If you're looking to invest in companies that are succeeding in a challenging workforce environment amid The Great Resignation, you don't have to look far. In this segment of Backstage Pass, recorded on Nov. 5, Fool contributors Toby Bordelon and Rachel Warren discuss a household-name company that is thriving in the age of flex, hybrid, and remote work.
Toby Bordelon: The market is doing well, but not all companies are doing well, and we're not talking just financially here. Electric truck maker Rivian, competing with Tesla and Ford in the truck market.
They got a car coming out soon, but they're having problems. A former vice president is suing the company for discrimination. She is accusing them of a toxic bro culture that marginalizes women. I feel like I have heard this before recently.
That's a real damn shame because I feel like we should not be hearing this at all in 2021. I want to know what you guys think. Is a company culture important to you in considering an investment generally? Why and why not?
Obviously, Rivian is having issues, so tell us about one company whose culture you do admire. Let's start with you, Rachel.
Rachel Warren: I hate hearing these kinds of stories nowadays. But I don't think this is something that is anywhere close to being removed from all our company cultures as much as we would wish it to be so. I do think it absolutely matters.
Company culture is very important. It's very important to the health of a business. As an investor and a long-term investor looking at buying and holding shares of great companies for a long time, anything that contributes to the underlying health of the business should be of interest to you, and company culture is definitely one of them.
I'm of the opinion that a company can't really succeed or reach its full potential over the long term if it continues to uphold the toxic company culture, and beyond the balance sheet and business fundamentals that you absolutely should look out when you're evaluating an investment.
I think a company culture is absolutely something else that you should be looking at when you're planning to buy and hold a stock for many years at a time. I think especially now we're in an environment what's being called The Great Resignation.
I think companies are seeing more and more of the impact of whatever the demands that they are not able to meet for their workers, whether it'd be a toxic culture, inadequate pay benefits, whatever the case may be, that is actually starting to have a real impact on many companies' top and bottom line.
Even just from a business perspective, it pays to continue working on and improving your company culture. I was thinking about this question: What's the company culture I admire?
I don't think any company is perfect. The company I'm about to talk about, they've had their fair share of issues with leadership in the past. But I'm going to be talking about Twitter (TWTR +0.00%).
I know they've made headlines over the years, some shake-up with management, trying to bring in new guys to hone down their company culture and make it a more positive environment. But I do think they have made some really positive strides that are worth pointing out in recent years. Twitter became one of the first companies to make that permanent shift to remote work.
According to management, it was a two-year project wherein they were essentially transitioning the company to remote work, and that was accelerated by the pandemic. There's this interesting website called Comparably. I might be saying it wrong.
But essentially, you can look up different companies. It's like Glassdoor, and employees can go on there and answer questions about the company. There are a lot of questions and answers specifically about Twitter.
One of the things that caught my attention there was, there was this question of how's work-life balance at Twitter? There were these responses of amazing, specifically talking about vacation time and parental leave. Twitter is one of those companies that I believe for almost all of their employees regardless of tenure, they have this unlimited PTO [paid time off] policy. That's a pretty big draw. Then of course now, they're, as far as I know, fully remote, which is also a huge plus for workers nowadays.
I think that goes a very long way to contributing to a positive working environment when you know that there's no pressure on you. If you're not feeling well, you can take that time because you're not maybe only working with a week or two. Then fully remote as more and more companies are doing that. But those were a couple of things I saw that I was like, well, I commend Twitter that they've done that in this very much fast-changing work environment.
