Trualta Case Study

Corporate Culture: How to Win the Talent War

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In the spring of 2021, COVID-19 was in full force, and Trualta had 12 team members, working from home and widely dispersed. Founder and CEO Jonathan Davis recalls it was a time of severe talent shortage.  Attracting high-calibre people was becoming difficult.
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“It was getting harder and harder to recruit people,” he remembers. “It was a real talent war out there. We wanted our company to be well defined.” But as a startup, they couldn’t offer the kinds of salaries, perks and incentives that huge companies like Shopify were providing. 

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Jonathan realized that he would have to create a more attractive corporate culture if Trualta was to compete. “To me, that all felt a bit fluffy—at the beginning. It’s only when you have some employees, and you’re scaling, that you realize it’s critical.” But he knew mission/vision/culture wasn’t his forte, and they needed help. 

That’s when he turned to Unicorn Labs, who had a number of persuasive referrals from other businesses.

“We didn’t do it for our customers or our business. It was for our employees.”

Remote, Dispersed and Lonely

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COVID-19 normalized remote work. One year into the pandemic, 32% of Canadian workers were working from home, compared to 4% in 2016. In the US, 27% of employees now work remotely, and 16% of companies are fully remote. 

The majority of workers do want the flexibility and convenience of remote work. And, businesses can save money with the remote model (some estimates peg the amount at as much as $11,000 USD per employee per year, even when working remote only half of the time). But the reality is, there is a downside—isolation and loneliness. In fact, 50% of remote workers say they feel lonely at least once a week.

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Jonathan saw the risks to his employees’ well-being. “I can sense when my young Gen Z employees are really lonely.” Signs employers should look out for are careless or sloppy work, limited participation in training and extracurriculars, lack of interest in career progression, changes in an employee’s routines (such as missing deadlines or skipping meetings) and lack of interest in offering input, among others. Gen Z team members may be especially vulnerable because they haven’t yet had the time to establish meaningful connections like their more senior peers have. They may as yet lack the practical skills for initiating and nurturing work relationships.

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“You have to be remote to attract staff,” Jonathan acknowledges, “but you do need to support culture and make sure that employees are engaged, and not lonely. The retreats are a great wellness tool. There will be a serious wellness issue with younger, less experienced team members If we’re not doing things like that.”

Isolation and loneliness in some staff members can also create drag on the whole team, and therefore the overall business. For one thing, it’s harder to retain lonely workers—one survey found 54% of Gen Z workers and 52% of Millennials were more likely to leave their job because of loneliness.

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Even for those who stay, loneliness can impair performance and commitment to the company. It limits creativity and affects the ability to reason and make decisions. And lonely people can often appear distant to their co-workers, which makes teammates less likely to communicate with them. Studies have shown that much of what is needed to know for work is actually transmitted through personal conversations, so lonely workers often miss out on the business side of things too.⁷ What’s worse, remote communication doesn’t allow for all of the myriad non-verbal cues we count on to convey meaning in in-person conversation, and can lead to misunderstandings that reinforce the distance and the loneliness.

Before engaging with Unicorn Labs, Trualta had not focused much on company culture. They had crafted a founder’s story, and hosted some happy hours and trivia nights for the few who lived in the Ottawa area. They held online coffee breaks, when everyone would just take a few minutes and socialize together on Slack. They were also holding monthly online town halls to help keep everyone plugged in. 

Despite these efforts, many team members just wanted that in-person experience. In fact, one young employee paid for their own flight to Ottawa and slept on a co-worker’s couch just to be physically in the work environment. 

Jonathan realized Trualta needed to be together, in person and offsite, for something more than just a traditional corporate retreat. He reached out to Unicorn Labs.

Unicorn Labs’ Team-Building Retreats: Experience the Difference‍

Unicorn Labs’ mission is to build unstoppable teams that attract and retain the best talent, and their offsite, transformational retreats are a big piece of the puzzle. 

The retreats are an all-inclusive experience held in beautiful locations, with gourmet meals, downtime to unplug and just hang with colleagues, and time for sports and games. But the retreats are more than just a chance to socialize. They’re also a time for building skills that help members gel as a team, and for getting to the core of fundamental team dysfunctions.

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Fun and Games: How to Build Serious Connections
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Team-building games are an integral part of the program. When Unicorn Labs’ Founder and CEO, Fahd Alhattab, showed him the agenda for Trualta’s first Unicorn Labs retreat, Jonathan was doubtful. “I didn’t think my staff were going to want to play what seemed to me like silly games. I almost tried to talk him out of it. And then everyone—including myself—loved every minute of it.”

The Unicorn experience had changed his mind. “I saw how good these games and activities were at getting people to open up and have fun. They were fun challenges. We were on our hands and feet working together. Not at the computer, not sitting down, but out in a field in Prince Edward County, trying to balance a ball on a stick. It was fun, and impactful.”

Experiences are key and have a powerful impact on team trust and cohesion. Sure, anyone can set up introductory calls as new team members are onboarded, but the impact is often limited to a 30-minute call that is quickly forgotten. But “silly” team-building games are often underestimated. In fact, these experiences a team goes through together have a much more memorable impact. They naturally establish rapport, break down barriers and help make space for human connection and vulnerability--all key ingredients to building trust and nurturing relationships deeper than unstructured ones that come out of a bit of chit chat on Zoom.

Trualta’s retreats usually consist of one day of team-building and then a day and a half on business strategy. Jonathan has seen firsthand that the team-building fun actually contributes to better work sessions. “If we're kicking off a full-day working session, and we have to be very productive, open and honest with one another, if Fahd starts with a values exercise or something to build trust and psychological safety, we will have a much more productive day.”

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Disc Personality Assessments: Unlocking Effective Team Communication

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An essential part of every team retreat is the DISC (dominance, influence, steadiness, conscientiousness) personality test. DISC assessment equips team members with an understanding of the different personalities on their team, how to communicate with them and how to motivate them. Most importantly, it gives them critical insights into their own personality. 

The assessment helps create teammates who know themselves, including what their blind spots are and how to work on them. Insights like these help team members recognize and engage more effectively and intentionally with the different personalities on their team, instead of constantly butting heads.

Accelerating Your Success: Expanding to Executive Coaching

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Building on the success of the retreats, Jonathan has taken advantage of Unicorn Labs’ coaching for three of the company’s executives. “We started asking for one-on-one, in-person sessions with Fahd. He knows his stuff. He comes off pretty quickly as a guy who has some unique insights about teams. And he now knows the dynamics of my team extremely well, so there’s a lot of value in having him come in and ‘read the room,’ as a sort of fixer—an advisor as to what’s going on with the people in the company.”

Jonathan says Trualta’s relationship with Unicorn Labs evolved to the point where he could call Fahd and say, “Look, I’m having problems with these two people ...”  And thanks to one-on-one coaching, those two executives who weren’t seeing eye to eye are now working extremely well together.

Unicorn Labs’ leadership development coaching builds leaders who can grow companies and accelerate success. Fahd’s personalized guidance and now personal knowledge of the team is a powerful combination that saves Trualta precious time and energy. Working IN the business no longer has to be mutually exclusive of working ON the business--making the product and the company more awesome can happen at the same time. The impact of doing both is what makes a Unicorn organization.