A conversation with Chieu Cao, Co-founder & CEO of Mintango, and Co-founder of Perkbox
For this issue of The Splash, we caught up with Chieu Cao, Founder and CEO of Mintago, and Co-founder of Perkbox, about attracting talent, building a strong culture, and keeping employees happy and healthy.
It’s been an amazing ride since I founded Perkbox over ten years ago, and then Mintago more recently. It’s certainly not been the easiest journey and we’ve had to rethink things a few times over the years, but we’re now at a place where we’re really helping a lot of businesses.
We recognized that there was a big shift in society to become more employee-centric. Millennials were driving this change by being a lot more vocal than past generations, asking for things like better management and healthier workplaces. They were talking about issues that had been considered pretty taboo before, like mental, financial, and emotional wellbeing
We caught up with Chieu Cao, Founder and CEO of Mintago, and Co-founder of Perkbox, about attracting talent, building a strong culture, and keeping employees happy and healthy.
We recognized that there was a big shift in society to become more employee-centric. Millennials were driving this change by being a lot more vocal than past generations, asking for things like better management and healthier workplaces. They were talking about issues that had been considered pretty taboo before, like mental, financial, and emotional wellbeing.
We started Perkbox to reward employees for their hard work, giving them access to hundreds of awesome perks and benefits. It was part of our broader mission to help companies create a better culture. One that resonates with both millennials and employers who cared about their staff. On the other hand, Mintago came about to help employees become financially happier and healthier, while supporting their mental and physical wellbeing.
Culture’s always changing. The important question is, what is the right culture at every stage of the business? The right culture is the one that has everyone aligned in terms of how they see the world. There’s no such thing as the right culture, there’s the right culture for that company. The culture is wrong when people aren’t supportive of each other and have wildly different views on things. This can be really costly to a company. I mean we’ve all worked at a job with a bad culture, no one sticks around for long.
Every time you hire new people, especially senior people, they bring along their views of the world, their past experiences, and the cultures they’re used to. If you hire someone senior with the wrong cultural mindset, it could cause a lot of disruption. All of the people below them are exposed to this new culture that may not comply with the company’s intended culture.
Obviously, it’s difficult to always hire someone who matches your culture perfectly, but it’s the founder’s job to nurture culture as they grow and unite mindsets to protect its integrity. Business leaders need to stand strong on culture and their view of what that culture should be. And they should be willing to let people go if they’re disrupting that. You can hire people who are technically really good on paper but they may not be a good cultural fit. This is something business leaders will be faced with often.
Talented candidates have options and can afford to be picky. They’re looking for jobs that are more than just a paycheck. I’ve found that the companies that attract a disproportionately greater amount of talent can satisfy several needs: a salary that meets candidate expectations, peers who believe in what they believe in, a great culture and work environment, and strong direction and vision as a company. Beyond that, it’s down to employer branding. We talk a lot about product branding, but a lot of companies still haven’t really evolved to think of themselves as a brand. You need to make people want to work there.
Absolutely. The technologies we have access to now are incredibly powerful. At my current business, Mintago, we focus on helping other businesses help their employees with their finances. Financial health is one of the most personal issues you can talk about, and along with mental health, it’s a subject people are likely to hide from their employers. But if you’re able to help your employees with this very personal problem, you’re making a positive impact on their lives both inside and outside of work. The reason we’re able to do this is largely due to the tech that’s out there.
But again, it takes a certain kind of culture to allow this. Management needs to set a culture that allows people to express their personal views and challenges. People need to be able to feel like they can openly talk about their financial difficulties and mental health and I think the future of leadership will be eliminating these taboos so that the right technology can help people.
Every manager should know about the concept of “psychological safety”. Psychological safety allows people to be themselves. It’s the ability to make mistakes in front of you and their peers without fear. It’s what allows people to talk about challenging issues that may expose their vulnerability.
People want to show their competency at work and hide their weaknesses. But in order to do a good job, people need to show failure as well as greatness. We’re all human. We all fail and we all need to be able to deal with and recover from failure. Companies create psychological safety by allowing that to happen.
In marketing, for example, maybe around 80% of ideas will fail. If you only focus on the 20% that succeeded, you ignore the fact that the majority of your employees’ time was spent on something that didn’t work. By not acknowledging that work, you psychologically undermine them. People will naturally want to avoid talking about their own failures for fears of repercussions, but a lot of good can come from failing and employees shouldn’t be afraid to do so.◆
