How to Create a Thriving Workplace—it’s not pizza parties or ping-pong tables.
In this episode of The Covi Way, host Dave Vint sits down with Teddie Linder, Covi’s VP of Business Operations, to talk about what really creates a thriving workplace—and it’s not pizza parties or ping-pong tables.
Teddie brings decades of experience shaping meaningful work environments and dives deep into how culture, clarity, and leadership drive employee engagement. From onboarding to feedback loops, strength-based leadership to radical candor, this conversation unpacks what employees actually need to feel valued and do their best work. It’s not about flashy perks—it’s about purpose, empowerment, and being seen.
You’ll hear how small changes in how we listen, coach, and support employees can build lasting trust, loyalty, and performance. Whether you’re leading a team or simply want to thrive in your role, this episode offers practical insights and powerful reminders that people—not perks—make workplaces great.
Episode Summary:
What makes employees actually want to stay, grow, and thrive at work? In this episode, COVI’s Teddie Linder joins Dave Vint to explore how purpose, culture, and intentional leadership—not perks—create engagement. From onboarding to feedback to StrengthFinder, they unpack what it really means to lead people well.
Key Quotes:
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“You can’t build great culture with perks—you build it with purpose.”
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“We don’t live in segments. If work isn’t fun, it won’t be meaningful.”
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“Employees see your company through a 15-inch screen. That experience matters.”
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“Being nice in the moment can be mean in the long run.”
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“The best leaders meet people where they are and build from there.”
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Links to The COVI Way Podcast
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Episode Transcript
Dave: Welcome to the COVI Way, the podcast where we break down the intersection of people and technology. Because IT isn’t just about fixing problems. It’s about enabling people to do their best work. I’m Dave Vint, CEO of COVI. And today we’re digging into work environments where employees actually want to be, where they feel valued and where they can do their best work. Joining me today is Teddie Linder, COVI’s VP of Business Operations.
Teddie has spent her career shaping cultures that aren’t just productive, but actually engaging. We’ll talk about what really makes employees tick, how great leaders bring people along for the ride, and why creating a workplace people love isn’t about perks, it’s about engagement.
Dave: Welcome Teddie, excited to have you on.
Teddie: Thanks, Dave. Been looking forward to having this conversation with you for a while now.
Dave: Yeah, we always have these great conversations about these topics, and I’m excited to share this.
Teddie: That’s fantastic.
Dave: All right, well let’s jump in with question number one. Let’s start with the big question. What do you think is the biggest myth when it comes to making employees happy at work?
Teddie: That is stuff. Stuff makes them happy. And that’s not the case. It’s, you know, everybody has a different equation. Each individual has a different equation on it’s like, and it’s going to be a combination of what goes on in their personal life, their finances, their family situation, what makes them happy as a person, you know, and what do they know what the purpose of what they’re doing is?
Dave: Yeah.
Teddie: If, if someone doesn’t know why they’re doing something, it’s very hard to get excited about it. And a good leader will bring that out. You know, part of it too is a lot of times organizations will spend an enormous amount of time on the mission statement. And it’s beautiful. It’s well crafted. It’s lovely. And it goes on the website or it goes on a plaque on the wall. And that’s the end.
Dave: That’s right.
Teddie: That’s right. What comes after that?
Dave: Yeah, that’s exactly right. What does come after that?
Teddie: You know, so do you mean to tell me, Dave, that if I don’t throw a pizza party, I might have a chance. Is that what you?
Dave: I do. Imagine that I thought the party would fix everything, fix everything.
Teddie: No, of course, we all know that’s not the case. It’s amazing how often organizations will choose to do that in of actual development of culture. Right.
Dave: Exactly. Because you never know. You got that one oddball that doesn’t like pizza. Right. And.
Teddie: So we have to find something that’s a little bit more deep.
Dave: That’s right.
Teddie: Yeah. You have to be able to delve into what people really care about in order to bring them along.
