David Tomas from Cyberclick on the happiest company in the world

Lisa: David, could you tell us a little bit about your personal journey and how you went from a little training with engineering to the CEO of the happiest company in the world?

David: It’s a long story, but to make it short - I studied engineering and I was working in the food industry for not that long, maybe two, three years. The truth is I always wanted to build my company and do it my own way. Even though I was treated really well with the companies I worked for, I realized that the corporate world was not for me and I wanted to do it my own way.

So that’s how I came to co-found the company. It was a little bit by chance because it was my sister’s husband - my brother-in-law - who had the idea of building a company. We were discussing, and finally we started together. That was back in 1999, so it’s a long time ago.

The first thing I realized - well, it’s hard to build a company, but it’s not that easy to create a great company to work for. Even though I thought I could do it better, the first year we struggled a little bit. We were a startup on the internet in the beginning of 2000, before the crash, when everything was like “internet was going to change the world” and the way people work, that you can go and work wearing a t-shirt. Even though we did all those things, we still had some of the ways a company’s organized traditionally, like some hierarchy, some stupid rules that you’re doing them because everyone is doing them.

It took us a really long time, I would say five, six years, where we started to say “okay, we need to do it differently, we need to change” because at the end of the day we’re building a company like the ones I didn’t like. Then we started to change our process, and the first thing was learning about other companies. So I visited a lot of different companies and obviously Buurtzorg was there, Semco, and several other different companies that we started to see that there was a different way. We started to create our own process to try to be a happy company.

That took a long time. First it was the learning, so I read tons of books about the topics, everything I could grab. But later it took us several years to fine-tune and define exactly what things we could do to be a company where you want to work.

Lisa: What is for you, why is happiness at work so important? Because it seems you’ve written a book about it, and it seems like Cyberclick now is very much organized around happiness. So what does that mean to you?

David: Well, the first thing is what we understand for happiness. There are several ways to understand happiness. For me, the happiness I talk about is fulfillment - it’s the happiness where you can express yourself, where you can do something that relates to what inspires you, where you feel that you have the flow, and you leave the company fulfilled and with more energy. That’s the kind of happiness. It’s not the hedonistic one where you just lay out and have martinis or mojitos. Here you still do something that makes you feel better and makes you feel that it’s not only a means to pay your rent, but it’s something more. It’s a way of expressing yourself. So that’s the key point.

For me, one of the ideas came from reading a book. I realized it has to be a priority for us. I was reading this book from Charles Duhigg, “The Power of Habits,” where he explains the story of Alcoa and how Alcoa was changed thanks to all the team focusing around safety - that there shouldn’t be any accidents and no one should get hurt. It seems they created a habit where everyone was well aware about safety, and they were taking care of their peers.

While I was reading it, I thought “okay, that made sense at that time at the end of the 80s and the 90s when we were talking about safety. We talked about quality, we talked about environment.” But I thought, “okay, this was 2000, almost 2010 maybe” - I can’t remember the year now when I was reading that. This is why I decided with the team - I think that nowadays, in 2010, what can really make a company thrive is to have happiness and fulfillment at the center.

That was an idea we were already working for, we were already talking about this, but it was a moment when I thought, “that’s something we need to do.” I sat with the team and explicitly said, “Well, this is a priority, but now we’re gonna make it THE priority. It’s going to be the most important thing, and we’re gonna measure happiness and fulfillment at our company, and we want to have regular conversations about that. It’s going to be a topic that we’re gonna give priority to.”

So that’s a little bit the process, and from then we started to measure happiness. We started to send every single day an email asking how you arrived at the company and how you left. That was with a traffic light - it was red, yellow, and green. And that was like the tool we used to have the conversations, because every single Monday when we had our weekly meeting at 11 o’clock (and we still do it at 11 o’clock), the first thing we do is check the traffic lights. So we have a conversation, and it’s not more than 10 minutes because nowadays normally everything is green, sometimes yellow, and some reds.

But at the beginning we had some reds, and we had these discussions about that, and we decided to change some things in the company. We changed things like the kind of projects we work on or the way we organize, and that allowed us to have those conversations that are not natural sometimes.

