An entire Presidential administration ago, I wrote an article on how to work with your friends. I was two years and two shows into my fun new side gig as a podcaster, and thought others might be able to learn from my mistakes turning fun ideas into actual projects with my friends.
Four years later, podcasting is my career. We still use the lessons in that article every day, but now they’ve been upgraded from habit to policy.
Here’s how we keep Multitude a fun, sustainable, and creative place to work.
Eyes on the Prize
Setting goals should be the first step in any project. Especially in creative projects, and double-especially under the crushing weight of capitalism, you need something to point to when thoughts like “Why are we even doing this?” cross your mind.
At the beginning of any project (or now! It’s never too late!) everyone involved should say what they want to get out of it. Do you want to have fun? Make money? Make a difference in someone’s life? Write these down somewhere you’ll see them and revisit them often.
Goals should also be measurable. Business people like to talk about KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators. That’s a fancy way of asking, “What does success look like for you?” If one of your goals is to make money, there’s a pretty easy KPI: the money you make! But the best KPIs might be an event (“When we sell out our first live show”), a feeling (“I want to feel excited when thinking about the podcast”), or a behavior (“I will consistently have new ideas for episodes”). As you check in with your goals, you should notice when you accomplish them, and create new ones with new, achievable metrics.
Listen to Other Podcasts
We spend a lot of time listening to unedited audio, making edits, and thinking about how podcasts can be better. It’s enough to make a producer swear off audio words forever. But listening to other podcasts, especially ones outside of the genres and circles we frequent, is incredibly important.
It’s an incredible way to find new friends and colleagues. You need friends who get it, and one sure sign someone gets it is if they make a show we like. Isn’t that what all of us want? Someone who doesn’t just like what we make, but knows exactly why what we made works?
It’s also a great way to find potential collaborators, clients, and colleagues. Many of the people we get to pay and get paid by began as people whose work we admired!
Creative workers need to know their field. Podcasts are no different. Listening to a wide breadth of shows makes us figure out what we like and don’t like, then we emulate it or make the show we wish existed.
There’s no better way to identify new talent and trends. Articles don’t capture anything close to the fullness and reality of podcasting; they’re more reporting on trends after they're made and affirmed by that echo chamber. Constantly trying new podcasts, being enthusiastic fans of the ones we like, and following editors and producers to their new projects is how we see the water before the wave.
Meetings Are Good
Most meetings should still be a Slack message, but what if your meetings could be worthwhile?I included the hows and whys of running good meetings in the 2017 post, back when our teams talked business once a month. As we’ve grown, we’ve also added and refined our meeting schedule. Here’s what we’re doing for 2022:
Weekly: Department meetings for the executive, marketing, production, and operations teams. Meetings actually last 20-60 minutes depending on how much stuff there is to discuss, and we cancel them if more than a third of the team is on vacation at any given time.
Bimonthly: Show Meetings where show hosts and Multitude’s executive + marketing teams to share updates and see if we can make the process of running the show any smoother. One-on-Ones cover similar ground, but are for individuals to talk to the CEO (me!). We used to hold both of these kinds of meetings monthly, but that got unwieldy as we grew. Now we alternate: show meetings one month, one-on-ones the next.
Quarterly: Once per quarter we have a company-wide meeting with all staff and hosts. Each department and show shares what they’ve been working on, and the executive team presents upcoming projects that affect everyone. We close with brainstorming: pitches, feedback, or a creative exercise to spark new show or project ideas. We also have an optional NO BUSINESS ALLOWED hangout in between quarterly meetings so that we never go more than six weeks without seeing everyone together.
Annually: Our company Year-End review is our longest meeting of the year, but we look up and four hours have gone by. We revisit our goals (told you it was important!) and brainstorm ways to do more of what we like doing and less of what we dislike doing. It may seem simple, but it is so difficult to really know your feelings about work, and realizing you can delegate or lean into something, without writing it down. Protip: Do these in October or November, not December! That gives you a chance to plan ahead for the new year before anyone goes on holiday breaks.
Prioritize Rest
Creative labor is labor, no matter what union-busting VC-backed tech-entertainment companies want you to believe. Just like we rest our bodies after exerting them, creative workers need time to rest our brains.
By the end of 2021, I was spent. I felt like I had to be available to anybody who emailed me at any time, even when I was in the studio recording my podcasts. My creative business was getting in the way of my creative job. When I brought that up at our year-end review, my colleagues had a brilliant idea: what if no one could email us on Fridays, and we could do whatever we wanted on that day without the guilt?
Now we do! Everyone who works at Multitude reserves 20% of their workweek for creative projects, independent work, and rest. We set Out of Office responders (see below) every Friday so that we can read, rest, run errands, listen to other people’s podcasts, take time off, or play Dungeons & Dragons.
Multitude’s Out of Office message
Prioritize rest. If you have employees, codify it. Make liberal use of your Out of Office responder, turn down work that doesn’t make sense, or keep an appointment with yourself for a daily bath or walk or zone-out TV time. However you can carve out time to rest, do.
Your Company Has a Culture (Even if you Ignore it)
A company’s culture is a product of its leadership’s decisions. If you leave it alone, people will go off their instincts or past experiences (and if what we know of most people’s jobs is true, it won’t be fun). So even if you’re worried about not getting it right the first time, try anyway. Set goals, make choices, and try to make yours the best workplace you’ve ever had. I’m so very grateful to my friend-colleague-coworkers for their patience, trust, and excellent ideas as I figured out how to lead a sustainable creative business. I know our learning is not over yet.
It turns out that caring for a friendship alongside the pressures of a creative business is a great tutorial in caring for a creative team. Multitude has accomplished a lot in the last four years, but the thing I am most proud of is that the friends I interviewed in that 2017 article are still my collaborators—and more importantly, still my friends.
-Amanda McLoughlin and Eric Silver