Julian: Hey everyone. Thankyou so much for joining the Behind Company Lines podcast. Today we have ShawnHewat, CEO and co-founder of Wavy, a platform for easy breezy Team buildingevents. Shawn, I'm so excited to chat with you. Not only you know your founder'sstory, but also your expertise into kind of how companies are shifting culture,understanding their, their not only their, their workforce a bit.

Kind of setting up expectations aroundnot only, alignment of our mission and vision, but keeping a cohesive kind ofproductive team is a challenge now for a lot of founders and, and evenfounders. From small companies to large companies. It's increasingly becomingmore and more important, not only to retain people but offer a really amazingexperience for, for other ch other talent that they want to track.

But before we get into all that, with,with Wavy, what were you doing before you started the company?  

Shawn: Thanks for having me.So before I started Wavy, I was working in the tech space. My background is inmarketing, partnerships, sales, and. Outside of my day job, I was also alwayson social committees, helping to plan team events and get people together.

I think a lot of folks that work inmarketing, especially women that work in marketing, end up doing that on theside of their desks. So I was kind of your go-to culture, culture pal. So,working in marketing, working with some really great founders in the Canadiantech space and learning a lot from them.

I always wanted to start something andWavy really started. Passion project rooted in experiences. We actually startedwith a B2C solution, helping people find local experiences, activities, andevents based on their interests, their group dynamics, their budget, theirlocation. Yeah, we curated everything from partners or local experts.

We launched that in fall 2019 and thenstarted getting organic requests for corporate events and really started toexplore the company culture space and felt that a lot of it was pretty oldschool and pretty kitchy and that there was some room for something new. Soyeah, moved from the world of, of digital marketing and growth marketing tobecoming a first time founder and started the business with two other founders.

And it's it's been. Journey of alifetime so far. Yeah. I've learned so much since starting.  

Julian: Yeah. It's incredibleto think about, especially just focusing, you, you gained all this traction in2019, the pandemic hits and even more so, it's that much more critical forcompanies to stay connected to their employees and, and keep them.

Mm-hmm. Reengage and, and honestlydefeat a lot of the fatigue that people were, were facing. It's like we haveall this time we spend on work and then outside of that, it's like, because wedon't have commute and all these other things, You have to kind of create thoseauxiliary events and I'm curious.

Yep. What were some of the, the, the, Iguess I don't wanna say historic, but legacy things that people did before,kind of the new interjection of Wavy and what are some of the first things youstarted planning? And started building in terms of the events with Wavy?  

Shawn: Yeah, great question.I mean, we started working on Wavy for Work at the end of 2019 at that point,thinking a lot about happy hours and kind of the traditional in-office teambuilding events that that teams do.

And we thought there was opportunity tochange that. A couple months working on that solution, COVID hit and thingsbecame more remote distributed. Yeah. And isolated than ever before. So we justsaw the problem space we were in, grow by tenfold over and thought there waseven more opportunity in there.

And I am a past marketer, so obviouslyhave experience with webinars and the. The worst thing I could imagine wasdoing a virtual event and having it feel like a forced webinar for the team totake part in. Yeah, so I, I think, COVID or not, the world of work is becomingmore global, more distributed, more remote friendly anyways, and when you lookat that, you can't do the same things that work in office remotely and also alot of things that people.

Thought were working in office actuallyweren't that inclusive. Yeah. Or equitable to begin with. I think companiesdefaulted to happy hours with, with alcohol focused events after work hours. Soright away you're excluding people who do not drink alcohol, would prefer notto be in that environment.

Parents who need to go pick up theirkids. Yeah. Who all wanna be a part. Company culture and community thatcouldn't do so in the pre remote work world. So it it all, like right off thebat, it leveled the playing field a bit. But what we helped steer companiesaway from, I don't know if you did any virtual happy hours when Covid hit, butwe were saying, okay, kill the happy hour.

Like, that's not gonna work. Yeah. Itneeds to be within work hours. It needs to be interactive so you're actuallychatting and getting to know your teammates better. Yeah. If you can dosomething with your hands, like create something or take part in a reallycompetitive game, like that's all the better.

