Anna Binder on How Asana Built Silicon Valley's Leading Company Culture

My pleasure, happy to be here.

Sure. So it originally started with a phone call from Matt Kohler, who's at Benchmark and who is a member of the board here. And he called and he said, 'I've got this great opportunity.' And in typical good recruiter fashion, he's like, 'I have a few opportunities that I want to talk to you about,' but he was really just calling about Asana. And he got me excited about it in two or three ways. So first of all, he pointed me to an article that Dustin, our CEO and Founder, had written called 'Goldilocks' that got me excited about participating. The second thing that he did was mention that Asana, with 150, 160 employees, had already hired a head of diversity and inclusion. So that sparked the first conversation. And then I think we had five months of dating where I spent a lot of time with him and his co-founder, tons of members of the team, and we sort of got to know each other.

Co-workers or the office is really nice — that is not what culture is about. Culture building an amazing culture is a means to an end. That end is what are your business objectives. So I like to think of it as sort of a triangle or three legs of a stool: what are you trying to achieve as a business? And that includes what's your product's positioning, what's your place in the market, what's the competitive landscape, where are you in your development cycle. The second is really what are your values as humans, whether you're your founders or your company, but like how do you want to show up. And then the third is sort of what are the ten thousand things that make up your culture, like the language used in your job description, the experience the candidates have when they come in, the way you achieve your business goals while being in line with your values.

Great question. So thinking back to the triangle, the whole point of building a culture where people are empowered and happy is because in that environment, amazing employees will do great things to help further your business. So at Asana, we actually just reached a milestone of 20,000 paying customers, and we very much think about that not as orthogonal or next to the culture that we're building. We believe that one drives the other. I think a lot of people try to make this trade-off of saying, 'I can either build an amazing culture or I can drive business results.' We think completely differently. We think that investing in a culture where people are thriving and empowered and happy is exactly what drives our business success.

There's so much to say about this topic. First of all, in our assessment process, we use a multi-faceted approach. We think about: is there a match in terms of the criteria we have as a company? Is there a match in terms of the criteria for a particular team? And then what are the role-specific criteria that a candidate needs to meet? We don't just say 'cultural fit' — that's a terrible thing to say because without really good definition of what is a cultural fit, then you're basically rounding off to 'I seem like me and I feel like I would like them and we'd have a good time together,' which is terrible. That's not a path to a diverse and inclusive culture. So I think it is really important when you say we want to hire for a good cultural fit — because that's part of the reason someone's going to be successful in your workplace — you want to take very clear definitions of what it means to be a cultural fit and then translate those into specific interview assignments that test for those behaviors.

The short answer is that they need to have both. And if they're too extreme on either end, you know, you don't want somebody who really is by definition a good cultural fit and has values alignment and has demonstrated behaviors and activities that you feel will be a strong culture fit, but they don't have the skills and abilities — that's not going to be successful either. But when I think about and when we do assessments around the most important parts of a cultural fit, we talk a lot about mindfulness. And mindfulness is: are you deliberate in your decision-making? Are you practicing balance in coming to the right decisions? And really importantly, are you open, curious, and comfortable talking about things?

Great question. So let me start with a little bit of what it's not. It is not a purely hierarchical system where the further up the chain you get, the more decision-making power that you have. It is also not some anarchist culture of zero management where nobody's clear who's on point for what. We very deliberately say that the role of the manager is a specific role. It is a job, like other things are a job. And in that job, the manager is not there to tell you what to do, but to help you do your best work. That's very different than I think a lot of people define the role of the manager. And really importantly, I think some people have baggage or scar tissue from other places where they either had a terrible manager or the role of the manager is very different.

Yeah, so this is a sort of a core challenge that happens all the time because the needs or experiences of a company of 50 is very different than those of a company of 250. So along these lines, I can off the top of my head give a few examples. We now have somewhere between 50 and 60 people managers. Like many companies similar to us, half to two-thirds of those have never been managers before. And that's great — we want people to be able to grow their careers here, and becoming a people manager is one way to grow your career. But without a ton of people running around that actually have experience managing, and without a super structured Learning and Development program, it can be challenging. We need to make sure that people are supported and have colleagues that can help.

There's a short, quick, easy answer that I think you can read a lot about: the role of the HR department is much more business-minded, business-focused. The function is being much more informed by data and the tools we have to make good data-driven decisions. But where it gets really interesting — and this is part of the reason it's so fantastic to work in HR — is that it's really core to the business. One of the most interesting ways that I feel like I am seeing it change is the pay-for-performance model. If you go back 20 years, you had the ethos of GE and Jack Welch and McKinsey — this really hardcore pay-for-performance, putting a disproportionate amount of the bonuses at the top 5% and calling out the bottom 5%. And we've really evolved much more to thinking about what are the intrinsic motivations, what is really driving people, and how can you build and design compensation programs that hit those core intrinsic motivations. We're seeing that in a lot of different places. Part of it is the Millennials coming into the workplace and really being awesomely demanding: 'I want to understand how my day-to-day work connects with the mission of the company. Yes, of course I want to be fairly paid, I want to be well paid, but what really feeds me is making sure that I'm connecting my work to the mission.'

Well, we just have a mutual admiration society here, that's right.

So we have three formal systems annually of feedback, and they are supported and underlined by just a general openness to self-improvement and improvement as a company. This ties directly to our value of mindfulness. So around the feedback, the first piece is an annual self-review. Employees are encouraged and really given space to write a thoughtful self-review. We have lots of prompts, and it's really designed for you to show up as your whole self: what's going on with you at Asana, what's going on with you in your heart, what's going on with you at work. The second is a peer review. We do peer review in a really wonderful fashion. You select somewhere between five and ten people, you ask them to write up some peer review for you, and then you either have a coffee walk together or you sit down in some beautiful part of the office, and the peer reviewer reads it to you and you discuss it. There are two or three things that come out of that. One, obviously there are things that you learn that you didn't see. And we believe, as the data demonstrates, that the impact of any kind of review is stronger when the positive outweighs the negative on a 5x basis, so people are encouraged to do that. It also helps us build a little bit of a stronger relationship. So that's the peer review. And then the third is manager-to-direct feedback. Once a year, as your manager, I will write some feedback for you based on your performance as it relates to your KRs and your objectives, as it relates to your personal growth goals, and then I deliver that to you. And as part of that, you do the same thing for me.

It started long before my time. I think there were like 10 or 15 employees here, and everyone took a day to write peer reviews for everyone else in the company and then did like a round-robin. Absolutely, yeah. So there are a couple other components of it. We do an anonymous 360 for a manager or a leader that's going through a particular transition or just taking a new role. We also do a 90-day check-in. So there are other components, but those three are really at the core.

I feel really lucky. I feel like I found the work that I was absolutely meant to do. So if nothing else, I encourage everybody to find whatever it is that they are meant to do, because once you get there, it's pretty awesome. The advice I would give is to think about the work you do in service of moving the business forward. The last thing I'll say about it is it's kind of a personal thing. I kind of stumbled into it in my late 20s. I thought that I was going to go a finance route, I thought I was going to go into microfinance, and I ended up doing this work. I was like, 'How do I get here into this HR role?' I'd go to parties or I'd meet people and say, 'Oh, I work in HR,' and I had so much enthusiasm for it, and they would totally roll their eyes, like, 'I only work in HR, that's the lamest thing ever.' And it took me a long time to realize that my motivation comes from inside, and I'm going to try to change some of those people's attitude with their eye-rolling, because this is great work and it's a fantastic way to make an impact.