Dave: That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. So we know that certainly benefits play a part into that. We know that culture is everything. I want to take a step back and talk about the actual work that employees employees do on a daily basis. It reminds me of Marcus Buckingham’s research. He talks a lot about how what people really want at work is to be seen for their strengths in the workplace. We know Marcus Buckingham from Strengths Finder. Not everyone knows his name, but a lot of folks know that book and that research. Many of us have taken that test and are familiar with our top five. How do you see strengths based organizations and how do you see that actually playing out in the workplace today?
Teddie: Number one, not everybody has the same strengths. And so a good leader will, you know, as you said, use the strengths finder tool, use another tool to actually understand what each person’s strengths are. And the idea of it is that we need to match their strengths to the work. You can’t like pick the work and then tell them, you know, and a lot of times you have mismatches. And so, as you know, you know, coming into the organization, you know, just you know, 18 months ago, that it takes a while because you have to get to know people. And the tools are great. They’re really helpful. But it’s like that day to day interaction. You know, also from, you know, Marcus Buckingham is the idea of the daily check ins or the frequent check ins, the informal check ins. That’s when information, the real information is actually exchanged, in my opinion. You know, you find out that somebody really enjoys playing the guitar or into role-playing games. And it’s like, OK, what is it about that that turns them on? And is there a component of that in the daily work and projects? A lot of times, there is more than you think. You wouldn’t think role-playing games would be something that would come in. But we’ve seen it happen when we’ve had to understand the customer. So you have to get somebody to play the role of the customer and that number one, that’s fun, right? You can’t have, you know, if you don’t have fun, you know, why?
Dave: That’s right.
Teddie: Yeah. I know that we’re really passionate about that here.
Dave: Yeah. That if we’re not having fun anymore, then why are we doing this?
Teddie: Exactly. And we build that passion to a lot of what we do. You know, speaking to that point around culture and making things expected, modeling the behavior that you want to see to create that culture of fun and engagement where you’re enjoying being at work if you’re not seeing that in your leaders. So I agree with you. I definitely think it starts from the top and works its way down. And understanding those strengths for yourself and how things outside of work might hint at that I think are huge. I think sometimes when we’re thinking about these things like strengths and you know, disc profile and and what defines us and what we’re great at and where we have opportunities. I think sometimes we overthink it. I think that sometimes it is like about a very specific tangible thing instead of something more subtle. For example, the role that someone might play in the context of a meeting. Maybe someone’s come to the table with a topic and something that we need to draw out. Maybe someone has the role in that meeting of playing devil’s advocate or asking the hard question. That’s something that’s relatively simple, right? But you don’t necessarily understand that strength that someone may have unless you’ve gotten to know them in a broader context. Like you said, what are you doing outside of work? What are your other passions? Because if you go strictly based off of just like a disc profile or just strengths finder, some of that’s going to show. But if we start putting people in those boxes that directly, you might not pick up on that smallest of decisions. To put it in a different way, let’s say that you have someone on the team like yourself, like myself, that futuristic is number one in StrengthsFinder. That’s great. Okay, we should put Dave in visionary meetings. That’s good. You might not pick up on the strength that I also really love attention to detail and a really strong project management process. You’re not going to know it unless you know me outside of work and understand these are the things I love building motorcycles in my spare time. I love studying aviation in my spare time, things that are pretty detail heavy and that require a lot of tactile and a lot of pragmatic thinking as an example. Is there an example from your experience that resonates with that?
Teddie: Oh yeah, there’s several. One of the pieces is I’m a martial artist. Okay. And so I teach people how to do techniques. That’s very physical. It’s very tactile and you can’t do it. You can’t teach it unless you can do it. And that, believe it or not, lends itself to some pretty high level problem solving. Because I can look at a situation and say, OK, is there a way to do that with fewer steps? In another world, I did that by moving an entire production process to the actual printing press and had the person who was setting up a digital press actually do the forms. And that freed up my high level, you know, pre press artists to be able to do more complex things. And so they didn’t, you know, we improved our process and all I did was move a process from, from one place to another. So we cut short, we just, you know, just, just cut the process almost by two thirds and saved a ton of time and increase our production.
Dave: No more press downtime.
Teddie: Yeah, that’s huge.
Dave: Yeah.
