Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Today we’re joined by Josh Olipson, VP of employee experience for a conversation about Crumble’s winning company culture recipe. Thanks Josh for joining us today.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): Absolutely. I’m excited to be here.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): Thanks for having me, guys.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah, we’re super excited as well and we want to tell our listeners a little bit more about you and how you got to Crumble. So, as the VP of employee experience at Crumble, Josh leverages his personal passion for forging meaningful connections to drive business results. He previously served as the head of talent and…

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): culture at Trager Grills and head of recruiting and culture at Crest Financial, a tech startup. He graduated from the University of Utah with a degree in business management despite being an avid BYU fan. That’s an accomplishment in and of itself right there.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): I know.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah. U BYU,…

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): Yeah,…

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): they’re big rivals, but Utah State really doesn’t like BYU.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): I know. you just lost 75% of the audience with that statement by the way.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Crumble started. So that’s why I’m wearing a Utah State uniform.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): So yeah. Yeah.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Okay, we’ll just edit that. and I wanted to hear a little bit more.  So talking earlier, you love you love food, you love cooking, and that’s what led you to Traeger and now Crumble also has that part of it. Tell us a little bit about what led you to love cooking. Wow.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): So I grew up, my mom immigrated from Peru when she was a teenager and she is a fantastic cook. can make any type of food and it’s the best you’ve ever had. So growing up, I just grew up with a passion for good food. and just really watched her and learned from her growing up and seeing what she did in the kitchen. And so I just kind of fell into the passion of cooking my own food and trying to make delicious meals on my own.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): And yeah, as you mentioned, just as I was looking into do I want to do with my career? What do I want to do, what’s going to drive me? And I just thought about a lot of my passions and what are my passions in life? and one of them is food. And so it was just a great easy segue to or…

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): pathway to follow my passion into what I do for work. So that’s what led me to Trager and now to Crumble. man.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Cool.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): And so all right, we’re going to put you on the spot. We want to know what your favorite crumble cookie is of all the flavors that they put out.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): That’s such a hard question. So, I will tell you, I was actually a huge fan, and I’m not just saying this for the podcast,…

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): I was a huge fan of Crumble before I even started there. While we were at Trager, we would do fun like health challenges.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Uh-huh. Okay.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): And so last year we did the health challenge that I was at Trigger. I was really into it and I was doing really well and eating clean every day of the week except I would have a cheat night on Saturday night and I would go in a hot tub with friends and I would break my healthy eating with a box of crumble for that week. so I was a huge Crumble fan before I even got there. And one of the cookies they had that made me a huge fan of theirs was their peach cobbler that they had. it was in a t they were cookies in a tin, so it was more like a pie.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): right.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): So the peach cobbler was Alzheimer.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): I beg them to bring it back as much as I can, but apparently it’s operationally difficult for our stores. so that was one of my favorite ones.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): Now of the new dessert offerings that we have come out with last year, our cinnamon squares. If you haven’t had our cinnamon squares, my gosh, I can’t even explain what they are. They’re so good. They’re so good.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Okay, we got …

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): thanks for the tips.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): Yes. Yes.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): We love food, too. We may not be as good of a cook as you, but we love food. And so, yeah, we always like the recommendations.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): Yeah. Check out the new desserts that Crumble’s rolling out. They’re mindboggling good. They’re so good.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah, we’ll have to do that.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): Yeah. Yeah.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Love it. Okay. We want to thank you for sharing about your passions and how it’s part of your job and we’d love to hear more about why it’s important for company values to inform how you approach employee experience initiatives.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): I mean, I think I would say that a quote comes to mind from Simon Synonyck in his book, which is people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. And I think that applies as much to customers as it does for employees, employees want real purpose, a real sense of purpose in…

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): why they’re doing what they’re doing. Otherwise, they’re just punching a clock, and nobody likes that feeling of being in a job where you’re just punching a clock. You’re not feeling a deep connection. You’re not engaged. You’re not motivated just by punching that clock.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): And so I feel like embedding the company’s purpose, their mission, and their values and why those are important into different initiatives really hammers home that point of…

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): why we’re there and what our purpose is. And I think it just creates more meaningful days and more and better output from employees. Yeah. Yeah.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): And …

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Thinking of crumbles specifically, the first thing that comes to mind is not just about creating a dessert and selling a dessert, but bringing people together and having shared memories and experiences and that has a deeper meaning than just a baked good as a standalone product. Yeah, I think that’s very powerful. So tell us more about the

