“You have to be remote to attract staff, but you do need to support culture and wellness and make sure that employees are engaged, and not lonely.”
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.
“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.
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.”
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
“Fahd has made it easier for us to attract and retain great people to our organization, and the business would be worse off without them.”
Unicorn Labs’ retreats are powered by a unique philosophy that recognizes six levels of high-performing teams. Each level builds on the ones before it, and all are designed to bring out the best in teams and culture. The retreats are an opportunity to learn about and then begin to master these concepts.
The foundational level is psychological safety. Your team is psychologically safe when members can voice their opinions, be vulnerable, and take risks without fear of negative consequences. They feel secure enough to make mistakes and hold diverse opinions. Trust is critical for psychological safety, which leads to the deeper connections and outstanding collaboration that define high-performance teams. The whole company benefits when all team members feel free to share their ideas.
A self-sufficient team is the goal, and empowerment is the way to achieve it. Once psychological safety is in place, empowering employees means giving them a clear understanding of their roles, and how to make informed, independent and proactive decisions. It means showing them where the boundaries are, and where they are free to make their own decisions and take initiatives. When team members can be proactive decision-makers, managers are no longer the bottleneck in the workflow.
At this level, more confident and empowered team members speak up and offer their ideas and opinions into the mix, meaning some conflict will naturally arise. Learning how to embrace healthy conflict through effective communication is key to creating a vibrant and productive culture. Managed well, conflict can unleash productive feedback and authentic discussions, propel collaboration and motivate superior performance.
As team members become more empowered and personally accountable within their roles, a culture of shared leadership will emerge, freeing management up for developing and coaching their teams instead of putting out fires. At this level, your team is becoming more agile, and more skilled at innovation and troubleshooting.
External motivators are great, but an intrinsic sense of meaning is transformational. At this level, team leaders must teach and demonstrate a deeper sense of purpose. Team members need to understand how their own actions contribute to the overall company mission. To produce their best work, they need to feel that work is meaningful, and that they are valued.
At the pinnacle of the six levels is the all-encompassing vision that unifies the team. A clear vision and commonly shared goals for the future unite a team and inspire them to work together for the good of both the team and the overall mission.
Trualta could have hosted their own retreat with the in-person connections and the hype, but Jonathan acknowledges that Unicorn Labs retreats are next-level.
“We all have our strengths. I do not have ‘Fahd energy.’ Fahd’s very good at what he does. And during the retreat, there’s some really interesting problem-solving that creates an environment of psychological safety that a CEO definitely can’t achieve on their own.” There’s also immense value in having an objective third party facilitating when the conversations become challenging or sensitive.
Just as important—Unicorn Labs offers full-service event planning. Along with being your strategic partner in executing your retreat vision, they then manage the entire retreat, from issuing the invitations to booking venues, accommodations and flights, vendor contact, facilitating strategic sessions, and agenda planning, taking the burden off of busy leaders. Unicorn Labs’ strategic partnerships also mean lower rates for venue, food and travel.
Corporate retreats represent a considerable investment, so every moment has to count. Unicorn Labs offers a powerful plan to help teams forge connections, build relationships, align on strategies, manage conflict, cultivate culture and grow together.
“At the end of the day,” Jonathan says, “Fahd has made it easier for us to attract and retain great people to our organization, and the business would be worse off without them.”
The culture is simply better. Learning the language around practices and rituals helps codify culture in a way that can be adopted by everyone. It also reinforces culture to be an organization-wide collaborative effort. It means culture can also stay agile, as all staff can proactively address issues instead of allowing them to fester behind closed doors. For Jonathan, psychological safety stands out above everything else. “It’s so important to the organization that everyone feels safe giving their ideas, working with different people, dissenting when they feel like something’s wrong, trusting each other. I think our team performs much better and people do their best work when they feel psychologically safe.”
There was a real difference in team collaboration after the first Unicorn Labs retreat. “The team was far more connected, communicating much more often with one another.” Team members were more willing to speak up in Zoom meetings. Even junior members of the team were more willing to say what they thought and how they felt. “It definitely made people feel more comfortable to do their best work and put their ideas out there.”