I ask my friends, “Okay, when was the last time your company or your boss asked you if you were happy at work?” And some of them just stare at me forgetting, “I mean, I’ve been working here for 10 years and they never asked me.” It’s not normal. And I think that’s a question we should introduce in companies because if you are not happy, there are plenty of companies to work for and you can find another way where you can be fulfilled.

For me, it doesn’t make sense to spend all your life doing something that doesn’t provide you fulfillment, because you’re not going to thrive in that environment. If you’re not fulfilled with what you’re doing, it’s like going against the wind. Everything is gonna be difficult, it’s gonna be hard. You’re not gonna flow, and you’re not gonna be a great professional. Whereas if you know what you think you were born for and you have a purpose to do that, then everything is going to be much easier.

It doesn’t mean everything’s gonna be perfect and it’s gonna be all easy because you will have problems as we all do. But you’re gonna face them in a different way because it’s aligned with what you want.

Lisa: I think it’s really interesting because it sounds to me like you almost took quite an engineering approach. You read “The Power of Habit” and you learned about this Alcoa story, and you thought there’s something in that - there’s something in focusing on one thing and then creating habits around that and measuring it and making it kind of baking it into the way that you do things in the company.

I think there’s quite a trend at the moment that people are talking about in the press, and there’s also been quite a backlash about happiness at work and people saying like, “Oh well, you know, it’s all great having foosball tables and slides in the office and stuff.” So I think it’s almost got a bit of a bad reputation. But I think your approach to happiness at work, to me, seems much more about having something that you organize around to begin with and using that as a way of asking important questions. Because, you know, books like “The Happiness Advantage” and various research has shown that when people are happier, when they’re engaged, they perform better. So it makes business sense as well.

David: Of course. I think that the point here is to align the company and the team, and that can only be done by both sides working well together. Normally, the majority of companies, what they do is someone in an office decides that this year this is the plan, this is how much we need to grow, this is what we need to achieve, and the rest of the team then needs to adjust their life to that plan without being asked or without participating in that decision.

So the idea here is to change that and allow the team to participate in where the company is going. At the end of the day, a company is a group of people doing certain things together. What we try to do is align that. In our scale, it’s “Okay, let’s ask every one of the team what you want to achieve this year at your personal level.” I mean, this year you want to create a family, you’re going to study a master’s degree, you want to prepare for a marathon - whatever it is. And now once you have clear what you want, let’s make the company priorities together. Let’s make sure that they are aligned, that there is not a conflict between them.

Because if there is a conflict, you’re gonna struggle. If you struggle, you’re not gonna be fulfilled. And if you’re not fulfilled, you’re not gonna do your task properly. So it’s going to be lose-lose for everyone. So what we try to do is align those two things.

To do that, what I say is - it’s not for everyone. There are certain people that want to be told what to do. They don’t want to spend their time thinking about their life or about what they want to achieve or how the company can grow. They just want to come to work and be told what to do. And that’s fine, I think that’s gonna be less and less people who want that, but there’s a percentage - I don’t know what, but I guess it’s big - of people that don’t want to be in that situation.

You need to find the right people that want to be in an environment where they need to decide, because it’s not easy. I mean, the easy thing is go with the flow and do what I’ve been told to do. But I think there you don’t find fulfillment. It’s like an easy life where you don’t think about why or what you’re doing here, what’s the purpose, what makes you happy, how you can make an impact.

So that’s a little bit the kind of people you need to find. And if you find these people and center all the decisions around fulfillment and how your team can grow and how the company can grow, I think that’s an advantage for everyone and it’s a real win-win.

Lisa: It brings to my mind as well that because I think there’s a myth perhaps for some people that if you focus on happiness at work, if you have a truly happy company, that things are easy and everyone gets to do what they want and there are never any difficult conversations. But you mentioned yourself that having conversations about, you know, “Are you happy?” and looking at the traffic light provoked conversations that don’t feel natural because we’re not used to being asked if we’re happy at work.

But there’s a definition of happiness that I read once that really stuck with me - that happiness is experiences of pleasure and purpose over time. And most people think of the hedonistic side of happiness, as you mentioned, but actually if you think about that - they gave the example, for instance, of parents who have children. When they have children, their pleasure happiness levels go down. It’s stressful, they don’t get sleep. But in terms of purpose, it’s very fulfilling in their life. Otherwise, people wouldn’t do it because nowadays it’s not essential for people to have children - some people choose not to.

