Company Values

Rob Goodman:

As unprecedented becomes the new normal, from the pandemic to climate to the conflict in Ukraine, company leaders are having to evolve faster than ever. So how do you adapt when those new challenges seem insurmountable?

Rob Goodman:

Hi, everyone. And welcome to Ready for Takeoff, the new micro podcast series from Wix all about hyper growth. I'm your host, Rob Goodman, Executive Producer for content at Wix. In each episode we go deep on one single topic in under 15 minutes, sharing insights and lessons learned from the leaders that built Wix as we talk about everything it takes to build a world class global organization. We're thrilled to welcome Nir Zohar, President and Chief Operating Officer at Wix. We're talking with Nir about something really important: how to take care of your employees both in good times, and especially when crisis hits.

Rob Goodman:

Nir shares an important management lesson he learned early in his career, discusses how to impart the values of your business across your entire global organization, and why doing the right thing is good for business. I think you're going to learn a ton in this episode and leave feeling inspired too. I started off by asking Nir about how to keep people connected to the culture of your company, especially as teams are distributed across different geographies, time zones, languages and cultures. I asked: as an organization, how do you stay united?

Nir Zohar:

Well, I would love to say that there's one thing that works and just is kind of the magic sauce that gets everything done. But like most things in life, it's not like that. It's a lot of different things, a lot of hard work. It's very much planned, not something that just happens by itself. I mean, when a company is small, I think the founders and the management of the company can instill and inject the DNA and the culture just simply by being themselves. By walking around the office, by meeting people and saying hello, and going out for a smoke or a coffee break and chatting with people, you basically lead by example. And that is being conveyed and injected back into your company. As a company grows, obviously you still need to lead by example, but in most cases most people are not going to see that example.

Nir Zohar:

So they're not going to experience you. They're not really going to know who you are. And I think that even more so, even if you have the chance when you have to speak with employees, many times they look at you as if you are...you've got this aura for being bigger than how big you really are. And I think it requires a lot of thinking about what do I want my company to be. I think that's around where management teams usually sit down and start writing their core beliefs or their values or the things they want to live by. And I think, by the way, if you look from one company to the other, in many cases you might find similarities in the values themselves, but in many cases the culture can actually be represented by how they are written.

Nir Zohar:

Is it a one liner? Is it the full paragraph? What are the words? How do we articulate ourselves to some extent? So we have our own “The Wix Way”. And we kind of count who we are, what we want to be. We address the fact that those values are things we strive to and not things that we've already achieved and probably never will achieve. We'll always have to try and be better in order to meet them. And then a few years ago, we understood that it's not enough to only write down who you want to be. You need to have a team that deals constantly in communication internally.

Nir Zohar:

What do we want to communicate to whom? Which group should know what, when and before someone else? There's a big change in the company. You want to speak with the executives first and then the middle management. But then you want to actually make it known to everyone, so you need to cadence the communication. You need to think about how you communicate. And I think that this is a big, big, big part of the culture is how open, how transparent and how often do you communicate with your employees? How open you are to answer questions candidly, in many cases without preparation. So not prepared remarks, but actually go on a Slack or a Zoom call with a chat and just get questions and whether they are easy questions or hard questions, just give an open answer to them.

Nir Zohar:

I think in the past few years, especially with COVID, when everyone were stuck at home, we tried to communicate all the time. There almost wasn't a week that went by without me sending an email to all employees, sharing thoughts, sharing ideas. In many cases giving them hope or directionally what's going to happen, even though I didn't really know anything more than authorities knew. But people wanted to have the comfort of somebody who's willing to talk to them about it. And I think that became even more important in these last two years. And now, by the way, we are facing this conflict in Ukraine. And again, it's super, super important.

Rob Goodman:

I think that all makes a ton of sense. And it's a way to scale that transparency, a way to scale that communication. And I want to shift to the idea of employee care. It's something that Wix, and I know you personally, take so seriously. What do you think it is that other companies get wrong about thinking about employee care? And maybe even a learning from earlier days at Wix that we got wrong here that folks listening might be able to learn from and kind of like reposition the way they think about taking care of their employees?

Nir Zohar:

Very early in the company's life, we had a software developer that was underperforming on a constant basis. And at some point we said it's not working and for really good reasons, we let that guy go. And at the conversation in which we basically told him that he's being terminated, we found out that his wife is due any day and we let him go. It was a done deal. But we stepped out of the room feeling really bad, okay? I don't want to curse here, so I'm not going to describe the feeling, but I think you get the sense of it. And one of the things I told myself back then is that I cannot afford to ever feel like that again, not about my own feelings. It's my job not only to look at my employees as a means to an end, as people who are going to help me achieve the company goals, but also as human beings.

Nir Zohar:

And that in fact, if I do so, I will end up being a better manager and the company's going to be a better company. It'll be easier to hire and it'll be easier to retain. And generally we'll probably be a better company and can perform better if we become like that. And for me that was a very important lesson. I think that over the years we kind of figured out that our pact, our commitment to employees, on a daily basis when everything is regular, when nothing extraordinary is happening, is similar to I would say any company and its employees. We need to pay good salaries and we need to create a safe work environment and give them, challenge them, and help them grow professionally. And they give us their time. They give us their effort. They give us their creativeness.

Nir Zohar:

And by that we manage to evolve and build a product and service our users and our customers and be successful. But every now and then something extraordinary happens. Something that is not in the course of business. It can happen to the company, but it can also happen to the employees themselves. And sometimes it's on a personal level. Somebody gets seriously ill. Somebody has some disaster in their family. And at that point of time, I think our commitment to those people, to whoever needs our help, has to go way beyond the baseline. Because at the end of the day, they spent most of their awake time working for us. Most of the time a day that they have, or the time of month they have, is dedicated to the company. So yes, we pay them fairly.

