Matthew Smith of Relay Foods: Designing the Employee Experience

This interview is with the one-and-only Matthew Smith of Greenville, South Carolina. Matthew first reached out back in July when Kin launched, but we’ve been familiar with his work for far longer. Matthew embodies what we see as the complete designer; he gets well beyond visuals and digital interactions. He’s passionate about designing experiences, and lately he’s been focusing on the employee experience he and his coworkers have at Relay Foods, where he’s currently Art Director.

Who are you, what do you do, and what’s your role at Relay Foods?

I “do” a lot of things, but mostly I try to be a reasonable human being and keep a decent and colorful prayer life.  My personal life and my design life are congruent – they inform one another. The way I parent and the interfaces I design come from the same core beliefs and the same core hopes.

“What’s your role?” It’s hard for me to answer this question in some normal way – whatever that is. The best I can say is that currently I’m employed at Relay Foods to Art Direct. I get to work around the smartest and least self-important people I’ve ever known, and it’s one of the greatest privileges I’ve ever had. Not to mention we have an ambitious goal of being part of a movement of entrepreneurial businesses that aims to disrupt an entrenched food system that I think is killing us inside and out.

The Relay Foods team making a special delivery.

My job is to build and maintain a team of people to be focused on simplicity as a service. Relay Foods is a grocery store, but in truth you can feed yourself from the local QuickyMart. We don’t just want to feed you. We want to make our customers the heroes of the food movement, connecting them intimately to the producers that grow, butcher, bake and bring the local foods that heal and grow local economies. We want to make our customers heroes at home, as they are more able to give their family healthy foods affordably. This is as fun as it is impossibly challenging. I love it.

You’ve talked about designing the employee’s experience at Relay Foods. Can you share your vision, your thought process, and any immediate plans?

[MS] There are so many businessy things I could say here, but the thing that gets me to CoWork (most of my team works in a different city) in the morning is building a product and a service that gives people more time to be with their families by cutting grocery shopping time in half, and building a product that helps our customers feel smarter about the food they eat by being more transparent about all our foods—where they come from, who made them, how it affects our bodies—and how the hell to cook something weird like BokChoy. We’re serving people with our design, code, content, great ops, and love of incredible food.

The trick then, is how do I get this sincere feeling to be something that everyone at Relay feels, so that everyone at Relay is motivated by these realities and not just by a boss’ requirements or the paycheck at the end of the week. It’s hard but these are the things I’ve been working on to make that happen:

• Practice making the vision and goals clear to everyone. For Relay the thing I keep driving home is that “Simplicity is the service.” This informs all our decisions.
• Give people more opportunity to act on those goals. The only thing stopping them is lack of clarity and lack of competence, both can be assessed and remedied.
• Assess your team’s work and performance weekly and monthly, not daily. Allow time for mistakes and improvements, encourage critique by consensus on your team.
• Build a team and a culture that doesn’t need you to be there for it to work.

I’m currently obsessed with David Marquet’s book Turn This Ship Around, and Dan Pink’s book To Sell is Human. Both have shaped my thinking about company culture and leadership.

One of Relay’s many local farmers / producers preparing an order

What are some core principles a team should employ to ensure knowledge, culture, and camaraderie remain vital and accessible to everyone at a company as it grows?

[MS] I’d say:

• Collectively, everyone should be clear on what the customer should think, feel, and do. If they know that by heart, it answers 95% of all questions about how to handle a given task. It can solve arguments.
• If you hire Class A people, you can all respect each other and come to the table with something to learn. Stop fighting for pole position – that’s where the brand and your goals belong.
• Develop a culture of questions, instead of delegation. Learning over knowing.
• Use as many smiley faces and gifs as possible. Whenever you can, compliment someone, because you will most certainly have a moment in the future when you need to let them know they missed the mark.
• Communicate your ass off. Let people know what you’re doing, when you’re doing it, when you’ll be done, when you’re late, when you’re early. Knowledge in a growing company is powerful.

“For Relay the thing I keep driving home is that ‘Simplicity is the service.’ This informs all our decisions.”

My friend and our CEO at Relay Foods, Zach Buckner, loves to tell the anecdote about FedEx before they had shipping labels. Apparently they used to have obscene amounts of customer service calls daily because people wanted to know where their packages were. Packages may have been minutes away or may have been late, but customers didn’t know the difference – so they called. When FedEx introduced shipment tracking that you could look up online, it changed everything. The simple communication of where your package was allowed people to know how they should shape their day, whether to change their plans, and if a package was going to be early or late. Communication is key. I’d rather know bad news early, than no news at all and have to find it out for myself later on.

But don’t forget to play. I love to start meetings with bad jokes. For instance: What did the green grape say to the purple grape? “Breathe dammit, BREATHE!”

“Whenever you can, compliment someone, because you will most certainly have a moment in the future when you need to let them know they missed the mark.”