But that to me is quite an interesting kind of balance, that it’s not just hedonistic, it’s not just about pleasure, it’s about purpose. And sometimes that means, it sounds like, part of the culture here at Cyberclick is also to have conversations that are difficult, and sometimes you might have those conflicts between personal and company goals.

David: I can give you an example. We had a person that was brilliant at what she was doing, but that was not what she wanted to do. We had the conversation when we were defining what she wanted to do in life, which we do twice a year. For her, it was clear that it was not the task she was doing here, and we didn’t have the type of task she wanted to do.

So there was a small task she did, and it was great because it was her natural skill, but… She was very good, but we had the conversation. And if we hadn’t had the conversation, probably she would have been unhappy for six more months at the company thinking “This is not what I want to do.”

But we had the conversation and said, “Well, we don’t have this task or what is promising with transition, and we’ll try to put everything we can. We can give you context, you’ll have free time to go study. We’ll try to do our best so you can do this transition.”

And that lasted for a year. Finally, she was with us for a year while she was preparing herself for a new venture. But it was good for everyone. The transition was good, she was happy, she was giving green [in the traffic light] because she was on her way to the transition. For us, we had a person that was brilliant for a year doing a great task. And once she left, it was good for everyone because we already had time to do the transition too.

Those kinds of things are difficult. It seems as though if you want to leave a company, it’s like a betrayal. And I don’t see it that way. I mean, nobody is loyal to a company. Everybody is loyal to their priorities. And as far as the company is helping you with your priorities, you will be happy and fulfilled. But if your priorities are different from the company, what the company should do is try to help you as much as possible within the means that you have. I mean, if you don’t have those means, you cannot help that much. But sometimes there are small things that you can do for a person like giving a contact or maybe paying for some education, or whatever you can do.

Lisa: At Cyberclick, I know you have some practices that probably a lot of people would see as progressive, like you don’t have a vacation allowance and working hours, and people can work from wherever they want and things like that. And also you are self-managing, so there are no managers or bosses or things like that. So I’m really interested then to hear about your role as CEO and what you do with your time now, and if there have been any kind of challenges or tensions in letting go?

David: Well, the first thing is I don’t like the role of CEO, so I don’t use this role. I am the co-founder of the company and I’m someone else working here, obviously. Now I have some gray hair and I’m one of the oldest, so I have more experience than the majority of the team. That’s something that allows me, for some projects, to have more voice than other people because I have the experience and they ask me.

But my role here, I think, is as an enabler. It’s like, “Okay, what I need to make sure is that we have our rhythm, where we have our open discussions, where we have the meetings.” And I try to provide as much value as I can in the areas I’m good at. I’m good at marketing, so I try to work on those areas.

But it’s quite open. My role is not probably as the regular CEO, but it’s more like an enabler. And it depends on the quarter, because we said every year there’s a big priority and every quarter there is a priority for that quarter. So depending on the quarter, sometimes I’m doing the tasks that an intern would do in a normal company, and sometimes I’m doing the tasks like a general manager would do. But it’s not a fixed role, so it changes.

One point is that now I have 17 years of experience in this area, so that helps in terms of understanding where the market is going. So for innovation and new products, I like to be involved.

Lisa: And how are decisions made here? Do you have any tools or practices that you use to make decisions as a group? You said there’s no top-down.

David: That’s a good question. Decisions normally are made in… so we have like this planning - we follow a methodology named EOS [Entrepreneurial Operating System]. That’s for companies that grow fast. We have our rhythm, which has two yearly retreats during the year. We spend summer with three days and winter is two days, and that’s a moment where we stop and we put like the “rocks” - the things that are important for the company. And that’s an open discussion.

So we send a Google Doc where everyone writes down what they think needs to improve, and it becomes a list of topics. Then we say, “Let’s talk about them all, let’s put them in order, let’s see what comes first, and let’s decide what we’re gonna do.”

The other thing we do is on Monday we have lunch all together, and at that lunch we take the time to discuss those topics. If there’s a topic that involves everyone, it’s gonna be discussed during Monday lunch. We normally buy sushi, and then we discuss about this topic. If there’s nothing on the agenda, we talk about the company culture, and everyone needs to bring one example of our core values. And if there are topics, we discuss them.

