How to Cultivate Community in a Remote Work Environment: Insights from Suman Siva - ep. 107

Join us for a new episode featuring Suman Siva, the CEO of Marco Experiences, as he shares his inspiring journey from consultant to entrepreneur in the dynamic world of experience design with Kaleem Clarkson and guest co-host Jeff Frick! With a robust background that includes his tenure at Bain & Company and significant investment experience with SoftBank, Suman’s unique blend of consulting, investing, and passion for consumer experiences has shaped his approach to building meaningful connections in the workplace.

We dive deep into Suman's transition to entrepreneurship, sparked by his early experiences with startups like Scoop Technologies. His enthusiasm for technology and direct-to-consumer ventures set the stage for the creation of Marco, a platform dedicated to organizing retreats and offsites that foster genuine employee connections.

Initially launched as a consumer-focused experience marketplace, Marco had to pivot to virtual events as businesses sought ways to connect remote teams during the COVID-19 pandemic. As restrictions were lifted, Marco shifted back to in-person events, where Suman emphasized the importance of creating opportunities for employee connection. With 80% of companies now operating in a hybrid model, he believes that intentional in-person interactions are crucial for building trust and camaraderie among remote teams.

The significance of intentionality in designing impactful offsite experiences does not go under the table! Drawing from research conducted by industry experts like Brian Elliott and insights from the Future Forum, Suman shares with us how brief quarterly in-person interactions can significantly enhance productivity and employee engagement.

As remote work continues to shape workplace dynamics, the ongoing challenges of loneliness and collaboration faced by remote employees stay present: 60% of remote workers experience connection issues!

Discover more about the vital role of experience design in enhancing employee connection, the concept of a "social connection strategy," and building community within organizations. Suman's insights challenge traditional notions of workplace relationships, advocating for a community-centered approach that promotes respect and collaboration while acknowledging the diverse tapestry of individuals within the workforce.

Tune in to gain valuable perspectives on how to foster genuine connections in today’s remote and hybrid work environment and learn how thoughtful experience design can transform your organization's culture and performance. Whether you're a leader seeking to enhance your team's dynamics or an employee striving for deeper connections at work, it’s time to put on your headphones and equip yourself with the insights and strategies needed to thrive in the modern workplace!

Learn more about Suman:

• Suman’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/suman-siva-64b0712b/
• Marco Experiences’ Webpage: https://www.marcoexperiences.com/

More about us:

• Remotely One’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/remotelyone
• Remotely One’s Webpage: https://www.remotelyone.com/

Transcript

Kaleem: 0:35

What is Build A Boob, bro? I mean, like, what is up with that? You know what I mean? Like, I don't understand. What is Build A Boob, dawg?

Suman: 0:42

Build a boop. I don't even, I actually have seen it before, so I, I get the reference. I have not partaken. I have not.

Jeff: 0:49

do you don't, uh, do every experience to do like a QA test to make sure it's, uh,

Suman: 0:55

I should.

Jeff: 0:56

the, for the,

Suman: 0:58

We do get good. We do get good feedback on that. Although it's, it is certainly one of one, I would say the build a brood of experiences.

Jeff: 1:06

Well, cause we know where the, cause we know where two and three go. So we probably don't want to go there.

Suman: 1:15

That's

Kaleem: 1:15

That's the best thing ever. So you,

Jeff: 1:23

Hey, Welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here coming to you from remotely one. That's right. I'm a guest host here for the second time. I'm pretty excited about it with my esteemed host, Kaleem Clarkson. Kaleem. Great to see this morning.

Kaleem: 1:34

Oh yeah, man. It's Jeff. Thank you. Thank you so much, sir, for stepping in for our brother and Rick. Why he, you know, Rick get better, sir. Get your back better. But I'm so excited to have you on man. We got a professional shout out to you and your podcast work 20 X X. So check that out listeners and viewers. Cause it's damn good. So, love it, man. Thank you for being on bro. Thank you.

Jeff: 1:57

My pleasure. But today is all about remotely one. So if you have been watching remotely one, you like the show, go to rate this podcast. com slash remotely one, and please leave a review just one more time. So you got that rate this podcast. com one word slash remotely one. If you did that, that would be great. Terrific. Since 2015, Rick and Kaleem have built an amazing community of remote professionals, over 3000 slack members, which is amazing. 5, 000 email subscribers. It's free. Check it out at remotely one. com. So, uh, Kaleem over to you. Tell us a little bit about our guest.

Kaleem: 2:37

Oh, Jeff, you know, you know, you know that I get real nerved up. I get so nerved up with our guests, Jeff, because they just make me understand how little I am and how lack of lack of productivity that I have. In addition, I have to wear these special shirts. I wear these special shirts, Jeff, that have like maxi pads underneath them so that I don't sweat so that I don't sweat through my shirt. So I don't mind. So today, today's guest is no different. Jeff. Today's guests, they are originally from Charlotte, North Carolina, the queen city. Okay. Okay. Charlotte. And they currently reside in the city, AKA New York city. Let's see. What else do we have? Oh, here we go. This is the beginning of me feeling, you know, incompetent. Our guest today, Jeff graduated from Vanderbilt. So. They

Jeff: 3:28

Call that the Stanford of the sec or the Northwestern of the sec.

