# The Art of Building Team Culture with Doug Camplejohn

Recent years have reshaped the way we think about the place where we spend most of our time: work. With it, team culture has become a hot topic of discussion.

But why is building team culture important for a business?

It boils down to one reason: productivity. A team that trusts each other, that works well together, and that believes in the company’s mission is a team that will perform well. In order to achieve increased productivity, leadership must adapt to new norms and be deliberate about how they form their team culture.

On this episode of Evolved Sales LIVE, host Jonathan Fischer sits down with [Doug Camplejohn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/camplejohn/), an accomplished tech executive and start-up investor, to delve into the secrets of creating a top-performing team through intentional team culture.

**Meet Doug:**

Doug Camplejohn is an exceptional tech entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience working at companies like LinkedIn, Microsoft, Salesforce, and others. Today, he's the founder, CEO, and Chief Fun Officer of [Airspeed](https://www.getairspeed.com/), a digital platform designed to connect and celebrate employees over Slack.

## Check out the transcription of this webinar episode below!

### Jonathan Fischer: 
Welcome back to Evolve Sales Leader. I'm Jonathan Fisher. Well, the success of any company is directly correlated to the effectiveness of its people that calls for teamwork. So how effective are your teams? No matter where you would score yourself, today's guest has some insights that'll help you level up your game when it comes to your people.

### Doug Camplejohn: 
Thank you. Great to be here.

### Jonathan Fischer: 
So what is it that makes you so fascinated with digital culture? And maybe you could give us a little bit more about your background before we jump into today's topic.

### Doug Camplejohn: 
Sure. I've always kind of been a culture junkie. So I started out my career as an electrical engineer at Apple. Obviously a great culture. So I started at Apple, there was a lot of just learning through osmosis there. So I joined a couple startups and watched how to do it and not do it, and then did a few of my own.

To me, it’s fascinating to see what works and what doesn't. Because work is so much a part of our life, my philosophy has always been let's have the most fun we possibly can doing it. And part of that is getting the right people, aligning them on the mission, and really building this trust layer.

### Jonathan Fischer:
And that trust layer is really, to me what culture is about, who you hire, who you fire, and how do you build that sense of connection.

### Doug Camplejohn:
I think everybody thought Covid was the invention of remote work. In fact, remote work has been around since work started. Covid just made us more sensitive to it. I think that when my last company was acquired by LinkedIn, I saw how deliberate the executive team was in cascading communications, so that they would actively engage employees in the right way.

### Jonathan Fischer:
There seems to have been a real flattening culturally in how we lead rather than a top-down notion of leadership, it's more about leading with.

### Doug Camplejohn:
I think there are a lot of people who were forced to embrace fully remote work, and there are a lot of people that wanted to kind of reign in control again.

### Jonathan Fischer:
What are some of the trends you're seeing out there? Do you think there is a new consensus arising among leadership?

### Doug Camplejohn:
I think that the pendulum is swinging, and we’re all figuring out what the middle looks like. I always ask, "If the office didn't exist, would we invent it?"

### Jonathan Fischer:
So how do you build teams today? What’s the state of the art?

### Doug Camplejohn:
We decided to take the money we’d normally spend in office space and put it into travel, once a quarter we put everybody on a plane and go somewhere fun. We are going to Vancouver next month. Those offsites are the opportunity to connect together.

### Jonathan Fischer:
So are there things that say, okay, we're remote but how do we facilitate these interactions?

### Doug Camplejohn:
At LinkedIn, we had something called