But most importantly, you wanna walkaway getting to know your colleagues. Better than you did before the call.Yeah. And doing something not work related so I can walk away and say, Hey, Ireally got to know Julian better in that event. Yeah. Whether we were playinga, in it to win it tournament or doing a, a painting and planting workshop orlike taking time to do something wellness focused.

Yeah. It's more the impact that we'refocused on.  

Julian: Yeah. Well it's sofascinating thinking about, you're so right, shifting the time kind ofcommitment to not being outside of work but being within the framework of work.And I think, yeah. Some founders are maybe are hesitant to do it because theythink about.

All work should be really productive andhyper productivity, and then after then you're off and whatever. But, what arethe outcomes when you see companies actually investing in building culture,changing their, their paradigm of, okay, we, we build these events in-houseduring work hours and we, we kind of have a focal point around.

Getting to know people and usingeverything that you said as, as a good kind of benchmark for those types ofactivities. What are some of the key outcomes you've seen for companies whoshift and start to reinvest in or invest in, in those types of activities andinvest in something like Wavy?  

Shawn: Yeah. It's funnybecause sometimes you'll see founders or or executives or leadership call teambuilding fluff or consider it to be in that sort of realm. Yeah. And then yougo, Hey, what's your biggest problem you're tackling right now? And they go,oh, well we've got a retention problem, or we just did layoffs and we reallyhave no employee trust or connection.

Like that's my biggest problem. Yeah.And then you take a look going, okay, well in the world of team building, Groupexperiences that fit into social fun wellness. Yeah. And learning does, thoseare some of the best ways to facilitate and build trust. Yeah, I think thereason we see high performing teams and high performing.

Companies with high performing cultureinvest in team building. Yeah. Is because A, if you get to know people ashumans outside of your like monotonous day-to-day work, you'll trust each othermore. Yeah. You'll have that more accountability. You'll be more tied to, doinggreat work with them.

Collaborating well, saying, oh, I'mgetting this done because I need to for Julian, because yeah. I trust him andI, he's my friend. Building that trust is super key for productivity. Yeah. Andfor work to be done well. And then the second reason we see great leadersinvesting in this space is to have that overall sense of community andbelonging at work.

Yeah. Like if you feel a sense ofcommunity and see that your team is intentionally investing in this space andwants you to get to know each other as people. During work hours, you're gonnahave more trust in the brand, more trust in the company, feel more connected tovision, mission, and values. Yeah.

And odds are, if that exists and thetrust exists, you'll stay longer, you'll tell other people about it, and youwill, you will build a, a greater place to work. So yeah, that's, that's whatwe, we really focus on and something we wanted to do in launching this. Makesure we could share feedback and results so that you can prove to leadershipthe impact these events are having on culture, right, and employee engagement.

Julian: Yeah. How do youmeasure those?  

Shawn: So we measure thingsin a few ways. First off, when teams start working with Wavy, we do a culturekickoff survey. So this is just more holistically chatting with all employeesreally quick like pulse survey to understand like how do you wanna gather, isthat in person online?

Is it asynchronous, like sharedactivities that on your own time sure. What time of day, what categories areyou interested in? How meaningful is this to you? So that before you start, youcan really look at things holistically and say, how can I build a program aroundthis? Or what themes are most important for my team?

Yeah. And then with each event, you cancreate a poll and have the team vote. So that the employees are really boughtinto what you're doing as a team. Yeah. It's not someone from leadership orsomeone from your HR team saying, oh, I like cocktail making, so I'm gonna bookthat. It's the team deciding what they'd like to do together, and thattypically leads to pretty great participation.

And then post event, there's pulsesurveys. We gather some info through our platform on like RSVPs andparticipation. Yeah. But you get written feedback and kind of scores onconnection and culture impact too.  

Julian: Yeah. And thinkingabout just doing so with. A lot of the hybrid, working cultures that, that we'veseen.

Now, being that some people are inoffice, others aren't, how have, is it by nature, I feel like it's difficult toconnect those to, groups of employees, right? Like if by nature it's a littlebit more challenging, how are you able to do that and what are some ways thatcompanies are doing it successfully?

Being that they, they won't have somepeople in office just inherently, or that the people in. Maybe need less kindof, over, not oversight, but less activity in terms of communicating and engaging.How are they able to do that?  

Shawn: Yeah. The hybrid andthen like globally distributed teams experience similar problems.