Teddie: And so those kinds of things that problem solving is like, OK, I’ve got I’ve tried to do a technique that I’ve never done on somebody who’s six foot eight. How do I do that? How do I how do I apply those same principles? And it’s, you know, number one, it’s fun because, you know, who doesn’t like taking down a six foot eight guy?
Dave: Indeed.
Teddie: And but it but it also informs all aspects of your life. It’d be, you know, that’s a great point that you just brought up. It’s like, we don’t live our lives in little segments of work and home and fun. We live our lives. And so if, you know, we are segmenting too much, then work is going to probably be the boring part. Because if it’s work, it can’t be fun, right? Well, who says? Who says, why can’t we sit there and have a robust conversation about a hard problem and then get ridiculous about it, start laughing. And some of the best ideas come out of those type of things. This is like, well, why can’t we just throw all their computers away? It’s like, hmm, maybe not a great idea, what would that accomplish? Well, we wouldn’t have to deal with Windows 7 anymore.
Dave: Yeah. And so some of those things, the most ridiculous things when you you when you take all of the guardrails off and just say, OK, there’s no bad ideas throughout throughout everything that’s that’s that’s, you know, absolutely ridiculous and extreme. And let’s see what see what we can come up with. And some of the best things that we’ve come up with comes out of discussions like that. Teddie, as our VP of business operations, part of what you do here is in our HR space. In fact, a lot of what you do in your current role is in our HR space. What do you think it means for an employee to be fulfilled at work?
Teddie: It means that we see them as a person. We don’t just see them as somebody who’s filling a slot on our org chart. So we bring somebody in and for the first time we want them to be able to know that we care. So we always do our human resources onboarding at least as close as we can, a couple of weeks before they actually start. We actually get a little bio from them so that we know. You know, put that out on our team’s channel on their first day so that everybody can chime in and say, hi. We encourage them to introduce themselves. And so that starts the process of them, you know, establishing their identity in the organization. And it gives, it puts the individual in charge of that. It doesn’t put me in charge of it or you in charge of it. It puts them in charge of it. They can reveal what what’s important to them, or they can choose to reveal something and not reveal other things. And how powerful is that? It’s just like, oh, OK, I get to say what’s important. They don’t get the two lines that they pulled randomly off my resume and stick it in Teams. They’re asking me to do that. Things like we also invite people to have input, new hires, to have input into the equipment that they’re going to use.
Dave: Being able to have a choice, it’s a huge piece of empowerment. And I think that that is really under, under, not understood well in the workplace. Okay. Because sometimes we’re like, was like, okay, got to get it done, got to get it done, got to get it done. And the person gets lost in that. that, that it starts, it starts there.
Teddie: By giving them choices and opportunities to exert their personhood early on in the relationship with your organization.
Dave: Got it. So it all starts there.
Teddie: It all starts there. It starts from the, it actually starts in the interview process. It can’t start early enough, honestly. Okay. And, and I know that you do this with, you know, with interviews. It’s like, what are, what are two things that you do, you know, during the interview process that encourages you know, you know, the perspective employee to voice their own personality.
Dave: Well, first and foremost, we make sure at COVI that our interview process is as consistent as it can be across the board. We want to make sure that it’s as fair and and we’ve removed as many chances of discriminatory decisions as possible. A phrase that we like to use at COVI a lot is an environment where it’s easy to make right choices, remove friction from some of those negative things and accelerate everything that we can, right? But once we’ve started with that clean slate, we have that standardized interview guide. I really like to ask questions to explore and get to know. And while a lot of folks like to lean into an interview that is going to be as aggressive and cut and dry as possible, it’s been my experience from the hospitality industry and other places that an interview that is as comfortable as possible while still asking difficult questions of pulling the thread actually reveals more about the candidate.
Teddie: Exactly. Exactly. And I’ve had the same experience. The best candidates are the ones that I’ve been able to engage with on a personal level during the interview. Not to be creepy about it or anything, but to actually just get to know the person and find out if, do I have anything in common with them? And then we can explore those. And then we could actually bring that back to how it relates to the job. And that tells you a lot about right fit.
