The Siete Family Foods website, like most company websites, showcases its founders. But it also highlights almost all of the company’s 98 employees, featuring childhood photos and “two truths and a lie” for each person. The full staff would be listed, but Siete is growing too fast to keep up: It has added more than 30 employees during the pandemic, including three this month.
Visitors have to decide if Veronica Garza, who founded the grain-free packaged foods brand with her brother, Miguel, and mother, Aida, is lying about being the lead singer in a band, running three marathons or vomiting during a national cheerleading competition. (She didn’t run the marathons.)
The company wants its customers to know the team and for the team to know one another as if they were family. Which is fitting, considering that much of the staff before the pandemic was Garza family, including parents, siblings and in-laws.
“We’re a family-first, family-second, business-third company,” Miguel Garza, the chief executive, said.
But it became harder to build that family culture during the pandemic, with people working remotely. Growing companies like Siete have struggled to find ways to make new hires feel they’re a part of the business when they can’t meet in person. Without clues from the office setting and existing systems, how do you learn the company’s culture?
The problem confronts small businesses and giant ones alike, though it can be more acute for small firms that may not have human resources or a clear culture in place. And it’s likely to get more challenging as the delta variant of the coronavirus puts back-to-office plans on hold and hybrid work structures become permanent. A working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research said at least 20% of Americans’ workdays would be from home even after the pandemic.
At Siete, the Garzas took a clue from their website and developed a game. New hires get a bingo card listing current employees’ hidden talents and stories and are asked to set up video calls with those workers until they hit “bingo.”
“It is just fun. It’s even fun for people who are already on the team,” Miguel Garza said. (He likes rom-coms and Frank Sinatra, but he doesn’t see live music every weekend.)
Before the pandemic, the staff often cooked, ate and worked out together in the Austin, TX, office, so Miguel Garza is constantly seeking ways to extend that togetherness into employees’ homes. Knowing how important fitness is to the team, Siete bought employees their choice of kettlebells, dumbbells or a TRX system, and Garza began hosting Zoom workouts.
Good health is also foundational to the company’s origin. When Veronica Garza was diagnosed with autoimmune conditions, she embarked on a grain-free diet to combat them. Her entire family joined her, and they quickly realized there wasn’t a good substitute…
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