, Growens started having conversations with the team about flexible work arrangements. In 2018, they started a small project where people were doing different work arrangements. In 2020, for obvious reasons, what was a small project became a forced reality for everyone.
At a group level, they decided to codify this flexibility into a policy called WOW. Why? Because it’s kind of catchy and optimistic. It stands for Way Of Working.
Previously, remote work was the exception. Now, it’s built this flywheel between Growens Group and Beefree. Beefree keeps spinning while the group supports Beefrees scale-up as a remote company.
People
There are two things to highlight with people.
- Who Beefree’s leaders are
- Getting people together
Who Your Leaders Are
Many people stay with the company because of the managers they work for. They have “values-anchored leadership.” Like Beefree defines behaviors associated with core values, they also define behaviors for leaders.
Let’s go back to the example of open-mindedness. For leaders, it means you love experimenting, so you encourage your people to try new things. You also coach them on figuring out whether the new thing is working or not and what metrics you should measure. Then, you encourage them to publicly share what they have learned from those new initiatives so that the initiative becomes awareness and knowledge for the entire organization.
Leaders connected to the value of open-mindedness are the people who see the bigger picture beyond the challenges of today.
Getting People Together
As a fully remote company, how do you get people together? Beefree does it by having fantastic team retreats at least once a year, usually in Italy.
They do retreats not because they’re doing well. They do well because they do these retreats. It’s a foundational driver of the relationships that will help your company get to the next level. You don’t want to do team retreats to celebrate yesterday, but to create the foundation to celebrate what you’re doing tomorrow.
Key Takeaways
What are 5 ways you can keep your people happy?
- Be deliberate about your culture. Use your core values to drive behaviors consistently and operating principles that support daily choices.
- Work in public. Utilize full transparency every time you can to enhance and leverage trust.
- Work on flexibility. Structure policy to help people to be hybrid while scaling up as a remote company.
- Anchor your leaders in your values so they embody those behaviors every day.
- Host annual retreats with your team. This sets the standard for working together as humans, not just as colleagues. Retreats will help you get to a new level of relationships and help your company grow.
