The Secret To Great Company Culture Is ‘Less But Better’ with the CPO of Headspace

The Culture Code

Culture isn't magic. It's the product of thoughtful effort.

As Josh Bersin puts it, “To change the culture, don’t start with the culture. Start with the problem that you are trying to solve, what success looks like, and why it matters to your company.”

Nowhere is this mentality more present than at Headspace, where Chief Operating Officer (COO) and Chief People Officer (CPO) Karan Singh fittingly operates under the mantra “less but better.”

Here are a few highlights from our interview:

1. how he creates a culture that reflects the company mission

“Culture certainly doesn't happen magically,” Singh pointed out. “You need to create it.”

Here are three ways (of many) that he does so:

- Beginning every all-hands meeting with a guided meditation

- Flexible time off for employees to catch up on life, recharge, and get away from laptops

- peer-to-peer recognition where employees express gratitude for each other’s contributions and adherence to company values

2. how a team’s engagement and workload capacity go hand-in-hand

As a dual COO and CPO, Singh shared the following unique perspective:

“Wearing my operational hat, I think a lot about capacity planning and how much a team can take on. I think those areas are directly related to employee engagement scores. As engagement decreases, so will the load that your team can handle. If you wait every six or 12 months to measure team engagement, you clearly can't plan effectively.”

3. how he develops “superhuman” leaders

A recent example of “less but better” in action:

The “Superhuman” Program—In collaboration with a team of neuroscientists and faculty members from UC Berkeley, Headspace created a program centered around this question: “How do you create a workplace that is remote-first and creates space for people to work smarter, not harder?”

Singh and his team strove to make these concepts explicit and operationalize them. Every employee at Headspace completed the program.

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This one is a must-listen! Enjoy!