Since we talk about them every week, it’s quite fast because maybe, “Okay, we’ll send this information with everyone and next week we come to a conclusion” or “We come to a decision of what we’re gonna do.” But that’s the same with clients, so we talk about the clients or the project we’re gonna manage and decide if we wanna do it or not.

We have open book management, and we apply the book “The Great Game of Business” [by Jack Stack]. That helps again because when you see the numbers, the projects that we’re doing, if we’re getting good results - we have a profit-sharing tool that is discussed in those meetings.

Lisa: So it sounds like, would it be fair to say that people are empowered to make decisions if they’re close to the client or close to the product or whatever, but if it’s a bigger decision, then you come together as a group either in these meetings or in the retreats? And you’re not aiming for consensus, but you have a group discussion about something until you make a decision that people are happy with?

David: It’s actually consensus. So we get to a point where the majority of people see that that’s the direction we need to go. We’re actually now changing our logo, and that’s a consensus. Maybe there’s someone that would be radical like, “I don’t like that,” but okay, let’s try, let’s keep working.

And sometimes that’s hard because some decisions might take longer, but the more you practice, the faster you go. So at the beginning, some decisions were really long. I remember particularly in hiring, it took us really long to make a decision like, “Okay, I have my doubts, I don’t know.” And now we have optimized the process so we can hire someone quite fast, and everyone participates in the process.

Lisa: You’ve mentioned to me before that you’re also organizing in smaller teams, almost like team of teams, and you mentioned earlier that one of them has recently moved offices and spun off and moved to Gracia. Does that help as well? Is there a thinking behind that in terms of having smaller teams where people can make decisions more effectively and have kind of close relationships?

David: I think that’s something we learned. We were still quite small, but what I’ve seen for the majority of companies - we have experiences for teams of more than 16 people - it’s hard to have the time and confidence among the people. So our idea is to build teams that will go from 10 to 20 people and then split them once they grow.

That’s something we need to figure out how we’re gonna do because now it’s… We have done it in different companies, but now those companies are growing, and we need to figure out how to do it. The idea, I think, is gonna be that teams of teams, and then find ways that all the teams have a moment together. But the day-to-day and the decisions for the team are made within the team.

Lisa: That’s always an interesting turning point for self-managing companies, I think, as you start to grow. It becomes more difficult to have those self-managing principles in place that happen quite naturally or more easily in smaller teams, in startups for example. So are you feeling those tensions already? Are there kind of challenges emerging in terms of how you keep that culture as you grow?

David: Not right now, but we can sense that if we grow more, we need to split the teams because there’s a moment where every meeting takes too long, every decision… and sometimes with some people in the team, you don’t talk regularly. I think it’s important you have this take to the moment where you interact and you have a strong relationship.

Lisa: Another thing that comes up time and time again when I talk to people about self-management and leadership - I’m really curious about - if you left Cyberclick for example, do you think someone else would take on the role of enabler, and do you think the culture would survive? Or do you think people would go back to a default, maybe a more traditional way of working? Or do you think what you’ve created here culture-wise and in terms of the self-management ecosystem, do you think it’s evolved to be self-sustaining?

David: I don’t know, I don’t know. It depends on the people that stay. At the end of the day, it depends on the people that stay. So it could be this way or it could change really fast. What I suspect is that if you have tried self-management and you’ve been participating in the decisions and you’ve been taken into account, for you it’s hard to go back. I think that that’s for sure.

But I still think that everyone puts things in a balance, and maybe, “Okay, now you don’t have that freedom, but you have something else.” So I don’t know. I think people, we all adapt. And I always say this is not the best management system - it’s the best management system for us. But maybe for another company or for someone else, it’s the worst management system in the world.

So what you need to figure out is if it works for you. Maybe in three years we decide we need to change. I don’t know, I have no idea. What I focus on is how I can be fulfilled and the rest of the team can be fulfilled today. Tomorrow, we’ll see. But the important thing is how we are fulfilled today and how we enjoy what we’re doing.