Dave: That ability to connect during the interview process, we’re looking for that, especially in those who have extra strength in the technical, right? To be able to balance those two skill sets. Another big thing that we like to explore in our recent revision in our interview process, I love to ask the question, What projects are you working on? For one thing, it tells you a lot about a passion area and you get to see some of that passion come out, which is a lot of fun. I think it also reveals a lot about their ability to think creatively and organize and sell you on an idea in many cases. And like you said, it gives us a chance to connect and it gives that candidate a chance to have an individual, gives that candidate a chance to have an individual personality amongst the group from day one. And should they be selected for the role, they get to carry that same story all of the way in. And from day one, they are an individual, to your point.
Teddie: Yeah. And from the organizational standpoint, why is that important? Because it’s like, should you just be asking the questions about what are your strengths and weaknesses?
Dave: It just sets the tone for the entire relationship between the individual and the organization because we’re not.
Teddie: Yeah, that’s good.
Dave: You know what?
Teddie: Yeah, we are not a corporation. A corporation is nothing. A corporation is a piece of paper that you file with the state. The company, and early on with my technical guys when we were really small. I said, guys, we’re a company. It’s like the company of the ring. It’s the fellowship of the ring. So we have a group of people and we’re setting off on a quest. And our quest is to help individuals with their technology have a little fun and make some money while we’re at it, make a living while we’re at it. And so that’s the whole idea is that we’re a company of individuals. You got the hobbits, you got the elves, you got your men.
Dave: And my axe. That’s the.
Teddie: And the so the idea is that we’re not all the same people. We’re not all cogs and machine. You know, and so being able to bring those stuff out and be a that’s the company. You know, that’s the definition that I kind of like of what a company is.
Dave: I love that.
Teddie: Yeah. And and and so what that does is makes that breeds loyalty on a level that’s impossible to deny. I mean, the fact that we have a rare turnover rate, okay? And that’s very, very low.
Dave: Almost, it’s unheard of.
Teddie: Exactly. Exactly. So, you know, and you know, our industry, the technology industry is a stressful industry. So we’ve got a group of people who hang out year after year in a stressful job. Why? Well, you got to look someplace else. It’s not, it’s not the day to day, you know, because, you know, customers are going to have problems and they’re going to have problems no matter where you work. But what’s going on? It’s, you know, we, we see and we hear them.
Dave: Yeah. That’s huge.
Teddie: Yeah. That’s huge.
Dave: Yeah.
Teddie: And we have, um, and being able to contribute, you know, um, the, you know, other, you know, data in the space talks about that, you know, a happy employee is seen as valued, you know, and what makes them feel valued. Number one, this idea of being seen and heard. Well, when they’re not a new person anymore, and all of a sudden they’re into the grind and they see something, do we have, are we, you know, have we set up and nurtured and reinforced the safe space to actually speak and put ideas out amongst us all. And what does that look like? So the safe space, and it’s amazing because we’ve had a couple of people that you know of that used to be shy, never would speak up in a group, and now are very forward. And they want to put out their ideas because we have set up a safe place for them to do that. And part of it is simply that they can be heard. We are allowing them to be heard. And sometimes we’ve had to do some training. We’ve had to do some behavioral training now, haven’t we?
Dave: That’s absolutely right.
Teddie: That’s right.
Dave: And it’s part of the skill set. It’s part of the learning. And so one of the learnings of our organization is that, yeah, listen. Listen to other people. And number one, you might learn something. And number two, it just builds that idea of we’re all contributors to our mission. You know, at Harvard, they talk a lot about how the best ideas are always going to come from the ground floor and that as managers, if we’re not walking the shop floor, so to speak, we’re missing out on all kinds of potential. It’s one thing to understand how things are working top down but it’s another thing to see them from the ground up.