Suman: 3:32

I think that might be Duke, but yeah.

Kaleem: 3:35

isn't it called, isn't it called the Hidden Ivy League or is it part the Hidden or the Southern Ivy League actually. Um, and he studied economics

Jeff: 3:42

They still have to play Alabama and football though. It's rough.

Kaleem: 3:45

That is true. That is true. Oh, our guest started off some of their professional career with a friend of ours from the show, Rob Sato at Scoop Technologies and the Flex Index. Shout out to Rob. Rob, what's up man? How you doing?

Jeff: 3:59

Kicking tail with the flex index.

Kaleem: 4:01

something most people don't know about our guest, Jeff. He has a twin brother that he has. He says he has a dad bod, but brother, I have a dad bod. It's okay, bro. Dad bods are cool. It's cool. It's the new, it's the new coolness, man. Um, he has a twin brother. Our guest plays the piano in. An instrument, which is an Indian drum called the tabla really interesting. So

Jeff: 4:28

Have you played that before?

Kaleem: 4:30

now I play the guitar, never played the tabla. Maybe you could teach me. Oh, and our guests, they went to burning man last year, AKA burning my guest. Did you have to throw your muddy clothes away?

Suman: 4:42

Definitely a portion of that. Yes, definitely.

Kaleem: 4:45

The dirt, they're in the trash. Oh, that's so awesome that you went, I gotta get out there one year. Let's see. So something else about our guests. Our guest was a senior associate consultant at this tiny, tiny little firm, Jeff. this company is called Bain and company. No big deal. Just one of the big three and the big three. What's that McKenzie. What's the other one? Uh, Boston Consulting Group and Banning Company. So again, Jeff, what the hell am I doing with my life? Jeff, what are we doing?

Jeff: 5:15

Something in the water.

Kaleem: 5:17

I know, I guess know some shits. Then he just decides to just say, I'm going to, I'm going to bolt. I'm going to bolt. I'm good. Then they decide I'm going to get into the other side of the, the, the. Startup business. The VC world decides to become an investor, an advisor in the Bay area, just doing big things, Jeff, just doing big things. And then last but not least, last but not least, our guests, they are the co founder. And CEO of Marco experiences, which is a platform that helps companies plan their off sites and retreats. So listeners and viewers, please give a warm welcome to Sue. Let's go. Woo! Let's go, baby. Settle down, studio audience. Just

Jeff: 6:12

Give that man a new shirt.

Kaleem: 6:15

studio audience, please chill. Sorry about that. Come on. Our studio audience gets fired up. Sorry about that. Thank you for joining us, man. Thank you for joining us.

Suman: 6:24

Pleasure to be here. Love the energy, Kaleem. You're coming in hot on a Friday morning or afternoon, depending on where you are in the country. So,

Kaleem: 6:31

Yeah, we gotta do it, man. Gotta do it. Thank you.

Jeff: 6:34

Greatest intros in the biz. That's certainly for sure. Subban, I want to, let's jump into it. So you were. Clip it along at Bain doing smart things with smart people and big companies. And then suddenly you decided to take a slight detour and join our friend, Rob, as a clean mentioned over at the flex index, how did you decide to leave the big world in the big business? And didn't get, uh, get your toe wet in the startup world.

Suman: 6:58

Yeah, actually, so Rob used to work at Bain as well. And so I was working at Bain doing consulting and I was working at Walmart, which is the biggest company, massive company. And I kind of, uh, always had this kind of desire to get work at a startup. This is, by the way, this is preflex index, Rob, Scoop was initially a B2B carpooling product. So they, they help companies with mobility. And so basically I think it was like 10 people in San Francisco. So, um, whenever they're, there's kind of a first taste of where I guess you live, uh, Palo Alto now, Jeff, but moved over to SF and was there kind of helping his chief of staff, everything from, you know, building out their financial plan to moving plants and moving offices for Rob, and so he's still an advisor. I'm like, Oh, actually, so, uh, I've had the pleasure to kind of keep in touch with him over the years. And obviously he's now a top Lincoln influencer in the future of work. And he's done a lot of amazing things with regards to kind of like building out the flex index and we can talk more about that. But yeah, that's how I initially got linked up with Rob.

Kaleem: 7:58

That's really cool, man. So I need to just go back to when you and Rob were at Bain and Company. So we've had a few people on the show that have been at either McKinsey or any of the other big three consulting firms. What was that experience like first off? Oh, do you remember your interview question? That's the first question. Do you remember your interview question by any chance? And then number two, like, what is that experience like? And like, what did you really take from the consulting experience as far as education? Okay.

