“You’re trying to transpose the culture across different geos and across different time zones and it’s very difficult to do.”
Conor O’Loughlin, former Connacht rugby player and CEO of Glofox, has managed to turn his Irish based company into an international gym management software system.
With offices across Ireland, Sydney, San Francisco and Australia, one thing that has always remained important to Conor when running an international brand is company culture.
Speaking on JOE’s business show, All In, backed by AIB, Conor spoke about how Glofox have managed to maintain their company-wide community.
“I think the way we look at how we handle that is we ensure that we obsess about culture and we obsess about the team and we make sure that firstly we have rigour in our recruitment process, that we are hiring the right people.
“I think the investment and the over-investment in resources there has definitely paid us back, but also the challenge is that you’re trying to transpose the culture across different geos and across different time zones and it’s very difficult,” he continues.
“We’ve taken the approach that we don’t do a yearly offsite where everybody comes and spends time together. What we do instead is we invest in moving people as much as we can in between offices so that way it is more real-time.
“It is very powerful when you can actually bring people from the mothership over to the Sydney office to spend time, or bring people back from Sydney to Dublin so that they can absorb the culture and they can take it back with them.
“Focusing on keeping culture and really having our values as a voice elevated in the company is a way to ensure that you can scale with that. And then having framework and process, and constantly looking at that, and how we make decisions, and how we run meetings, and our expectations around communication, and ensuring that we have discipline in that, enables us to be successful in this hypergrowth.”
