Totem is making sure work, and our relationship to it, changes forever

Totem is similar to Slack or Teams but focuses on building culture instead of communication, writes Martin Friel

Since Marcus Thornley launched the app in 2016, it has worked with John Lewis and Tottenham Hotspur (Totem)

We are told the way we work has likely changed forever. But the truth is, nobody really knows if that’s true or whether we will gradually slip back into old habits.

But while we wait to see how it all plays out, Marcus Thornley, founder of a business culture app called Totem, is already working away to ensure that work, and our engagement with it, changes forever.

“We need to ask what work really means. We inherited the current model from our parents, but we’ve never really questioned the format,” says Thornley.

But that is exactly what he has done, and his answer to the question is Totem. Its approach is similar to other workforce engagement apps such as Slack and Teams but differs in the sense that it is focused on culture rather than communication.

“What we are trying to do is reduce the distance between the top and bottom of the pyramid [at work],” says Thornley.

“We have a belief that work can be more than just transactional but for the vast majority of people it is. It needs to be more than that. Humans search for meaning so using vast amounts of your waking hours in a transactional relationship is really disappointing. I don’t think it allows people to really fulfil their potential.”

In the future, many people won’t join a company unless they are convinced the culture is right for them which would have been a strange conversation for my father or grandfather to have had

It appears he is not the only one to feel that way. Since the app launched in 2016, it has attracted big names such as John Lewis, Tottenham Hotspur, the Hakkasan restaurant group, Leeds Building Society and financial firm, Mercer.

While these organisations came on board pre-pandemic, it feels like Totem is designed for a post-pandemic working world, helping companies make and maintain connections across the business, regardless of where their employees are located.

But the ambition goes deeper than simply connecting people. For Thornley, it’s all about culture and the role of leaders in the future.

“Things such as management visibility, being answerable and recognition being fairly distributed have always been important to us. But all those things have become even more important since we lost the office,” he says.

As has culture.

“In the future, many people won’t join a company unless they are convinced the culture is right for them which would have been a strange conversation for my father or grandfather to have had.

“In most companies, culture is driven downwards but it needs to be owned by everyone. So, on Totem, anyone in the business can recognise anyone else in real time and everyone in the team can see that recognition. Recognition is owned by power, the boss, in the old model. In the Totem environment everyone is empowered to recognise others.”

Thornley believes that authentic work cultures must be owned by the employees (Totem)

The desire to flatten the hierarchy within companies lies at the heart of what Thornley is trying to do. He believes that the only authentic cultures, ones that will stick and deliver the best outcomes, are “owned” by employees. Which is why the app is designed to put the power of conversations, interactions and engagement in the hands of employees, rather than the business.

He admits that this is a difficult leap for some companies to take but he is adamant they will have to take it eventually, in some form or other, if they are to survive: “I think it is going to be increasingly hard for companies that won’t work this way.”

The features of the app have a lot in common with well-established social media platforms such as Reddit, Instagram and LinkedIn with users able to start and join groups on a variety of topics and find their own team replicated within the app. All of this creates a personalised newsfeed for users to scroll through, pulling together all the things that matter to them both inside and outside of work.

While traditional internal communications can be uploaded and shared within the app, it is not designed to replace intranets or more traditional channels: “If Totem was purely a vehicle for the internal comms team to push out info, it wouldn’t be used.”

Rather, it is designed to create a sense of community among the workforce by encouraging users to create, share and comment on content across the business in much the same way they would on external social media platforms. So much so, that Thornley has found that employees use it well outside of the confines of work which, he believes, bodes well for their employers.

Annual employee surveys are bad data. Imagine you are the financial director of a company and twice a year you give a snapshot of the accounts

“The peak day of Totem usage is Christmas Day which tells me that as humans we yearn for social connection, belonging and being part of something bigger,” he says.

“And if work can harness that in an honest way, there is the potential to make employees happier and more connected which has a net benefit for the business.”

Totem is more than a social media tool designed for business. One of its key features is that businesses can monitor sentiment by morale, candour (how willing people are to speak out) and engagement. These measurements are done in real time which, Thornley believes, brings HR and people management up to date with every other function in a business.

“Annual employee surveys are bad data. Imagine you are the financial director of a company and twice a year you give a snapshot of the accounts. No one else could run their part of the business like that but that is essentially what HR has been asked to do,” he says.

“Now should be a golden time for HR as the pandemic has proven that when you have stripped everything out, it’s not the ping pong table and coffee that matters, it’s the people. They are the reason companies have remained afloat.”

And those people, given free rein to express themselves and communicate and engage as they see fit outside of the more formal confines of email and intranet message boards, are perhaps starting to change the way we work.

The ways in which they can personalise their profile on Totem, showing various facets of their personality plus the fact that it feels like a social media app, allows people to show more of themselves and for others to see more of them and, perhaps, to feel more comfortable about being themselves at work.

There has been much said about how work is penetrating our personal lives but if Totem is a sign of things to come, it feels that the opposite might be the case. It could be that the social experiment we have all been living through will actually change the way we behave at work, not the other way around.