Suman: 8:29

consulting, it's one of those things. It's like, there's actually means about this. It's kind of people don't even know what the job means, right? It's like, what does a consultant do? And I think there's actually there's truth to that. But what I think 1 thing about consulting is you kind of learn how to think and solve problems essentially. So going to your question, like the way you interview for consulting firms is like a case study. So essentially, Absolutely. It's like, Hey, there's this business problem and what they're kind of testing for is like, can have structured thinking? Can you kind of like figure out from first principles, like how to solve a problem, which I would say Rob is phenomenal at. The first, I don't remember the first interview question, but I remember the guy that interviewed me was one of those fascinating guys. This guy, Nick Padlow, and he was an army Ranger and he was also went to Stanford for business school, but he was a, Professional poker player as well. And he was like a weird, eccentric, super smart, charismatic guy. And we just like hit it off. I don't know. There's certain interviews you do and you're like, this was this kind of clicked. And so I still remember he actually went on to become an entrepreneur and do a bunch of interesting kind of things. But I remember the person who interviewed me, not necessarily the question itself, but yeah, exactly. yeah, exactly.

Jeff: 9:42

How many manhole covers in Manhattan?

Kaleem: 9:44

Yeah.

Suman: 9:45

Yeah,

Jeff: 9:51

and you went down another kind of traditional course, which is on the investment side. And you jumped over into the investment and even got to spend some time at SoftBank Vision Fund, which at that time is one of the biggest, most important investors out there on the tech space. So what did you learn kind of in your time on the investment side?

Kaleem: 10:09

Unbelievable.

Suman: 10:10

so I initially started off at a firm called Castaneda and now it's called Stride and they're a consumer, basically, I love, I love brands, uh, whether that we obviously focus on businesses B2B now, but they were the former Neiman Marcus family office. So invested in, you know, brands, fashion, food and beverage, beauty, that sort of thing. So I love kind of, um, brands and kind of brand equity, which is something too important to kind of Marco. Now, and then basically I was like, all right, I want to go into tech in some capacity. So I was working with consumer. I worked, I went over to soft bank and joined kind of pretty early. I was one of the first money folks. On the investment team, working on the consumer technology and prop tech or real estate tech group and so Stop bank was I mean we could do a whole podcast on that to be honest, right? It was a hundred billion dollar firm. The initial year was like, you know it was could have been I mean, I actually joked that there should be kind of a movie about this But you go there It was like 20 people. We got a ton of money to deploy in the first year was, you know, just really, I would say getting a lot of exposure to some of the most interesting people in Silicon Valley and just be a super young person, but because of the fund, you got tremendous access. So meeting incredible founders who were creating kind of category defining companies. And to be honest, a lot of what. I found there was, I was like, it looks like, people on the other side of the table are doing more interesting work. I think, the venture ecosystem, is super important and capital is important. And obviously SoftBank made some good investments, made, some wild investments that I think. Masa was probably ahead of his time in terms of thinking about the importance of AI, which is obviously super relevant now. But he was always talking about kind of the importance of AI as an investor in NVIDIA. And so basically I didn't know what I was doing. I was at SoftBank and I was like, all right, I want to go start this company. And I was working in consumer tech, spent a lot of time within travel and experiences is kind of a category. Invested in a company called get your guide, which is a competitive trip advisor. It's an experience platform. It's kind of like, all right, I want to get you something in this space. Didn't have co founder at the time. Didn't have really much of anything. And so went out. Luckily, I was in San Francisco. So it was able to meet Nick, my co founder and start working on markup. So

Kaleem: 12:20

Interesting. Interesting. So just out of curiosity, before you started your company, and we'll talk about that in a second, what was your initial spark that got you involved with the remote work? What was your first remote work experience? Like, do you remember?

Suman: 12:38

Well, you know, what's funny is we started Marco right before COVID. So initially it wasn't focused on remote work, but it was focused on experiences. Right. So it was actually consumer facing. And then I remember COVID happens and Nick and I, Nick, my co founder were in Tahoe actually. And we were like, all the ski resorts start shutting down. And no one really knew what like was going to happen. It's like, is this going to be a weekend thing? Is this going to be a couple of weeks? Is this going to be. What happened is couple of years, and I don't think anyone foresaw that the way we live and work would just fundamentally change overnight, like, even the fact that we're doing this podcast recording super normally over zoom or Riverside or whatever platform that's not normal. And now 80 percent of companies are remote. Our hybrid and the way we work is, is kind of fundamentally changed. What happened actually, and then the reason for kind of pivoting Marcos, we basically were trying to back to square one, figuring out what we're going to do, and we started doing like virtual events to support kind of creators, hosts in the local kind of community and someone, we just basically had a text list and we would just, people were, you remember, we're so bored that they would really do anything. And so we were just doing these events and there's a couple of funny stories from that period. But someone worked at like an old school tech company. I forget. It was like work or something like Cisco. And they were like, Hey, like our team hasn't seen each other. Would you do this? Would you do this for our team? And we're like, Oh, that's interesting. you're like, yeah, we're just like on zoom all day. We, we don't get to kind of like do anything social or kind of engage with one another. So then we kind of started doing this. We had a PDF with basically 10 hosts that you could just kind of book. And people started. A lot of companies leaned in and they're like, okay, we need some way to connect our employees. So that was the first experience of people kind of asking for some way to connect.

