Overview

Coda knows the importance of building a strong company culture, especially in the remote work era. With Glue, they found a solution that empowers their employees to take the lead in culture building. Read on to discover how Glue enables Codans to plan and execute impactful team events.

The Story

Coda is redefining how teams collaborate through software that combines the best of docs, spreadsheets, and apps into an all-in-one platform. Like many technology startups, Coda grew rapidly during the pandemic while navigating the shift to remote work. Today, more than half of their workforce is remote.

Pre-pandemic, Coda used the office as a space to bring employees together, build new connections, and foster trusting relationships. However, with less than half of their employees returning to the office, Coda knew they needed a long-term solution that would bring the benefits of their in-person spaces online. Namely, Coda sought a solution that would:

• Allow them to build relationships across the organization, regardless of whether an employee is remote or in-office
• Give employees the opportunity and autonomy to take culture building into their own hands
• Be easy and effective to use

Everyone is a maker. Especially employees.

One of Coda’s core values is that everyone is a maker: that great ideas can come from anywhere, and that anyone can be a change agent in their organization, community, and more. With Glue, Coda found a solution that empowers employees to “make” culture from the bottom up.

Using Glue's Team Manager feature, organizations can designate ‘organizer’ permissions to team members, giving them access to booking and event organizing tools in the Glue platform. At Coda, every team member has access to organizer permissions—meaning any team member can book an event for their colleagues. The outcome has been apparent for people leaders like Brian Lederman: when team members plan events, the act of building culture feels more organic, leading to more buy-in across the organization.

These employee-lead events have contributed to an increase in connection across teams. Brian describes that as a leader, when booking a team event he will traditionally invite individuals within his direct reporting structure. However, when employees book events, he’s noticed they’ll often invite people from across different functions of the organization.

Since using Glue, user to user collaboration at Coda has improved by 27%.

Providing a way to connect outside of work

Remote work meetings can often be transactional in nature, with less opportunity for conversation and interaction about non-work topics. Brian highlights that “...just because we spend a lot of time together on work calls does not necessarily mean we’ve gotten to know that person on an individual level.” With Glue events, Coda is intentionally setting aside time for employees to connect over an activity unrelated to their work—creating space for new friendships and reducing the risks of attrition often associated with lack of social connection.

When asked to share his team’s experience with Glue events thus far, Brian answered simply, “They love it”. And it’s not hard to see why. 92% of Codans love Glue events, and 87% agree that Glue strengthens their at-work connections.

Our home offices can be a narrow window into our worlds. However, learning more about one another often requires us to step outside of our work and outside of our offices. Glue events help Codans do just that. For example, during some events (such as cookie baking or cocktail making) participants will bring their laptop to different parts of the home. “A lot of times,” Brian recalls, “you get to meet family members, kids, and pets, which can be humanizing.”

Glue events are also helping strengthen other culture building activities Coda organizes, such as quarterly offsites. Often, connections created through Glue team events provide familiarity that accelerates meaningful in-person connection. 

Codans who have used Glue in the past year have experienced on average a 37% increase in their number of connections at work.

With Glue, Coda can build culture at scale—from the bottom up.

Team events are a great way to connect employees, but they can be difficult and time-consuming to execute. Coda knew that to leverage team events to successfully build connections, they needed a solution that would make it simple for both people managers and individual contributors to book great events (and to measure the success of those events).

Glue's platform does just that, giving organizers easy access to hundreds of quality-vetted events while automating the tedious logistics like event invitations, reminders, and feedback.

“I would recommend Glue to anyone who is taking on the burden of event planning themselves or delegating it to someone else. Glue's platform makes it so easy to book and execute events. In this new normal of distributed work, you need to blend remote, hybrid, and in-person experiences to build culture and trust in different ways, and Glue is a great enabler for that.”