Teddie: Oh, yeah. The the the makers of, you know, the lean, you know, you know, space, you know, famously the Toyota production system. OK, TPS and would would have their their managers and they would take them out to the production floor at a Toyota plant and they would have these circles drawn on the concrete of the floor. And that was the manager’s spot. They had to stand in that spot. And they had to stand in that spot. Now, I’m not a proponent of this exact methodology, just to be clear. But their job was to watch. They weren’t supposed to talk to anybody. They weren’t supposed to correct anybody. They weren’t supposed to coach anybody. Their job was to watch. And then their supervisor, manager, officer, after their time in the circle, would ask them, What did you see? And the expectation was that they were going to come back and say, this process is clunky and is inefficient. And if we did x, y, and z, we could improve that. Now, to be clear, this is not necessarily people focused on this. But the idea was that they were taught to watch. What can you see? And that was you know, that’s really important. So many times we are, we have got, you know, confirmation bias on a very high level. We think we know what’s going on. And so therefore, you know, that’s the way it is, but we don’t, we don’t know what goes on and we have to listen to the folks that are on the phone with the customer. You know, we have to listen to the folks that are struggling because they can’t get into something that they need to get into rather often and it always slows them down. And so if we don’t, it’s not a good place.
Dave: You know, in the context of company culture and employee empowerment, I think we often forget the role that technology has in a lot of these things. Daily hangups that create a lot of friction that may not be well understood. Silly things like, oh, I didn’t know that you have to restart your computer twice every day for you to be productive. I didn’t know that when you go to type an email, Outlook tends to restart, or you have to create a calendar appointment a few times. I don’t think it’s well understood how important that feedback is in the context of technology, and how much those little frustrations add up to creating that lack of engagement or lack of satisfaction within the workday. I think it’s a pretty significant thing.
Teddie: I think it is too. I mean, you know, the most recent iOS update, I spent an hour trying to get my email on my phone back to where I wanted it because it had been improved and I really didn’t want it improved. I was perfectly happy with it. So
Dave: That’s right.
Teddie: So yes, it was on the weekend. Yes, it was my personal time, but I still spent an hour, you know, trying to get those stupid icons off of every one of my messages.
Dave: That’s right. We know that change management isn’t always a strength of technology providers, much less platforms as large as that. Right?
Teddie: Right. That’s a lot of stakeholders to manage in the world out of OS change.
Dave: Yeah. And so being able to have tools, and I think just in the last year, we’ve developed a couple of places where you know, our staff can go on to a particular teams channel and say, hey, I’m having this problem. Is anybody else having this problem? And what did you do about it? And that, you know, basically feedback among peers is really important. It really kind of saves us time. It mobilizes the power of the entire group to solve problems.
Teddie: Yeah, absolutely. Let’s take a step back. Let’s talk a little bit more about culture and the part that leadership plays. We’ve touched on a couple of different things today. One of them is employee feedback. We’ve talked a little bit about technology, what it means to create employee engagement and so on and so forth. What it means to have value at work. We know that all of this is set by the leader. You know leaders set the tone, leaders set the example. What do you think separates great leaders from just managers when it comes to engagement.
Dave: We’ll go back to Buckingham, the idea of the flexibility. Leadership is not a one size fits all type of operation. You can’t decide, okay, this is how I’m going to lead and every person is going to, you know, You must comply. But not every person has got to resonate with that. So making sure that you can reach people and taking the time to actually engage with individuals where they’re at, okay, and find out what’s going on. In one of my past lives, I led a team of about a dozen people. And when somebody went on vacation, I would just sit in their chair.
Teddie: Figuratively, most of them had uncomfortable chairs.
Dave: The idea was that I took on their workload or a good chunk of their workload while they were gone. And I discovered so many things about ways to improve. And when the individual come back, we just have a conversation. Was like, hey, this came up. How do you normally deal with this?
Teddie: So meeting them, they were like, well, I just thought that that was the way it had to be. I was like, well, not really. Why don’t you and I work together and see if we could make this better?
Dave: So that’s a form of leadership. The other thing too is not being afraid to be very candid and say, listen, you have to be able to honestly tell somebody when they’re not doing well.
Teddie: You and I have had this conversation before. If we’re going on and on, they’ve gotten OK appraisals and everything, and all of sudden we come in and they’re just like, well, you’re not doing these 13 things correctly. I’ve got to kill myself on this mic. I’m going to put it in Armbar. I am.