Jeff: 14:22

It's pretty interesting. Brian Elliot from the future for him, you know, one of his great lines is remote. It doesn't mean never together. And, you know, it's even more important and more intentional than the time you are together. You're spending time building trust and building relationships and strengthening the team and move all your crap work to async. But I'm curious, everyone was kind of struggling in those early COVID days. You know, they're doing zoom meetings and zoom cocktails and zoom happy hours and zoom family days. How did you start to think about experiences first digitally? And then I don't want to just say we have to get to people together. Obviously there were the restrictions. So together still wasn't an option in early COVID. How did it kind of evolve into a, to more than just getting together on a zoom call?

Suman: 15:08

totally. And so Brian, we do for Marco, we do a webinar, called turning companies into communities. He's been a guest on there with, Chrissy Arnold, who, when he was at Slack, they had, you're familiar with this, something called the future forum. They're publishing a bunch of like amazing research. around remote work and how to collaborate more effectively. Obviously, slack is one of the, you know, we live in slack. It's amazing collaboration tool. However, both of them will talk about how, as you said, Jeff remote doesn't mean never together. Right. So I think philosophically human beings are just like social creatures. So Kaleem, we met an event. We met at HR transform. Right. And I actually think that meeting and developing kind of empathy and kind of just like, Making friends, honestly, with folks that you work with or developing some like common understanding just allows you to do better work. Like I always say that transactional work or just like the productivity of work is a lot easier. Now you have so many tools that are collaborative, whether it's like notion or Slack or whatever it is to like, get your work done more effectively. But if I'm working with you on something and I don't know where you're coming from, I don't know if you have a family or kits or like, what's stressing you out on a personal level or just like, don't have that empathy, I don't just think there's a lot of data that supports this. You're not going to do as good. Your work isn't going to be as good, right? So that is philosophically, I think, something that's super important, and then I would say, like, in the beginning of covid, the only way you could get together with zoom. Right? And we actually, our company has pivoted and focused on group travel kind of onsites, off sites, retreats, and the reason for that, and any dean at last year and do a lot of like, great research on this that folks have all kind of. Yeah. Seen in the space around they've measured the impact of kind of, you know, say you're doing a quarterly gathering or something like that. Your scores of employee connection improved by 30, 40 percent and then they go down after time. But those moments are like super. And you can tie that to productivity. It's not just employee connection, but there's actually like business outcomes that come out of that. So long winded answer, but

Kaleem: 17:17

Yeah. I mean, it was, it was, it was good answers. Good answer. And it actually made me think about, so if I'm getting the timelines, correct, you started, Marco experiences as a company that did like in person events before the pandemic started. Right. Is that accurate?

Suman: 17:34

we, we, yeah, we basically started, Marco is there's a company called party full or you may know Luma, which is like a. Basically like a Facebook events, like super lightweight, text based social events product where you can book experiences on a marketplace as well. That was like the initial kind of thing. So it's always been called Marco and it's always been around kind of the, I would say like experiences kind of space. and then it was kind of like virtual and then in

Kaleem: 18:00

Uh oh. Like, cause you're all ready to go and then all of a sudden there's a thing. Uh oh. So then you had to kind of transition. And now you're kind of back to being able to help people plan their experiences in person. My question is kind of back to connection again. I know I talk about this all the time. So people, I'm sorry if you're hearing it again, but shout out to buffer for the, doing their state of remote works that they've been doing since like 2016, maybe I think they've been doing those state of remote works for a while and in every one, they ask relatively the same questions as far as what are your biggest challenges and the most recent one, or the 2023 version, when you add up all the challenges, Difficulty collaborating, difficulty, connecting with my teammates, difficulty with loneliness. When you add up all of these connections, it comes out to about 68%, I think, no, 60 percent of all of the challenges that people have or around connection, like literally like those are their challenges. So as a company that Is leading the charge in this space. How much advice do you provide your clients as far as building the week out for those intentional connections? I know a lot of people plan these off sites and load them up with work, work, work, and shout out to chase warranting. He's talked a lot about this with do us as far as what their percentages are of work versus fun. So what type of assistance. Do you provide, you know, organizations, especially remote or hybrid organizations to really be intentional about the connection side of it?

Suman: 19:44

Yeah. I think it's a great question. So I think we always talk about like intentional experiences at Marco and the way I describe it is in some ways. You're kind of in this like long distance relationship with folks that, by the way, even if you're remote or hybrid or in person now, a lot of companies have different hubs. So you might be on a sales team and you're actually working with folks that are in different geographies. So you're actually, even if you wouldn't be qualified as a remote company, everyone has. Yeah,

Kaleem: 20:12

you could be fully onsite. You could be fully onsite and in different locations is your point. You could say we don't allow remote work, but all these people in different hubs, technically they're working remotely.