The human connection was a huge benefit. “Going into the retreat, everyone was really excited to be spending time together in person. A lot of team members had never met. A lot of managers had never met their subordinates. That’s the crazy thing about remote teams. But the retreat was a lot of fun and there were a lot of laughs. Bonding—that’s culture. Doing non-work stuff together for just a few minutes, just one day a year.”
Trualta is now on their third Unicorn retreat. Jonathan already has plans for the next one. “In the upcoming retreat, we are going to push it to the next level. We’re going to add some new games. We’re going to focus on multiple levels of the ladder. I want everyone, not just management, to do the DiSC assessment and get new insight into them themselves.”
Why does he feel the need to keep up the retreats year after year? “Everyone leaves the retreat with a very full glass, but that slowly depletes over the course of a year.” The retreat is a time to refuel, re-energize and reconnect, as well as cultivate the corporate culture. Bringing folks together and intentionally nurturing connections gives the junior employees the foundation to build more meaningful relationships that will help sustain them as they return to working remotely.
It’s an intentional signal of commitment to the team that, year after year, culture remains at the heart of company priorities, to acknowledge and support the hard work they do as an organization.
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.
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“You have to be remote to attract staff, but you do need to support culture and wellness and make sure that employees are engaged, and not lonely.”
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.
“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.
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.”
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
Unicorn Labs’ retreats are powered by a unique philosophy that recognizes six levels of high-performing teams. Each level builds on the ones before it, and all are designed to bring out the best in teams and culture. The retreats are an opportunity to learn about and then begin to master these concepts.
The foundational level is psychological safety. Your team is psychologically safe when members can voice their opinions, be vulnerable, and take risks without fear of negative consequences. They feel secure enough to make mistakes and hold diverse opinions. Trust is critical for psychological safety, which leads to the deeper connections and outstanding collaboration that define high-performance teams. The whole company benefits when all team members feel free to share their ideas.
A self-sufficient team is the goal, and empowerment is the way to achieve it. Once psychological safety is in place, empowering employees means giving them a clear understanding of their roles, and how to make informed, independent and proactive decisions. It means showing them where the boundaries are, and where they are free to make their own decisions and take initiatives. When team members can be proactive decision-makers, managers are no longer the bottleneck in the workflow.
At this level, more confident and empowered team members speak up and offer their ideas and opinions into the mix, meaning some conflict will naturally arise. Learning how to embrace healthy conflict through effective communication is key to creating a vibrant and productive culture. Managed well, conflict can unleash productive feedback and authentic discussions, propel collaboration and motivate superior performance.
As team members become more empowered and personally accountable within their roles, a culture of shared leadership will emerge, freeing management up for developing and coaching their teams instead of putting out fires. At this level, your team is becoming more agile, and more skilled at innovation and troubleshooting.
External motivators are great, but an intrinsic sense of meaning is transformational. At this level, team leaders must teach and demonstrate a deeper sense of purpose. Team members need to understand how their own actions contribute to the overall company mission. To produce their best work, they need to feel that work is meaningful, and that they are valued.
At the pinnacle of the six levels is the all-encompassing vision that unifies the team. A clear vision and commonly shared goals for the future unite a team and inspire them to work together for the good of both the team and the overall mission.
Trualta could have hosted their own retreat with the in-person connections and the hype, but Jonathan acknowledges that Unicorn Labs retreats are next-level.
“We all have our strengths. I do not have ‘Fahd energy.’ Fahd’s very good at what he does. And during the retreat, there’s some really interesting problem-solving that creates an environment of psychological safety that a CEO definitely can’t achieve on their own.” There’s also immense value in having an objective third party facilitating when the conversations become challenging or sensitive.
Just as important—Unicorn Labs offers full-service event planning. Along with being your strategic partner in executing your retreat vision, they then manage the entire retreat, from issuing the invitations to booking venues, accommodations and flights, vendor contact, facilitating strategic sessions, and agenda planning, taking the burden off of busy leaders. Unicorn Labs’ strategic partnerships also mean lower rates for venue, food and travel.
Corporate retreats represent a considerable investment, so every moment has to count. Unicorn Labs offers a powerful plan to help teams forge connections, build relationships, align on strategies, manage conflict, cultivate culture and grow together.
