That is so encouraging to hear! Company culture has been a main focus of ours at Biocom recently – building it internally and educating around the need for it with some of our endorsed suppliers. What do you do to help build it or frame it here at Biocept?
This is always a challenge for us. I think by and large, most of our employees are pretty happy. We started doing an annual employee survey, which has been a huge game-changer, and most recently had about 87% of the responses come back with positive remarks. We have some work to do, but there are different needs for folks based on different demographics. We have a very diverse workforce here. When people say diversity, a lot of the times they’re thinking of cultural diversity, which is important, and we have that, too. About 75% of the managers here are women, VP and Director Level included. We have people that work for us that are older as well – our CSO is in his seventies! We also have folks working for us straight out of college.
This is the challenge: how do I balance the expectations of what a workforce should look like to multiple generations? There are such different expectations right now of the new workforce coming in, then the folks that are still working. It used to be everyone retired at 65, and now a lot of people want to work and continue to contribute. What if I told one of our managers who is in his sixties, and has been at numerous San Diego startups over the years, that we’re going to put a bar downstairs and people are going to bring their dogs to work? He’ll say that’s just not what you do at work, right? Some of the older generational employees already think I’m crazy with all the things we do for employees as it is, today. The young people, that’s what they want – a more open type of culture. Nothing is right or wrong, it’s just a constant balancing act.
So when you say how do you develop culture? We are doing our best. We host town halls – I try to have them every month – where we all just have lunch together, and employees are encouraged to ask me anything they want. I field questions on everything from financing, stock options, employee benefits, and smaller things like they don’t like how the app works for the time clock. We introduce all the new employees, we bring food in all the time, and the list goes on. We do our best to make it a good place and a fair place, for everyone.