Nir Zohar:

But now they have a real need. They have something that is broken in their lives and we can't just ignore that. So it's the right thing to do as a human being, but it is also good business. Because eventually people appreciate that. People will be loyal to you for that. People will appreciate that you care about that, and everything is going to be more healthy in the company in the longer term. It's true when somebody has some sort of a personal crisis, but it's also true when the crisis is bigger, when it's wider. When it's a hurricane hitting Miami and all of your employees in Miami not only are locked down and cannot go to work, which is relatively minor at the end of the day because it's a few days of downtime, but there's actual danger to lives. So if I can afford to help them out and move them outside, rent hotel rooms, and help with the families, or maybe supply clean water and help with food, then why wouldn't I do that? How can I not do that, in fact, if I can afford that effort?

Nir Zohar:

So I think throughout the years, it was true for... Again, for the personal crises. It was true for the bigger events. Whenever there was storms in Miami or storms in Austin or missiles in Tel Aviv or fires in Israel, in which people have to vacate their homes and run away. And it was... Obviously now in our current crisis, which is Russian invasion into Ukraine, it's on a much, much, much bigger scale, but that the principles are the same.

Rob Goodman:

To give a little more context here, something you might not know about Wix is that about 1,000 people, or almost 20% of Wix's employees, are based in Ukraine. Just before the conflict began, Nir, who's a former lieutenant commander for the Israeli Navy, along with a dedicated and voluntary team of Wix employees, started making emergency preparations to evacuate our Ukrainian colleagues and their families. Okay. Let's get back into it.

Rob Goodman:

As a leader, how do you deal with those pivots and shifts when crisis hits? I feel like a lot of the business leaders out there, they talk about they have to be well positioned to take on business challenges when they hit. What's going on with the company, what's going on with consumers, the market, all of that. But when there are these outside forces, things beyond anyone's control, as a leader, how do you compartmentalize or how do you shift your focus and then all of a sudden kind of take on something that you've never had to deal with before on behalf of such a large workforce?

Nir Zohar:

I think when a company grows very fast, there are so many challenges that I haven't done before all the time. So the magic at the end of the day is the team, is the people. If you take the Ukrainian crisis, for example, I gave direction, but very quickly it was nothing was actually done by me, but by a team of Israelis and Lithuanians and Ukrainians and Polish that just jumped in and each took upon himself to do some part of it, with the operational team leading the effort and kind of assigning the roles. So you get very quickly into a cadence of execution. That being said, it's true that these are challenges that we weren't prepared for. But I think that generally we have a culture, we have a DNA, of trying not to assume that we know what we are doing based on past experience.

Nir Zohar:

Past experience is extremely important obviously, and it really helps you out, but when things change quickly you also need to be able to be open enough and honest enough with yourself. Have the integrity to say, "This is something that I haven't done before.” So let's not assume that I know how to deal with it. Let's stop, zoom out, get some advice, talk to someone else that has either done this before. Or even if not, just rely on someone else's advice or perspective to see that I'm doing the right thing and adapt and keep changing. I think in the past month with Ukraine, we've been changing so many things all the time because we made an assumption. We tried it out. Sometimes it was right, sometimes it failed or sometimes something just changed in the middle.

Nir Zohar:

So even if the original assumption made sense, our reality changed fast enough in order to break it apart and we had to kind of get back to the drawing board. And I think that if you are always there and kind of trying to not become complacent in assuming that you know what's right and keep on questioning, then you'll end up making mistakes on the way, but also getting it right. And I think that this is something that played a big, big deal for us throughout this whole experience. And the other thing is, and I think it's true for these kinds of events. It's true for the business challenges. Any challenge holds some opportunity in it. You need to also zoom out and try to figure out what is the opportunity, what you can achieve out of it.

Nir Zohar:

Even in Ukraine, one of the things that is the opportunity, one of the things that happened to us, I think that it injected a lot of sense of what's most important to the company. It gave everyone something to rally around, which was a very strong bonding effect for the Ukrainian team, but also for everyone else. So there's always also an opportunity in each challenge. And this is also part of what we need to do as a business leader or as a leader in general is to also figure out how can we grow stronger from what we have to go through now.

Rob Goodman:

I really appreciated Nir's transparency. Like he says, as a leader you don't always have to know the answer. You just have to show up with integrity, communicate clearly and do your best to do the right thing. Especially these days, teams really value and need that behavior in their leadership. And it's a good reminder that no matter your level, you can't afford to make decisions that go against your values. And on a more serious note, at the time of this recording the conflict in Ukraine was just early days and still ongoing. Our teams continue to support our colleagues and their families caught in the war. If you're interested in learning more or supporting those in need, please visit wix.com/stands-with-ukraine. That's wix.com/stands-with-ukraine.

Rob Goodman:

Ready For Takeoff is brought to you by Wix. Now, if you don't know about Wix, we're the all-in-one platform for running your business online, trusted by over 210 million people around the world. With Wix you get incredible security, reliability, performance, and SEO, no matter the kind of business you run or the size. With Wix, anything is possible. So visit wix.com to start building and growing your business today. Thanks so much for listening. You can find more episodes and information on our website at wix.com/readyfortakeoff. Ready For Takeoff is hosted and produced by me, Rob Goodman, at Wix, with production by Lindsay Jean Thomson at Wix. Audio engineering and editing is by Brian Pake at Pacific Audio. Music is composed and performed by Kimo Meraki. Our executive producers from Wix are Susan Kaplow and me, Rob Goodman. We'll see you next time.