Michael Kerr, Humor at Work: Building a Tribal Culture at Work

International business speaker Michael Kerr interviews the President of Argus Industries on the importance of building a great, tribal workplace culture to boost morale and engage employees.

Partial Transcript

Michael Kerr here. I am in Winnipeg at Argus Industries, and the other Mike with me today is Mike Easton, the President of Argus Industries.

I am here because they have an incredibly cool culture, a very positive fun culture. In fact, I saw Mike speak ... do a talk that you would not typically see a President or CEO do. He did a talk on the importance of humor and fun in the workplace. Culture is obviously incredibly important here, Mike. How would you describe your culture here at Argus?

Mike Easton: Well I guess the topic of the speech was called Serious Fun, and that's what we do. We actually make it a strong point, a serious point that we actually try to have fun and inject fun into our days. The quote that I like to use all the time is that, “My critics can't tell whether I'm working or playing because to me I'm always doing both.” I try to echo that to all of my employees to make sure that, you know what? When you're at work, like we talked earlier, is that my father, one of his founding comments to me when I started in the business about 15 years ago was that nobody wants to work, but we all have to, so why not have some fun? Taking that and running with it and knowing that there's serious work that has to get done to have an organization perform. You don't have to have a bad time doing it, and so we have fun. We have a good time. We have games and food competitions and just, well, like you see, people are laughing everywhere and having a good time, and we don't take ourselves too seriously.

Michael Kerr: You were telling me, Mike, about the importance of celebrating your star moments, and star is an acronym for something.

Mike Easton: Correct. Star is not my own doing. It’s something that gathered through books and some other speakers. The star moment is something they always remember, and for us, we like to find those opportunities. All my VPs and managers, they have gift cards in their desks and they have permission to spend money on their employees to make a star moment happen. Also not just with employees, also with our customers and suppliers. We kind of say Argus is a tribe. We talk to ourselves as a tribal group of people, and the customers and suppliers are also in that tribe. If there's anything that we can do at the spur of a moment to make a star moment happen, people have permission to do that. Whether it's taking someone for lunch, whether it's shipping something overnight just to show them that we really could do it within 12 hours and blow their minds, and you get an email back going, “You know, everybody else was three weeks and you guys did it next morning, showed up and it was on my desk.”
You know what? You’ll run to the back and say, “You guys have an opportunity for a star moment.” They’ll put it on our cutting machine and they'll cut out the 50 gaskets, put them in an envelope and ship it off, and again, that customer, they'll never forget that. The other thing is the team that actually made that happen, they are part of a star moment and that sits in them as well. They'll never forget that. When you have opportunities as a President to go one on one with someone who's having maybe health issues or something personal that is deep and maybe struggling, if you can go and extend that hand out there and say, “You know what? I've got you covered. Here's some extra money. Uh, you know, take your family out for dinner.” We had a person - they were having some struggles in their family and stuff like that. I said, “You know what? Take your family out to their favorite restaurant and spare no expense and bring me the bill, and tomorrow, I'll give you cash in hand.” That was a star moment. That person will never forget that. The kids will never forget that. The wife will never forget that. You know what? I'll never forget that. Very valuable to try to make this happen when you can.

Michael Kerr: Let's just talk about one of those fun ideas, your videos you do at Christmas time, which I think are fabulous.

Mike Easton: It has nothing to do with Christmas. It just happens that time of year. In the video, we try to give everybody their 15 minutes of fame. That's one of the things I like to do. It helps build the tribe. If the lonely guy who's been on the shop floor for three weeks and nobody knows who he is, you put him on a video and show him off a little bit. Everybody knows who he is, and now instantly he's accepted in the tribe.