Dave: That’s right. You’re not doing these 13 things right. And they’re like, what?
Teddie: That’s right. So what did this happen?
Dave: I know both of us are huge, huge fans of the book, Radical Candor.
Teddie: Yes.
Dave: And the concept of ruinous empathy, which is to say that it may seem like the nice thing in the moment to be soft on a review or to hold back on expressing some truth saying, yeah, it’s really not that bad. But then as illustrated in one of the first examples of the book, you will get 10 years in and you’re letting someone go because they’re not fulfilling one of the core tenets of the role. Right. And why didn’t you tell them 10 years ago? They would have fixed it. Right. But because you wanted to be nice, you were actually mean in the long run.
Teddie: Right. And it’s, you know, we’ve we’ve got examples real world. Are real world examples of, you know, doing that. And the person responded in a quite remarkable manner and came around, but you know, they weren’t happy to begin with. But at the same time, it was the best thing for them, right? You have to tell people what is going on or else you not, it’s not fair. It’s flat not fair.
Dave: Not fair to anybody.
Teddie: No, the organization suffers because they’ve got a low performing person. The person suffers because, you know, they don’t know that they’re low performing. It’s the whole thing. Just like, I don’t tell you what you’re supposed to be doing, how are you supposed to know?
Dave: That’s right. That’s right. It’s common sense. And we know that part of that is being prepared to share that feedback. Part of it is actually being available enough for that feedback to happen or for you to see when something is off. And that goes back to our point around walking the shop floor and actually being in a place where you can see it. Maybe that looks like stepping into the role and shadowing from time to time so you actually understand your employees’ experiences. All of these come together to be able to provide that actual, accurate, usable feedback. But more importantly, I believe, asking the right questions of the folks that are working for you so that they have the chance to come to those conclusions on their own and or that they have that sense of ownership. So if we start to tie up a lot of this conversation, you know, into a box with a nice little bow, I personally feel that employee fulfillment and employee engagement comes down to being recognized for your strengths, being recognized as an individual, knowing that other people know what you are great at, what you are exceptional at, having the chance to receive actionable feedback and that your role in the organization is understood. And finally coming back, knowing that you’re being part of an organization where your feedback is going to be valued. Not just because you give feedback and your team’s going to take it seriously, but that you are given that opportunity to provide that feedback on a regular basis and that your team around you is hungry for it and humble for it and eager to learn from your experiences. Is there anything else you would add to that list based off what we talked about today? Going along with that in terms of culture.
Teddie: Is some basic skills training, which sounds like a big fancy thing, but it really is. It’s modeling listening. It’s modeling active listening, where you’re actually giving feedback that shows that you understood and heard what the other individual said. And then creating actions when the employee or the staff member puts forward an idea, we should make be making sure from the organizational end of things that we are acting upon that information. Even if we don’t end up implementing anything, it shows that we’re hearing that. And it shows that, you know, and that, that matters, that matters because then you get more and you know, the more feedback we get, the more ideas that we get, the stronger that will be and we’ll be able to make those improvements.
Dave: So obviously talking about something like employee engagement and someone having value at work is a much broader subject than what can happen on a 20 minute podcast.
Teddie: Sure.
Dave: But I love that these are some of our favorites as we have worked to continue to maintain and grow COVI’s culture year to year. As a couple of nuggets for the audience today, there are a handful of things that our best practices that we follow here at COVI beyond what we’ve talked about today. The first thing, first and foremost, is that employees have clear expectations. What is actually expected of me and what does success look like? Item number two, how does my work contribute to the bigger picture? What does this actually mean and why does my work matter? And point number three, how do I grow? A lot of folks look at that as how do I grow inside of the company? How do I grow in terms of job title and why that? Certainly that matters. I think it’s a little bit broader than that. It’s bigger than that. It’s how do I grow as an individual? Not everyone is chasing the corner office. We all know this. I believe that most people do want to improve themselves. And maybe that just means I want to have better conversations with my coworkers. So again, we’ve talked a lot about so many things today, so many great topics, things to explore. We hope you enjoyed our time with us and looking forward to chatting with you next time. Until then, make it a great day.