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): how you have tied employee experience initiatives at Crumble to the mission and values of the company.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): Yeah, absolutely.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): I mean, you hit the nail on the head as far as our mission is bringing friends and family together over a box of the best desserts in the world, right? And a lot of people are like, why do you sell them in a fourack? Why don’t you sell them individually, which we now do, but for a long time it was a fourack. And that was the reason. That’s not to say there’s no shame if you go and get yourself a fire-rack of crumble cookies and eat every single one by yourself. However, that’s not how most people enjoy crumble, Most of the time you’re getting a fourack or a six-pack or a party pack to go and share with somebody or to give it to a friend that’s maybe had a bad day or our purpose statement is creating meaningful moments with those that matter most.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): And that’s really what our cookies do, you kind of create you you remember those moments, those times that whether it’s, somebody’s grieving and you send them a box of crumble or they got a promotion, you want to send them a box of crumble, whatever it is,…

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): you’re helping create a meaningful moment or enhancing a meaningful moment in people’s lives. So back to your question, the question was how do we embed our purpose, mission, and values in our initiatives? How have we done that? Is that correct? Is that the Yeah,…

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah. Yeah.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Exactly. How are you tying in employee initiatives to that mission and value?

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): There’s a number of ways we’ve done it, but some examples are one of our four values at Crumble. They are authenticity, relationships, experience, and innovation.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): And along with our mission and our purpose statements, what we do is we try to find ways to make those statements more than just words on paper or words on a wall that employees see every day. We want them to truly experience those statements so that they see the power and the value in those statements. and so anytime we have an initiative, we start at the end and we say, “Okay, what would the end result be?” and what is it going to drive and how is it driving either our mission or our purpose or our values inside of the organization?

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): And so for example last year via some of our surveys we found that some of our teams really loved their immediate team and the team that they worked on but the cross functional relationships weren’t very strong. And so, with that being one of our core values of relationships of putting others first, we thought to ourselves, okay, how do we get our employees to live this value more? How do we get them to put others first?

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): And that then begged the question of when do you really only put others first if you truly know them and you truly care about them and you truly have a relationship with them.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): And so we came up with an initiative to partner with Kodapaxi and we did a companywide questal. what we did, if you’re familiar with Kodapaxis Questible,…

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Wow.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): it’s basically a huge all day scavenger hunt type of thing. yeah, so we did a questal with crumble specific challenges. and we had everybody getting to teams of five to six members and they all had to be from different departments and we did that so that again we could better foster cross-functional relationships in a unique and…

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): That’s cool.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Next  This is

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): authentic way that wasn’t forced, right?

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): it wasn’t just a hey let’s have a lunch together in the office and meet the finance team right even those initiatives have their place we just wanted to do something that would really stand out in their minds and something that they wouldn’t forget and something that would hopefully authentically drive those relationships to the next level. So it was a really fun event. They were doing crazy things like one of our founders opened up in Preston, Idaho. And so we said one of the challenges was to drive up to the polar bear in Preston, Idaho, have a meal and take a picture with your team. And so that you would be surprised how many teams actually did that challenge. I mean, it was worth a lot of points.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): But they were doing things like that and just there were service components to it like they drop off the bag of clothes on the road home…

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): who we partnered with and so we had a lot of different fun challenges that really what we hoped to achieve with that was that people spent some quality time with people that they didn’t know build a relationship and had and created meaningful moments with each other. So that was a really cool unique experience and initiative that we did around one of our values.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Did you hear feedback from other people…

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): what they thought of that experience and did it have the effect you wanted.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): Yeah, It did have the intended effect. We always survey after a big initiative like that and…

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): survey scores satisfaction scores were around 90%.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): and not only satisfaction but we asked them did this achieve the intended purpose of creating relationships with people that maybe you didn’t know in the organization and also very high scores on that I can’t remember the exact but every score on that survey was around 90% so it was a fantastic initiative it was awesome my team did a great job with that  Yeah.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): What? Yeah,…

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): It sounds incredible, very innovative, very creative and certainly based on relationship building. To me that feels like it really hits on the core of what Crumble stands for and those values that you outlined. And I think you recognize that you and your team are keepers of the culture in the sense that you have that responsibility and…

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): opportunity to receive feedback from all of the team members, and then essentially diagnose ways to improve relationships and improve the experience. And what you did So,…