Suman: 20:22

Yeah, for sure. So there's, from an advice standpoint, we are as much learning from companies. They're doing the doing, you know, doing these the right way. We're kind of learning along the way as much as we are providing advice is what I would say is everyone's trying to figure it out. And we're in this period where companies are just starting to develop. You know, during COVID, no one could see each other. Now people there's a period of experimentation where people are like, okay, cool. We're going to invest in kind of these kinds of gatherings. And now you have like companies like Atlassian Dropbox that are developing strategies around like frequency cadence. format, right? Whether it's like, okay, cool. This is how often we do something with the full company. This is functional level, leadership team level, new hires and so forth. From a content perspective, it is a classic kind of, the initial kind of reaction will be like, cool. We only see sort of let's jam in a bunch of stuff here in these three days, which especially you have to think about some people are introverted. Some people are extroverted. Everyone is exhausted and probably has to travel. They may be leaving behind kits and so forth. So then that is actually not the best use of time in terms of just like getting as much things to do and possible.

21:30

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Suman: 23:37

And Brian, actually, we talked about this when we chatted, but we do something called kind of experience design where it's like, what is cool? We can book you a hotel. We can handle vendors and so forth, but also there's almost like a psychology aspects around how does the near, like, we also talk about like the airport test, which is how do you get. An employee, when they're headed back down to the airport to be like, that was an exceptional use of time. And it actually isn't like a boondoggle where you're just like having a bunch of drinks and having a bunch of fun, but it's also not something where you're just like heads down on your laptop all the time. So there's different ways you can kind of structure and program the time when you're together. And I think it should be. Based on it could be, you know, there's obviously like your things and where you're eating, you're drinking, there's collaborative work you can do. So there's work around like, hey, I got to build a slide deck or write some code or whatever. You can do that pretty effectively asynchronously. Right? But what you can't do. Is maybe having like a product kind of jam session or, getting old school whiteboarding, which I still am a kind of big fan of right or delivering some strategic message and getting people excited about something or doing something around like team connection, which is a very broad phrase, but something that is kind of work related, but it's actually about like understanding how someone Shows up at work, what their strengths are, you know, how do you effectively communicate with them? So we basically have a whole platform or product around this, where you basically build out an itinerary and there's templates around what you might want to do, how do you structure the time and it will actually tell you how to do that. Most effectively, and we have people that will help. So

Kaleem: 25:16

Oh, you called it experienced design consultants available to help people.

Suman: 25:20

yeah, so we have, yeah, so court Roberts leads experience design. She has a background as a facilitator as coach and she'll, you know, and we work with other companies as well. If you need to book like facilitator or session or something like that, but we can also our big thing at market was combining product and technology with like, a high level of support service and human beings as well. So,

Kaleem: 25:42

man. Kudos to you, bro. Wow.

Jeff: 25:46

So it's interesting. People are always trying to define the right word that describes the relationship between people in the company and the company. And, some people will say it's like a family and, you know, people have a lot of pushback on it's a family and there's all kinds of different words. Your guys tagline is turning companies into communities. And helping companies bring together. How do you see communities as the right defining characteristic and what is it about a community that's the right amount of intimacy, but, you know, something short of a family?

Kaleem: 26:16

Well

Suman: 26:16

Yeah. So there's a guy, Chris Shembra, who, he's a, he's an author. He's a speaker. He's an awesome guy. He's a gratitude expert is what people call him. So he's written a book, a couple of books called gratitude through hard times. And I think gratitude and pasta is another one. So he talks about in his books, he's a big kind of community fan. And he talks about the original word company was from two Latin words, which means come, which means together. And ponies, which means bread. So the original word for a company was people coming together to break bread. Then it's translated into people coming together with a shared objective or a mission could be, you know, to build a product or a service or whatever it is. But by the way, a professional sports team is a community as well, right? And their fans are communities as well. You can think about them as customers, right? So a community doesn't have to be this like kind of kumbaya family where you're all kind of like, friends and that sort of thing.

Kaleem: 27:10

Just going to burn in man. Yeah. Like you, we don't like community going to burn in man with tents and all that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. I get it. I get it.

Suman: 27:17

well, so no, the reason I went to Burning Man is like, I think Burning Man is one of the most interesting experiments on community that exists in our generation. Right? Because if you go there, there's 10 kind of like guidelines. One of them is like, leave no trace, for example. So everyone is picking up trash. The whole thing is like, you cannot like leave any trash. So like, you talk about mud, despite all of that, And each camp has their own kind of like guidelines. So you have to like work shifts, you have to contribute. Everyone comes there and it's part of the build process. So like that is also one of the reasons I was like, that is a super interesting example of a community that comes together and builds a full city. In the period of a couple of weeks. So it is a fascinating kind of example. So Mark Levy, who's the head of global employee experience at Airbnb, and he's also an advisor at Marco and he, at Airbnb, they actually coined the phrase employee experience, and he talks about like four types of connection that was important to Airbnb, and I might get some of these wrong, but it's like connection between the company and the employees, the to the employees, the employees to the customers and the employees to the community.