Yeah. And that it's hard to makeeveryone happy and it's hard to create programs that are truly inclusive foreveryone. I think one of the. Legacy things in the space that makes thisdifficult is people assume, we're one company, we're gonna have one holidayparty, and I'm gonna gauge whether that was successful or not, based on howmany people showed up to that event.

Right? And that's the only way they'relooking at success. Even if people dragged their feet there and weren't happycommuting in and didn't even wanna go or didn't have a good time, it's notabout that. It's about headcount, right? So we have a lot of work to do inchanging. Changing the conversation there and like if your team members feelforced to do something and they do it, does that even help?

Like is it meaningful connection orengagement, or is that more, more forced? So you encounter a lot of that inthese hybrid situations. Yeah, I think first and foremost, making everythingvoluntary. It's up to employees, whether they wanna take part in these sorts ofexperiences. You need to have leadership, most importantly, engaging in.

Yeah, online events, in-person events,you need leadership to be taking part actively in those. And if you're doing ahybrid event, I would strongly recommend having a theme. So, we've got EarthDay coming up in April, so having a theme and then looking at it as more of anomnichannel initiative versus like one singular event.

Yeah. So what I mean by that is, yourcompany could celebrate Earth Day. Maybe sustainability is part of your corevalues. With that celebration, you could do something in person, somethingonline, like, we've got meal prep for rising food costs and more sustainablemeal prep. Yeah. You could do a kind of climate action workshop in person, andthen you could do an Earth day like trash pickup that's asynchronous.

It doesn't have to be done at the sametime. And employees can opt into what works best for them, both for theiravailability. They're learning and engagement style. And then you look at,well, how did Earth Day perform overall? Did it help employees feel moreconnected? Did we move the needle forward on our sustainability goals?

Do people think this was positive forour culture? And it's not about that singular event and how many people tookpart. But how did the whole kind of campaign go for you? Yeah, so that's howwe've really been approaching hybrid. And then same with global teams, likedifferent time zones. One theme.

Yeah. And yeah, that's the, that's whatwe've been seeing. But if, rule of thumb is if you're doing something hybrid,you, if you're doing something in person, you have to do. Virtual as well.Mm-hmm. It has to be its own dedicated event. That's the most inclusive way toYeah. To start having good hybrid engagement.

Julian: Yeah, that's great. Imean, it's just great. I can see how, it's great advice and how, how you cankind of incorporate both and keep this whole theme within this sharedexperience, which is mm-hmm. I feel like the, the biggest thing you want tomaybe communicate is that shared experience and so that everybody can havemaybe a talking point, right.

And it's mm-hmm. Not everyone say,everyone's saying extrovert in, in a classical sense, but others still wannaconnect and have those relationships. Yeah. One thing that was interesting thatyou mention, you mentioned a lot of, sea levels or managers or people kind ofin more people oriented positions, um mm-hmm.

Thinking that, culture building and allthat is fluff and, and how do you change the mentality of those individuals,how much education's needed and what's able, how are you able to get past thatthat opinion, that philosophy to seeing the value of actually investing inculture? What are some challenges around that and how are you able to overcome?

Shawn: Yeah. I mean,companies with leaders that are truly people first perform better. Yeah. There,there are so many data points around this, but even just looking at Glassdoorratings and reviews and actual like, turnover, like, voluntary turnover and,and, and retention. It. It speaks to itself. So if you've got leadership thattruly believes in this and invests in it, your people will thank you for it.

They'll stick around longer, they'llwork harder, they'll have more accountability, and they'll be more tied to yourorganization overall. Unfortunately, there is a gap often between people and cultureteams, people, managers, and senior leadership. S there's a, there's a lot ofsenior leadership in North America right now that's saying we've gotta go backto the old ways and get back to the office.

And if we're not in office, then we'renot productive and no work is happening when that just simply isn't the case.There's like this notion to go back to the way things used to be, but that'sthere not happening. There's a new reality of work and good leaders understandthat. And yeah. So some of the things we do to.

Our customers who do have this problemcan approve to leadership is, is all in data and insights. Like I said, we dothe culture kickoff survey when we launch. So it's, it's not, it's, it'sshowing leadership saying, Hey, here's what your team's actually saying. 75% ofyour team doesn't wanna get together in person.