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): Yeah. Yeah.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): It really sounds like it does that. It fostered strengthening of relationships in a really fun and authentic way that would certainly be memorable. I think that’s incredible.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): And I think again the goal is to take it from a meaningless statement that you get on your first day from a company.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Mhm.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): I can’t tell you the previous companies that I worked for what their mission and purpose statements were because they just didn’t drive it home authentically. It’s just an empty word that they would say to us every now and then.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): Whereas today I could tell you and obviously it’s my job but with Crumble I could tell you word what ours are and I could still tell you everything at Trager because Trager did a great job at that as well.  And I think that finding those unique ways that stand out, that make those experiences sticky. If you’ve read Med made to stick, finding those unique ways, it was interesting maybe about two years ago when we were having those massive snow storms. You remember those snowstorms?  There was one day that was like crazy snow day and it shut down a lot of the valley and our CEO really saw an opportunity to make a worthwhile moment for our employees.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): not only did he say, “Please just stay work from home today,” which is what most companies maybe did or didn’t do, but beyond that, he saw an opportunity to really go above and beyond just being a nice CEO and letting your employees work from home. he said to stay home. I want you to spend some good quality time with your family as our mission is bringing friends and family together and to really press you on that. I’m going to institute a contest today. He said we’re going to do a snowman building contest. You’re going to build snow if you build a snowman with your family.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): We take pictures with you and…

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Okay.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): Your family builds a snowman and the person who builds the best snowman with their family gets $2,000 or something like that. It was a crazy price and so you wouldn’t believe just the flood of snowmen pictures and the unique things that people did that came in. again it was a really unique way for our CEO and he took a possibly worthless day across the organization knowing that people would just sit at home with their families and not do anything and kind of encouraging them to live our mission in real time by going out and creating a meaningful moment with your friends and families and having fun in the process and having a fun contest on top of it.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): And so it was just a really fun, unique moment that I know every employee at Crumble that was there at that time or that is still here will never forget that day because it was such a powerful powerful moment because you realize man this really is such a cool thing that we do here at Crumble to that we do that helps people create moments with their families and…

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): loved ones. Yeah. No,…

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah. And…

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): what I love about that is most people their personal life, their families, that’s what comes first before work, and you guys were asking them to be authentic as well and to enjoy that time with their families and to share what they’re all about, what their families are like, and yeah, I think that’s so authentic. It doesn’t get more genuine than that.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): no, it’s and…

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): It does start from the top down, right?

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): If you have a great leader that understands that, it makes those of us in the HR world, it makes our job so much easier.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah, totally.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): I think that’s incredible. What a way to seize the moment in an authentic way. tell us Josh about one other element that’s happened at Crumble.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): Yeah. Yeah.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Tell us about the hackathon.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): Again so we try to do a quarterly large initiative around each of our values since we have four. So we try to do an initiative around each value every quarter on a larger scale. And one of our values is innovation.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): And so we were thinking okay again how can we create an initiative that is something out of the norm that is something that we can have employees get into different teams that maybe they’re not typically working in and have a moment where they really see in our value of innovation, how do they live that value?  And so, we came up with a hackathon. I know that’s not unique out there in the world. I know a lot of companies do it. And so, we wanted to do a companywide crumble hackathon. And so, the challenge was to come up with an idea that would improve same store sales across the nation in our thousand locations that we have, thousand plus locations.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): come up with a unique idea that would improve same store sales and you could only get into teams again we’re trying to foster different relationships. You could get into teams of four to six people and they had to be from different departments. And so each team we actually shut down the office for a week.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): We shut down work for a whole week. allowed these teams to really go through the whole innovative process of ideation and testing and results. And so it was a really cool experience. And then we had everybody we came back the next week and…

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): My god.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): every team pitched their idea in a Shark Tank format with our executive team. And so every team went out there and we took this seriously.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): We even sequestered every group in a room until they went and presented it so that they couldn’t tweak their ideas or add to their ideas after hearing other teams’ ideas. So we took it pretty seriously and so yeah, we had a ton of different teams pitch different ideas, amazing ideas. My team and I came up with a kind of a B2B subscription solution and yeah it was interesting. So they picked all I think we had about 20 or so teams, not actually maybe 25.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Holy cow.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): We had about 25 teams and a lot of the pitches were so good. We initially said that there was only going to be one winner and each team member was going to get an all expenses paid trip to Hawaii for two people for a whole week. So that’s why everyone was so into this. Everyone would just really dove in and put their heads together and so initially we said there would be one winning team, but then the pitches were so good that we did keep the one team that won that prize, but then we picked three or four we picked three others. They called them our CEO Jason,…

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Very powerful.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): He’s so funny, he called them the non-winner winners. he picked three other teams that were still going to move forward with their initiatives and we had consolation prizes for those groups as well.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): So, it was a really cool, fun experience and my team was one of the non-winner winners. And I’ll tell you, it was a key learning there because it’s not the best way to win your own prize or…

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): to win your own contest, I should say. Yeah, that didn’t go over too great. So, that was a key lesson learned there to not enter your own contest. It was a great idea.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah, but it was such a good idea.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): You had to lead by example,…

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): I still stand, Yeah. Yeah.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): I definitely. But I think that’s really cool how you essentially invited everyone from every different department and gave them permission to be creative and think innovatively about what could impact the entire organization.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): I think that’s incredible. Yeah. And one clear similarity between all of these initiatives is you have to have some good incentives.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): Yeah. Yeah.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): Got to have some good incentives.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): Make it fun. We love a good contest at Crumble and we’re very competitive and so we like to kind of add that element to a lot of our initiatives and have fun with it. Yeah. I mean,…

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): I’m sure these ideas are probably already getting our listeners’ wheels turning,…

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): but do you have any final advice that you’d like to give anyone who’s looking to implement initiatives that reflect their mission and values?