Jeff: 28:19

You hit it. I got them written down right here. You nailed it.

Suman: 28:22

so, so yeah, not to be like a consultant and there's a framework, but like, this can relate to any company, like you, if you're trying to solve this big problem and you're super high achieving and you're like more kind of hard line, you're like we got to crush it. That doesn't mean that you don't need that level of connection. The connection could look different. Right. But think about a company like open AI, which is absolutely crushing it. They have to think about their community, which is cool. How do we have the, the leadership of the company kind of deliver the message that employees are working on, how do employees work together, cohesively, how are they going out and selling the customers and how do we get people to like, you know, in the broader community, kind of get, come along with the vision. So it doesn't matter what company you're in. If you're just like, this doesn't matter. We don't have to invest in kind of connection. That doesn't make any sense to me personally, but

Kaleem: 29:10

Community connection. I love that. That's one thing, you know, working with a client where we're trying to move away from family as business term, you know, cause you can't,

Suman: 29:21

yeah,

Kaleem: 29:22

I mean, I guess you could fire your family, but. Really you can't, I guess. So, yeah, we're trying to, trying to step away from that. I think one of the things that we're kind of leaning into is if you are going to use family, maybe say family first or people first, right. Like, um, but I really love your tagline to, um, you know, transitioning to communities because it really is community. If you really think about it, you're all getting together. Communities, all people, all coming together for a common thing and then you're moving it forward. So

Suman: 29:54

yeah. The also like you spend like 70% of your life at work. So something like, I forget the exact amount of time or hours, but you spend a tremendous of your life at time, of your time, like waking hours at work, so you don't have to necessarily like, like the people you work with and wanna go for dinner or drinks afterwards. By the way, I think that's a good thing. Right. It's not a bad thing. It's a good thing. You might as well, like in my mind, she was like, I might as well, I don't be best friends with everyone. Yeah, that's not true, but I've plenty of great friendships that I've built at work, but you do have to respect each other, right, in order to do good work. And so that's, that's, I think, a non negotiable, but.

Jeff: 30:33

So I'm curious on your feedback forms. What is the thing when they're going to the airport that they say was the most impactful thing of the week? You know, I think of Brian, when he talks about his offsites with his teams, he talks about the cooking and making meals together and, the spending time. Is there, you know, two or three things that are just consistent winners and bringing people together and building a sense of belonging.

Suman: 30:54

Yeah, I think it's all a means to an end. So you could do something that's like really fun. But then the objective of that is to share some type of mement with someone, right? That could be work related to you solving a really complicated problem, right? Some of the most effective offsets, even for our personal team, is we're coming together. And we do like kind of product ideation sessions with our team and bring in cross functional folks so they can create something that then we'll go build that has been kind of extremely, people get super excited about that, but anything I would say the biggest impact is like you meet someone new, you share like an authentic kind of experience with that. Brian talks about this too, by the way, I think, Zillow charter works just published this. Where the natural inclination of someone, if you're with a big group, you're going to like, and you're friends with clean, when you go to these types of things, you're going to hang out with clean, you know? Yeah. So then ways to kind of like create. Kind of structured serendipity where it's like you actually interact with someone that you're on the sales team and you're talking to someone on the engineering team that is great. And we just did a webinar on cross functional collaboration. And 1 of the great things is we had Weller, who's a senior engineer at Marco, Hannah is on the product operations team, and then Allie Brown, who's on the supply team. And they're now, they work super well together. They're collaborating super well, but all of that, like Hannah actually met Weller at one of these offsites that we did, developed a friendship with him. He's a Brazilian. So he used to not be super confident going and like just chatting with someone because English isn't his kind of first language. And now he's, they're working super well together. So that actually manifests in like business results because now they're working together and they're friendly and they, it's going super well. So, I

Kaleem: 32:48

you're right. I've mentioned this before, but there's a book, I might get the title wrong, but like, Why Are All The Black kits Sitting At The One Table? And that basically is, it's very similar, right? Like, you know what you know, and you kind of gravitate towards the people that you're, you have some sort of relationship with. I do want to kind of ask you your opinion. I have a feeling now you're going to answer, but I gotta ask you anyway. You know, so at Blend we talk a lot about connection because again, that's 60 percent of the challenges that companies have around connections. So, you know, as we're consulting with them and helping them improve their employee experience, that's a big challenge. So we kind of coined this concept of, you know, creating a social connection strategy. This idea that you have, you know, we kind of group these connections in the three big buckets. You have professional connections, mentors, colleagues, coworkers, et cetera. You have lifestyle connections, which are hobbies, things, friendships that you do. And then intimate connections, which, you know, people get a little wary of a little bit when you're talking about intimate Intimate, connections, right? So romantic relationships, religions and intimate relationship, politics is an intimate relationship, but they are there, right? What do you think the role is of the organization and the company? Especially in a remote company specifically. What do you think the role is for a company to ensure that their employees have these connections and does Marco experiences provide opportunities for people to kind of learn about the culture of a community? Right. Learn about these other things just outside of work, because everybody's focused on how can I just know my coworkers? What, what about those other connections?