Or they wanna just do wellness focusedexperiences and they wanna do it just with their department or have somethingcompany wide bimonthly. So letting. Speak for themselves and showcasing thedata is a really great way to go. Yeah. And then post event, having moremeasurement than the participant count, Hey, this is how these, this spend,these events are actually impacting connection.

And as we just saw, this type of eventthat you wanted to do actually had a much lower connection than this one thatemployees chose. So I think wherever you can back up with data and insightsyeah, goes a long way with leadership. And, and just unfortunately just provingthe ROI is what Yeah. Works best.

But that's why we, that's why we build alot of what we do so that whoever is using Wavy can truly be that like championthat culture champion in their org.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. It's socritical to, to really implement things that are gonna be, measurable and, andstructure to, to rather reinforce certain, decisions that you make, but alsounderstand where.

You need to invest in more wherehonestly understand where you are at the start and the onset of these eventsand things like that. Tell us a little bit more about Wavy and not only thetraction you've seen so far, how many customers have you been working with? Butwhat's particularly exciting about this next year and, and this next journeythat you're on.

Shawn: Mm-hmm. Yeah, so wewe, we got into the kind of future of work space in 2020 as we evolved ourinitial concept to Wavy for work. And since then it's been, it's been great.We've worked with close to 200 teams around the world, or 200, 200 companiesaround the world. Over 10,000 employees have felt more connected through Wavyexperiences.

So, so that's been really great so far.We started with virtual but it's really evolved into something more Wavy is nowyour culture hub for company wide and department based initiatives, whetherthat's something fun, something wellness or something learning related. You canbook experiences in our marketplace.

You can grab free activities from ourlibrary, things that you, you and I could do for free and just run on our own.And you can publish your own events. I think the magic of it. We buildeverything with our customers, not for them. So we're quite collaborative.Yeah. And I think the magic of it is all of that, like really monotonous,really detailed event logistics and management work goes away when you use whatYeah.

Whether you're planning yourself orbooking something in our, in our marketplace. You just have to. Yeah. Invites,rsvp, order management feedback kind of closing the loop on that and sparkingwhat you should do next. All of that is automated through our platform, so itactually saves saves organizers five to 10 hours per event.

Wow. In that, that work that nobodywants to do. Yeah. What's next for us is continuing to grow in the teambuilding. Not just virtually, but in person too, so that hybrid teams can bookand enjoy hosted experiences wherever their people are. And from here we'regonna be expanding more into other things that can improve employee experience.

Like, like gifting recognition. Yeah.Pulse surveys and more so that you can use all of that to plan what's next andget proactive with your, with your engagement program.  

Julian: Yeah. Whether it'sexternally or internally, what are some of the biggest challenges that Wavyfaces today?

Shawn: Yeah, I mean, we gotour start in the tech space. All of our growth has been through community,through word of mouth, through referrals, so that inherently led to a, a prettytech focused customer base. And as you can imagine based on the news today,Tech companies, big and small, have been going through layoffs, budget cuts,budget delays, yeah.

Which in some cases, especially withleadership that doesn't kind of understand the investment in employeeexperience, that's directly impacting things like team building and employeeengagement budgets. So that's been a challenge for us being a small techcompany ourselves, seeing our core customer segment really go through it overthe past year.

Having to give them more free and budgetfriendly resources, which is, which has in turn impacted our own business. Sowe're starting to expand more beyond tech in diversifying our customer base.But I think that's been a big challenge for, for us navigating those waters.And then I think for any first time or early stage founder, the other biggestchallenge is really figuring out what to prioritize on.

Yeah, there's so many different waysyour business can grow and so many different ways you can take it. But how doyou get laser focused and say, we wanna achieve this in the next six months, 12months, 24 months, and every day we're gonna reprioritize to make sure we'restepping towards that goal.

That's a, that's always a hard thing todo. Yeah, and we've, we've certainly experimented with a lot of differentthings and directions.  

Julian: Yeah. If everythinggoes, everything goes right. What's the long term vision for Wavy?  

Shawn: Yeah. I think taking astep back and looking at the employee experience ecosystem, a lot of solutionsin this space, if you think of performance management or hrs tools are quitehierarchical and top down.

An annual or biannual employee surveythat's coming from the top that is supposed to be anonymous, but it's not really,and shares an NPS score. I think a lot of that space is broken and a lot of thechallenges leadership faces. How do we attract the best talent and how do weretain and grow the best talent?

