šš½ Welcome to The Folklore, our weekly newsletter where we talk about our journey of building Folklory, a startup that helps you turn family memories into podcasts. Weāll share weekly updates, wins, and learnings, so sign up if youād like to hear from us.
One of the Folklory use cases weāre very bullish on is helping employees get to know their colleagues. Over the last week, weāve been finalizing a pilot with a small team who wants to use Folkory to help members get to know each other better and preserve the memory of events from 2022. In todayās issue, weāll talk about why and how teams at companies can use Folklory.
If you run a team and are interested, let us know and weāre happy to do a free 3-episode pilot for your team. There are 3 ways in which Folklory can help a team:
Increase empathy and understanding among team members
Build culture by preserving stories and milestones
Enable managers to communicate effectively at scale
Letās dive in!
How was your weekend?
In most companies, thatās the extent of the non-work-related conversation. Some of us will get lunch with colleagues, maybe a drink - but from my experience, we all would agree that we donāt do enough. A lot of the conversation at the workplace feels very transactional and while this might be efficient, it can sometimes feel hollow.
At Folklory we love going a few levels deeper in our conversations, to really understand people. Thatās what weāre really good at. āWhy did you join this company? What drives you? What is the one thing someone working with you should know? What does success look like to you? What are the things youāre least confident of?ā - knowing this about the people we work with, according to us, would really improve the effectiveness of a team and how they collaborate with each other. It also helps increase empathy and pushes us to look at someone beyond their Slack name, title, and picture.
You know the time when ā¦
Company stories are an important part of the culture. You hear them at town halls and over drinks. But you hear the same ones again and again - usually from the founders or senior management. However, every single team member has such stories. We donāt hear them often because we do a bad job of preserving them.
As a company grows, every team operates like a mini-company. They have their own culture, rituals, and ways of functioning. Just as companies have a āmeta-cultureā, we believe teams also have their sub-cultures - a good example of this are the unique Slack emojis used only by certain teams inside a company.
We see Folklory helping build both the companyās meta culture as well as team sub-cultures by preserving stories at both levels.
A new tool for Managers
One of the most important jobs of a manager is to ensure the team is motivated and aligned. This is done by constantly communicating with the team and setting expectations as clearly as possible. With only a limited amount of hours in a day, most managers struggle to do this well. They find themselves repeating things again and again, and while itās part of the job, it can get exhausting. This also means that thereās less time to go deeper on any given topic.
We see Folklory as a new tool for Managers to solve this. By recording a conversation and making it widely available, itās easier for any team member to get context quickly. This leads to 2 key benefits -
Conversation with existing team members can go deeper during 1-1s instead of staying at the surface
The manager can effectively communicate with a larger set of people - even beyond their team - without spending more hours
We donāt believe that recorded conversations are the only ways managers should be communicating with their teams. But having some information that can be accessed on-demand by team members can offer managers a lot of leverage to spend time on higher-impact communication.
The success of products like Loom, a tool that lets you record your screen and share your thoughts asynchronously and avoid meetings, proves that there is a lot to be gained from this format of communication.
Challenges
Some of the biggest challenges we face today are -
The return on investment for Folklory is more long-term and it can get hard to show short-term quantitative results.
A lot of companies donāt pay attention to culture and internal communication. Even if they do, itās a lower priority and thus making a sale is harder.
One challenge we foresee is that people might just want to do it themselves - you just need to hit record right? Thereās a lot that goes into producing a good conversation - asking the right questions, guiding the conversation to make it interesting for listeners, editing and post-production, etc. In the long run, we want companies to do this with in-house voices, but hosts need to train before they get good. This is another piece weāre excited about - training the next 1000 hosts for Folklory - and weāll talk about it in a future edition.
Slack strategy
Iām not 100% sure if this is accurate or not, but I heard somewhere that Slack had similar challenges while trying to sell to organizations. Email was the default mode of communication and everyone did have some kind of internal messaging tool - so why did they need Slack?
What Slack did, and continues to do today, is allow a small set of users to get started for free. These users then love the product so much that they become internal champions and push the rest of the organization to get on board.
We will be trying something similar.
If youād like to give Folklory a try within your team, write to me at haresh@folklory.com and weāll do 3 conversations for your team absolutely for free. If you see the value, we can chat about how to do more, and if you donāt, you and your colleagues would have had an interesting conversation. If you have questions or want to learn more, Iām happy to speak with you.
Iāll leave you with this conversation we had with a startup CEO - you can imagine something similar for your company and team.
Until next time,
Haresh
Hope youāve enjoyed this weekās episode of The Folklore. If youād like to follow our journey, do subscribe using the button below
If you have feedback, ideas, or just want to get in touch, you can always write to us at theteam@folklory.com or DM us at @thefolklory on IG. We would love to hear from you ā¤ļø