Suman: 34:31

Well, I would say we don't just focus on social connections and I'll answer your question. But my kind of thing is like, even just to take a step back, if you're a remote or hybrid or in office, we also are kind of like ambivalent towards that because the whole reason you have office space in the first place, by the way, is so your employees connect. Yeah. Like, so

Kaleem: 34:50

We forgot about, that. We forgot about

Suman: 34:52

no, so like we, we did this whole thing on like the ROI of like gatherings and what the analysis shows is Companies on average spend like, especially in the Bay area, maybe one and a half to three K per employee per month on rent, furniture, consumables, all the stuff that's like associated with an office. Now you're spending less. And so, cause people are like, well, I don't, should I really be investing in this like, in people are investing more in team travel, but the reason is like, by the way, on the net, you're probably saving money. Right? So you got to think about your budget and your ROI on like this spend ultimately one of the big reasons you spend on this kind of stuff. Is to connect, like that is literally why you pay for office space actually. Right. So you can be in the same base and deal with people and begin work done and so forth. So for Marco, like it could be work related, right? Like we do plenty of things where it's like a sales kickoff or a leadership team offsite, which is like, that could be super work related from a connection standpoint. However, even within that container, you're like, cool, there should be to your point, different types of kind of connection. I think that's really up to the company, to be honest. Like you could, like, you think about Brian Armstrong at Coinbase, he's like, we're not talking about politics or kind of religion or these types of issues within the workplace. I actually kind of probably am on towards that side of the coin in terms of like, the workplace shouldn't necessarily be a conduit to like, talk about politics or something that like, actually, you should have a place. And the reason is like, You should have a company where people are allowed to have different points of view, I think, right? I think there definitely is value from a just culture and education standpoint to do things around celebrating each other's history and culture and so forth. That's a positive, right? Cause that is more just like celebration and allowing you to like show up as your true self within work, which is a big part of your life, right? So that stuff's great, right? Like, and there's no negative. Thing to celebrating black history month or I'm Indian, like bring an Indian food to the rest. It's like, that's great. Right. Cause that's a part of, um, you know, your identity and you should be able to share that. I guess to answer your question, I think a company should be able to decide what that looks like, right. And there are a certain minimum viable kind of like you should invest in social connection because there actually are business outcomes that come out of that, because like there's a Harvard business school, did this paper where People, your attention and your productivity and all these factors are like way more likely to be high if you have a best friend at work. Right. So if someone's like, well, I don't actually give a shit. Like, why do you need to be friends with people at work?

Kaleem: 37:22

Seven, seven times more engagement. I think there's the stat I use that in my slides. It's seven times more engagement. If you have a best friend at work, it's crazy.

Suman: 37:30

Yeah. So we talked to like people leaders, but also finance teams, like CFO, right? Okay. Well, I'm going to do this. And I'm like, cool. Well, there's actually a lot of business value to like investing thoughtfully in these types of things. Like Bain, for example, is always like glass door, best place to work, all this kind of stuff. The first thing you do at Bain is you go to something called associate consultant training. It's always in Cape Cod and it's global. So Bain has a ton of different offices. I didn't work directly with Rob, he was in the New York office, I was in the Texas office. But I have developed friendships, relationships, been in weddings, invested in, had people invest in my company that I met at Bain. So it is like, that's, and by the way, like,

Kaleem: 38:08

new higher cohorts, new higher cohorts are critical. Yes.

Suman: 38:12

yeah, but then you think about like, oh, why invest in this stuff? It's like now I'll talk about Bain during this podcast and people are like, Oh, interesting. I'm a college person I'm thinking about going to work at a consulting firm. So you develop a certain affinity And if you're like an executive down the road and you're like, I got to hire a consultant and you enjoyed your time there, who are you going to choose? You're going to choose that firm, right? So it's short sighted to, I mean, every company should decide, but you should think about kind of that stuff and figure out the right balance for your company.

Kaleem: 38:41

Makes sense. What is

Jeff: 38:42

All right. So when we're getting towards the end of our time, so we have the hard question for you, tell us what comical or inspiring moment you had while working remotely,

Suman: 38:54

Yeah. So the first time I was working remotely was when I was wearing on Marco, right. So. It's actually funny because this is for an event we were doing for Bing. And so initially when you're starting a startup, you got

Kaleem: 39:04

right.