Yet the systems they're using to say,well, how well is our, how well our employees doing, how happy are they? How'sit going? Are pretty broken. So, we're excited to disrupt that space even more,starting with team building today. But there's so much more to grow in, in theculture world. Our long-term vision for Wavy is, The culture os for distributedglobal teams and doing it from a bottom up perspective so you can get a realview and insight into yeah, how your team's doing and get proactive about stepsyou can take to continue that positive momentum or course correct if things aregoing badly.

So definitely we'll be getting more intothe, the people analytics space. And not just stopping at the analytics, butgiving you the solutions to improve recourse. Correct too. I think that's wherea lot of that space falls flat. Great. Her morale, our employee morale was low.We found that out at the end of the year.

But what do you actually do to changethat? So yeah, that's the world we're starting to play in now and excited to todo it in a much bigger way as we continue to grow.  

Julian: Yeah, it's incredibleand I love this next section. I call it my Founder FAQs. I'm gonna hit you withsome rapid fire questions and let's do it.

We'll see where we get. So, firstquestion is thinking about, HR as an industry at all and thinking about other,companies that outside of technology that haven't necessarily, use technologiesto, to track culture and influence culture and impact it. What are some otherindustries outside of tech that you have, have started to sell into and or havestarted to focus more on company culture that traditionally ha hasn't been thereality because they, tech has kind of popularized the, the idea, I guess, Iguess also validated the importance of culture building.

What are some industries that areadopting that now that you see or that you would like to see?  

Shawn: Hmm. Yeah. I've beenthinking about this a lot lately and a couple industries that I'd love to helpwith this change. And I, I think there's been some interesting case studies orstories within them are ones that are even pre covid, quite distributed andquite remote.

So if you think of accounting firms,consulting firms, insurance brokers, real estate, a lot of these workforces areinherently distributed and. I know, if you think of accounting firms or lawfirms as an example, I think those, those two are known for having pretty harshor pretty bad culture. So yeah, I'm excited to make a bigger splash in thatspace and, and help just.

To disrupt those who maybe haven'tenjoyed the kind of tech culture that we've known to grow and love, and I thinkwe can bring some of those influences into those, those places.  

Julian: Yeah. And what, whatwas being used before, was there any culture tracking? Was it just kind of anHR system that showed your benefits and your 401ks or things like that?

Like what was in those other industries?What was being used or what has been used? So track or has anything at all beenbeen really helpful?  

Shawn: Yeah, I think you seea lot of legacy systems in there. So doing that annual employee engagementsurvey. Yeah. Doing the best place to work kind of survey.

Perhaps you have like cocktail hours,like we still see these industries kind of stuck in that legacy space. Mm-hmm.They certainly have a lot of processes and are doing the kind of informationcollection, but in terms of action to actually help improve the employeeexperience I think there's a, there's a long way to go, especially in the worldof like team connection and, and employee wellbeing.

But of course the, the trade off there,unlike being in the tech space, is more security better benefits and perks,packages that come with larger. Larger workplaces. So, I think those are thethings that, that employees enjoy there and, but there's still a lot of work todo when it comes to culture.

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. And, andmore personally, as a founder, what's something that you're particularly, goodat now that you know earlier on? Say you, you weren't so good at it, or that,what was something that you, you continuously improve?  

Shawn: Oh my goodness. It'shard because I'm such a generalist in my role, but I think, every year when Ilook back at myself this day last year, I'm amazed at how little I knew theyear before.

So the speed of learning and developmenthas just been wild in the four. Building Wavy so far, I feel like I've gotten12 years experience. Yeah. So it's hard to nail down down one thing. But I, Ithink I've gotten a lot better at the data and reporting side of things. Yeah.Not just going based off a feeling or based off a hunch or what we're excitedabout in that moment, but actually taking a look at the customer, the partnerkind of journey.

Looking at the data that's happeningwithin those and helping use that to validate what we should do next. Yeah. Inthe, in the end of 2022, we looked at what was our top engaged customer cohortdoing, and what were the patterns happening there. Use that to inform our goalsfor what's next and yeah, use that to improve our, our pricing model andbusiness model going forward.

