Built on Trust

Welcome to Rework, a podcast by thirty seven Signals about the better way to work and run your business. I'm Kimberly Rhodes from the thirty seven Signals team joined by thirty seven Signals cofounder and CTO David Heinemeier Hanssen. This week, we're talking about building a high trust organization. The reason this came up is because we constantly have customers asking us how they can prevent people from doing things in Basecamp. Like, anyone can delete a task or archive a file. Our answer is always like, well, we just have a very trusting organization. I don't think that is by chance. I think that's been built over the years. So, David, let's talk about that a little bit. I mean, I don't know if you've intentionally you and Jason have built that kind of trust within the organization, but it's what we always tell people. We just are very trusting. I think the trust though is partly, consequence of the kind of culture and the kind of hiring that we do. And I think we've ended up with over twenty years of having a lot of people through the company. Some have worked for us for a short amount of time, some work for a long amount of time. But the kind of catastrophic anecdotes that I can pull on when we have extended too much trust and it went wrong, it's a really short list. It's not zero. Like, there's always the opportunity that you just you're wrong about someone, and they did not, for whatever reason, deserve the trust that you extended to them. But But I think what's key here is to divide the calamities that could possibly occur if someone you trust prove out not to be worthy of that trust. There are certain aspects of the business where the trust really is truly critical, and that's around areas like data access. Right. So when it comes to accessing customer data, especially on something like, Hey, where you're dealing with personal emails, we actually have a multilayered step process that communicates that, you know what, we may trust you, but this is so critical and this is so important that even our most trusted employees still have to go through quite a few steps. So for example, when someone is investigating a issue with, hey, and emails aren't being delivered or there's something else wrong, they usually have to go in and look at the database. But right from the get go, we knew that if the staff we had had full access to the data and just through their normal course of business, their normal investigations, their normal help of customers, were exposed directly to emails and the subjects and the rest of it, that wasn't gonna be something we'd be comfortable telling customers. In fact, it goes further back than that. When we were building HEY, I was trying to get my wife to use it because I thought, like, hey. You write …