Suman: 39:04

to look like an idiot. And in this case, I look like an idiot, but so we, so I remember we, we basically were doing these like cooking classes and I was like working to like manually ship these kits with this. Like the chef who she basically didn't have it dialed in terms of like shipping food kits. So then I'm working with this junior person at Bain, and it's actually the head of the technology practice at Bain, all these like senior partners. And then they would basically ship them meat and it gets spoiled. And then I'm like, Oh, crap. And then I'm getting this woman that I was working with was like, assuming like all that. This is terrible. Like what's happening. And I was like, I'm going to like, Instacart everyone food. They're like, we don't want any more of this spoiled meat. We are, we, you got it. They were like, let's just do a cocktail making class. So then I hit up Kate and I'm like, this is a disaster. She, this is actually a funny story. So

Jeff: 39:58

How many people, How many kits were you sending out?

Suman: 40:01

this, it's like 20 kits or something

Kaleem: 40:04

So, So, just, just, they opened the kits and it's spoiled

Jeff: 40:07

It's just rotten

Suman: 40:08

the, the meat is just, okay. Yeah. So by the way, just to be extremely clear, now we've had our hosts and for any of these experiences, people have figured out the shipping thing. So let's just make that super quick. So then, I call Kate and I'm like, we gotta like, Just do this cocktail making class. I don't know. We'll figure it out. She responds and she's like, I met her, my, her, her father had a construction site in San Francisco. She had thrown out her back at the construction site that day. So she's like, I can't like move or walk. So I just grabbed everything in my apartment, like all the booze and the utensils I had. And I was like, I'm going to go to her restaurant. And I am not a mixologist. I was like, I'm going to do this class. I think I'll figure it out. And so, and these are,

Kaleem: 40:49

spoiled me already. so

Jeff: 40:50

To keep it simple, gin and tonic.

Suman: 40:53

yeah, so we, exactly. So then we had a, this guy, um, on our, Kevin Blake, who's a magician, And he made like, he made a ton of money on our platform during COVID. He's an exceptional magician. It sounds kind of kitschy, but he's like a badass. Like he's, so I called him and I was like, Hey man, I need a favor. Like we have something, we have this event and like, we can't do it. Are you available? He's like, when is it? I'm like, it's in like 15 minutes. And he's like, okay, I'm going to go to my studio. And so then we get, I get to the thing and I turned on the zoom and I was like, so this is all part of the experience. You thought you were doing a cooking class, you're doing a magic show, and here we have Kevin Blake, and he gets on and he crushes it.

Kaleem: 41:36

Well, what

Suman: 41:36

was

Kaleem: 41:37

with the drinks? What did you do with the drinks? Cause you, you grabbed,

Suman: 41:39

I had to have a drink after that experience, that's for sure. So I

Kaleem: 41:44

that's,

Suman: 41:45

drink because I have like 10 stories, I have like 10, 10 similar stories.

Jeff: 41:53

They didn't even, they didn't even know about the mixology chapter that just kind of slipped in and out before they even

Suman: 41:59

They didn't, no one really knows about this story. Yeah. So I was sweating bullets. I'm like, Oh my God. And then the partner, the partner's like bringing their kits in there, like, this is so cool. But that was a stressful experience for sure.

Kaleem: 42:13

Your former company. Wow. What is, what a story, bro. Thank you for sharing

Jeff: 42:17

Lemonade out of lemons. I love it.

Suman: 42:20

Yeah, it worked out it could it could have I mean could you imagine if Kevin wouldn't that would have been a disaster

Kaleem: 42:26

Well, you had the drinks ready to go. You had the drinks ready to

Suman: 42:29

Yeah,

Kaleem: 42:29

have,

Suman: 42:31

yeah Jeff it would've been here's how you make a chin tuck Yeah.

Jeff: 42:38

and got sick after the fact. I mean, there's all kinds

Kaleem: 42:40

well done.

Jeff: 42:41

bad things that could happen.

Kaleem: 42:42

Well, you figured it out. You figured it out. Got to pivot.

Jeff: 42:46

That's why I tell people dancing is important. You got to learn to dance. You got to be comfortable because stuff changes. All right. So where can people find you? Where can they reach out? Where can they learn more about Marco experiences?

Suman: 42:58

Yeah. You can go to markoexperiences. com first and foremost. I'm active on LinkedIn, so you can search Suman Siva, S U M A N Siva, S I V A. On LinkedIn, Twitter, all this, all the things, but yeah, check us out at marcoexperiences. com. We help companies save time, money, make their group experiences off sites on sites better, more effective. So hit us up and, uh, appreciate your time guys. This is fun.

Kaleem: 43:22

Oh man. Thank you so much, bro. We'll definitely make it out to one of those experiences. I want to check it out. So I appreciate you coming on The

Suman: 43:28

The Turkey one. We got

Kaleem: 43:30

Yeah.

Suman: 43:30

one coming up right up for

Jeff: 43:31

I'm bringing a deck of cards. I'm bringing a deck of cards.

Kaleem: 43:34

Awesome. Suman, thank you so much. We'll talk to you all soon. Peace.