Starting out as a manager in the hospitality industry in the U.K., Neil Morrison learned quickly that an
In his early 20s, Morrison was working as an operations manager for 20 pubs before getting recruited by the fast food chain KFC, embarking on what would become a "15-year love affair with fried chicken," in various
"That was my dream job and I had a blast," says Morrison. "At the end of that experience, I had the opportunity to step into an interim managing director role, and then had a decision to make: Stay and keep building a career there, which would have meant a move at that point to a different part of the world. My husband and I had two young kids, and we wanted to stay in the U.K., so it was the right time to look for the next challenge."
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After connecting with people who worked at employee communication platform Staffbase, Morrison was impressed by their engaging culture, mission-driven approach and shared values. He accepted the role of CPO with the company in 2023, working with a team of around 800 employees spread across multiple countries. That shift meant leaving behind some of the leadership tactics that worked at KFC, but the connection between a great working environment and the success of a company is universal, and something he now prioritizes at Staffbase, he says.
"If you compare the highest-performing and the lowest-performing restaurants, many things about them are true, like chicken comes in the back door, it gets cooked a certain way and then it goes out the front door," he says. "But the way a manager or a leader engages the people doing that stuff, [determines whether] it becomes a great restaurant, and much of that is down to the environment they create and their ability to galvanize individuals to be a part of the team and part of the community."
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Morrison recently sat down with EBN to talk about building connections among a remote workforce, why all levels of management need to exhibit company values and what it means to lead loudly.
What are some of the ways you are strengthening connections among employees at Staffbase?
On a daily basis, I would come back to our product. We have a Staffbase product for ourselves, and it's amazing when you have a platform that enables communication, but you marry that with the empowerment of a philosophy or a skill set that says, "Hey, we all have messages to communicate." Encouraging people to talk sounds simple, but that's really important. Otherwise, all we do is sit on a screen for eight hours transacting between meetings. Breaking it up with examples of progress or momentum, or challenges that were solved, or wins to be aware of, is really important for belonging as well as alignment.
We have quarterly town halls, where we come together and hear what's on the mind of our CEO. What's happening with our performance? What are the financial tailwinds and headwinds? What were the results from our sales organization and which wins should we celebrate and things to be concerned about? Full transparency through all of that stuff drives greater engagement and much stronger agency for change, and that's the output we're shooting for.
Then it takes the turn of hearing about what's going on in all the teams, and each of the teams shares a great thing that happened in those few weeks, and we celebrate those together.
And then the last thing is a big annual company event, and that is a very, very important cultural initiative that carries the cultural value for hopefully the 12 months to follow. That's a very immersive, experiential, informative, but also together time.
How do you ensure that all levels of management — not just the top — are reinforcing the importance of community as well?
We have three values: When you grow, we all grow, we take ownership, and we truly care, and we created a leadership code so each of our values has a three-part breakdown of what it means for our leaders and our managers. We've used that leadership code to design our own leadership development methodology, and we have a group that just kicked off in Europe, of that mid-tier management layer, and they are learning together in person and virtually, what our leadership code means for their daily routines and behaviors. As a leader, to take the spirit of the value in the code, but bring it to life authentically in a way that's right for them, it really helps us actually drive a consistent expectation around the behavior, and therefore, the experience of their team, our employees.
We have an opportunity to really help people with the head, the heart and the hands. I think we're doing a really good job on the head and the heart, and we have to just make sure then that's wired into the hands. So those practical, actual how-to's is another great way for us to embed that consistency of behavior, because culture is the outcome of a collection of behaviors, and that's the bit we have to work hard to help people exhibit.
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How do you keep work from becoming overwhelming, and model this so your team can do the same?
Perspective is important. I take my work very seriously — I don't take myself that seriously.
The other thing is boundaries and transparency. Rest has become very important, and I've got young kids, and they're only going to actually want and need me to be around for bath time and dinner time for a little bit of their life, so I'm not sacrificing that.
Transparency — being loud and visible — that's the whole virtue of leaders leading. How can you talk to your team about the two hours you didn't work because you were going to a sports event? Share the video of the sports day and say, "Hey! I just did this this morning!" It all comes down to two things, trust and output. If we haven't hired people we can trust to get their job done in a way that works for them, we've hired the wrong people. Trust, transparency and output focus is what gets you to the point you can shine a light on the important things outside of someone's work, and make it okay to prioritize those.