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): man, that’s a hard one. I would say first make certain that your mission, purpose, and values make sense for your organization.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): So maybe doing some research into how is that landing with the employees and making sure they’re the right things for your organization.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): I think there are many organizations out there that create it when they first start and then don’t think about it years down the road when maybe the organization has completely changed. so I would say maybe do an audit first and make sure that you have them not matching.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah. Culture matches…

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): what your mission and values are. And if they’re not, you might have

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): Discover why. And is it the fault of the mission purpose of the purpose, mission, and values, or is it a fault of hiring people that maybe don’t really back what your mission,…

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): purpose, and values are, right? I would say start there.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): I would say secondly, the key to a lot of this as I mentioned before and as you probably could see in some of the examples that I shared is getting buyin from that senior leadership group is so critical and key into stressing the importance of any initiative that you come out with, if the CEO and the executive team aren’t behind it, the employees are going to feel it and they’re not going to really want to get behind it either. They’re going to be like, “It’s not important to me.” And so I think that’s a key place to start is making sure that you get that senior leadership buyin. And as you heard throughout every example, the snowman thing was all our CEO, right?

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): The innovation thing like that was a pretty big financial commitment for the organization to put behind and not only from the prize standpoint but also from shutting down basically operations for a week to do it right that’s a huge commitment and…

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah. Mhm.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah. Yeah.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): I think that really stood out to our employees. They’re taking this seriously. I better take it seriously and so I think getting that buy-in is critical and then from there I’d say like I said earlier what I try to do is to look at the end result first and…

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): Kind of work my way back from there and make sure that that end result is hitting those key drivers indicators that I’m trying to or levers that I’m trying to pull. And if the end result doesn’t do that, then we try to ideulate something different.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah, that makes sense.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): I think honestly I love that you mentioned starting with an audit of your culture first.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Because you may discover some misalignments between…

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): Yeah. Exactly.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): what people say and what you’re aspiring to and a lot of the times that can be corrected with managing expectations and the way we talk about things differently in education showing how different values are actually implemented in an example a real life scenario. So, I think that’s a great starting point because if you’re a few degrees off and then you fly thousands of miles across the country, then you end up in a completely different place than maybe where you wanted to be. So, I think that’s really good.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): And I have kind of a funny failure story with that.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): When I left Trager and came to Crumble, there was a quick lesson for me that you can’t just copy and…

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): paste what you did in one company into the next company culture because they’re all different. And I learned the hard way because one of the most popular initiatives at Trager was our annual weight loss contest. I can’t tell you how popular that initiative was at Trager. And then I brought that to crumble thinking, ” yeah, it killed at Trager and I’ll do it here.” And I will tell you,…

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Yeah.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): I’ve never had more offended employees in my life that I was doing that. And I just was like, why are they mad?” And it was a quick failure lesson for me that each company’s culture is unique.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): every employee base is different and what they value is different and they have different experiences and they come from different places and it was a quick lesson for me that I can’t just copy and paste what I’ve done in the past and…

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Veryful. You thought the dessert lovers would. It takes a great leader to acknowledge their mistakes and…

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): I have to figure out what’s unique to them. I know I didn’t market it properly and it felt flat. It felt honestly and it was all my fault. I give no blame to the employees. It was all my fault. totally on me.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): learn from them. and try and…

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): I admit my mistakes all the time. I don’t know if that makes me a great leader, but I think I just have too many mistakes.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): We can all be non-winner winners, point. So, I think that’s great.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): That’s going to be the tagline of my biography.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): Josh Olison, the non-winner winner.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): Love it. So as Matt mentioned, I just want to leave with those final three things that you said. So, aligning your culture, doing an audit, keeping the end in mind and getting that buy in from leaders. That’s huge. So, take that, run with it, be creative, and we’re so Thank you so much, Josh, for being on the show today.

 

Josh Olofson (Guest): Yeah. Thank you.

 

Matt & Crista Vance (Hosts): And everyone, tune in next time. I appreciate it. Thanks.