So I've gotten a lot deeper into thelike data and insight side of things so that I can inform business decisionsbased off of that.  

Julian: Yeah, yeah. youmentioned prioritization being something that's extremely on top of your.What's, I always like to ask this question. I think it's kind of fun, butwhat's something that you spend too much time on that you would like to spendless, and what's something that you spend little time on that you would like toallocate more to if you come to mind?

Shawn: Interesting. I'vespent, I used to spend too much time on meetings. Yeah. But I went on a bit ofa mission to cut that down and I've achieved that to have a lot more headsdown, focus time today. I think I spend too much time on like manual reportingand finance processes. So, I'm sure a lot of other.

Stage founders out there feel my pain inthat too. But just the heavy lifting for everything, for invoices, payments revenueand expense reporting, making sure that aligns with our CFO and that ourreports are, are clean and match up to what's actually happening. I spend toomuch time on that stuff.

It's important, Steph, because it helpsguide what's next and. Show what sort of track you're on with the business. ButI would love to automate a lot more of that. And something that I love doing,but I don't get to spend enough time on, are things like this. I really enjoyspeaking doing webinars, going to events, speaking on podcasts, and, andwriting about what I'm learning from our, yeah.

Customers and in the space, and I'd loveto have some more time to be able to do that. To just really share the, thebehind the scenes and yeah, and, and share tips that'd be helpful to, to folkswho are looking at this challenge of like hybrid, remote, distributed teamengagement. Actually we have a lot of learnings there.

Julian: I love that. And Ialways like to ask this next question cause I love Yeah. The information that,that founders extract out of anything that they ingest whether it was early inyour career or now, what books or people have influenced you the most?  

Shawn: Hmm, good question.One book that I love and I like taking inspiration, not necessarily from myindustry.

So one book that I love is one calledGet Together. Mm-hmm. think it's published on Stripe Press. And the folks thatwrote that, I think originally worked in tech, but what they did is studiedWhat makes a great community and not community is in the corporate world, butyou know, a like. Knitting club or Yeah, a baking club or an environmentalclimate action group.

So they really went deep in studyingcommunities across the states and kind of pulled together this book on like theblueprint for building really meaningful, sustainable community and of. Taken alot of inspiration and learning from that into building Wavy cuz it's superapplicable. Yeah. So I'd really recommend that book for anyone who's interestedin the topic.

And they're one of the only books I'veseen that have a trailer on their, on their website, so you should check itout. It's a, it's really inspirational one.

Julian: And, and in regardsto, I always like to ask to make sure we didn't miss anything. And, and, and,and and kind of just before we wrap up the show here is there anything I didn'task you that I should have or that you would've liked for me to ask?

Shawn: Not that I can thinkof. I, I think we covered some good things. But but if you're, if you'relistening and interested in the subject and wanna jam more, I'm always happyto, to talk. So happy to share my, my LinkedIn and, and connect with whoever,whoever's interested in the space.  

Julian: Yeah. Last little bitis we always ask our guests, please give us your plugs.

What's your LinkedIns? Where can we alsolook at Wavy support you as a founder, support Wavy as a product? And, and ifwe're a company wanting to get involved, where can we start gettinginvolved?  

Shawn: Yeah, so all oversocial media and our website, we're joinwavy. And hopefully you can share thespelling for that in the show notes, but it's, it's as it sounds and Wavy is.

Free to use. So you can just head tojoinwavy.com and click get started to create your company dashboard and getstarted. So would, would love to see, see that. And we're, we're always here tosupport and help with questions. If you're looking for inspiration. And thenI'm Shawn Hewat on LinkedIn and Twitter.

So always happy to chat there and it's,it's really me behind the dms and messages. So if you've got any questions orwanna learn more, I, I'm here, here to chat with you.  

Julian: Amazing. Shawn, it'sbeen such a pleasure chatting with you. Not only learning about yourexperience, but also Wavy and how really it's, it's changing the dynamics aboutengaging with your, your company culture and keeping people involved and, andreally, honestly, from an employee standpoint, you, you, it's really changingour experience and our motivation to do things and be more engaged with our,with our company.

So overall excited to see what comesabout it and, and, and what other things that you've created around. I hope youenjoyed your conversation today on on Behind Company Lines, and thank you somuch for joining the show.  

Shawn: Thank you.

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