My impression is that everyone wants freedom, and there’s plenty of studies that support that everyone wants to be part of a decision. They want to be considered and not a number. But that goes with the education - the more information a society has and the more education, well, the more you want to be taken into account.

Lisa: What have been the benefits for you then at Cyberclick? You said that this isn’t the best management system for every company, which is a great point, but why is it the best system for you?

David: For me, it’s like a mission in life to create a company that wants to be the happiest company in the world and be fulfilled. For me, I think it goes back to my education and the way I work. My family, they had a small business, but they were really unhappy, and I know it wasn’t like this idea of suffering and working, like “Okay, you need to work really hard.” And I have a lot of friends that altogether have this idea that when you work, it’s not positive. And I always wonder why - I mean, why can’t you work and be happy? Why can’t you have fun at work?

For me, it’s part of what I wanted to do in life. I think that you can work and be fulfilled. I think that your life is gonna be richer if you are fulfilled. I talk about the positive cycle in my book, which is: even on Monday morning, you are happy, you have more energy, and your life at work and your peers - they see that you have energy, that you can achieve things, and they have more confidence in you. That confidence allows you to do bigger things. So now you have more self-confidence. And when you leave your company, you’re laughing, you’re happy. So your family, your friends, your kids, they see you laughing, and they like laughing back because of mirror neurons.

So that’s the idea. For me, I think that everyone would have a more fulfilled life if what we do professionally allows us to do a few things.

Lisa: So for you, it’s a personal mission really, and something a value that’s very important to you about leading a fulfilling life and work being part of that rather than being just a means to an end?

David: Correct, that’s my point. Like, how can you be fulfilled through what you do? Because I think that when you create things, when you do something that is meaningful for you, you are more fulfilled. And that’s what I want to prove - that you can create a company and that company can help you to be happy and fulfilled.

Lisa: I imagine also, you know, you mentioned before about innovation being important here. I imagine that working in a self-managing way is conducive to innovation because you can be more responsive. You’re creating a safe environment for people to speak up or have different opinions or perspectives, to try things and sometimes to make mistakes, and for everyone to be involved in decisions. So it seems like innovation and self-management also kind of go hand in hand.

David: I think a lot of the innovation is… we all can be innovative, but the way companies are set up doesn’t allow us to be innovative or takes all our energy away. Because if you have to fill three forms before you can have access to something, well, then the next time you don’t do it and okay, you forget about innovation and you don’t propose any new idea and you’re not engaged.

So in companies, we need to try to connect with that innovation from everyone. And when you make things and organize things that make sense for people, and if they think they are put in the center, they want to contribute and they bring their best ideas.

Lisa: Finally, you mentioned that along your journey, you’ve read a lot of different books. If you could pick one book that you would recommend to listeners who are interested in self-management or new ways of working, what book would you recommend?

David: There are several, but obviously the book from Frederic Laloux, “Reinventing Organizations,” that would be one that’s very inspiring in terms of how companies are organized. And you see a lot of examples in the book from Ricardo Semler, from Richard Branson. “The Great Game of Business,” and there’s a book that we read, “Self-Organizing Teams.”

But there’s something I will recommend for any company: “Crucial Conversations,” which is a book that everyone who comes here receives in the welcome pack. Because it is a book that helps you to express your feelings in a way that is positive. Because we normally have a problem of communication - we have a hard time trying to express our feelings or trying to say something difficult to someone. So the book helps you to give a hard message in a way that can be received properly. And that’s one I would recommend for improving the communication in a company.

Lisa: And what would your dream be for the future of work in general, not just Cyberclick? But what would you like to see in organizations in the future? What would you wish there was more of in the world?

David: I think the companies will change, that’s for sure - the way we are organized. So what my dream would be is that people are fulfilled, what I call “inspiring Mondays” - that for you, Monday is not a bad day but it’s a positive day where you do tasks that you enjoy. Obviously, everyone likes to have a weekend and different activities.

But what I would like to see is when, Monday morning, sometimes you go to take the metro, the subway, sometimes you see people that are really struggling and they don’t want to go to their companies. That’s what I would like to change - that people have a work that they enjoy and it’s in a company where you can organize the best way for you and your peers and the company. And I think those three things can be aligned, and if you align them in companies, great.

Lisa: Thank you, David.