Giving workers 'wellness days' to recharge is the key to driving innovation at GoDaddy, top executive says

• GoDaddy's approach to personal time off has been a key driver in inspiring innovation.
• The president of US independents, Gourav Pani, says regular wellness days are key to experimentation.
• Insider spoke to Pani about how the company is fostering an environment conducive to ideation.

When it comes to driving innovation, GoDaddy's president of US independents Gourav Pani said the company's approach to personal time off has been the cornerstone of its success.

As a website hosting site and broader tech company, GoDaddy is constantly in search of new ways to foster innovation.

GoDaddy's tech team takes a different approach to the outdated mantra "move fast and break things." The company's strategy is more calculated and is rooted in experimentation, Pani said. GoDaddy developed a formal, company-wide system of experimentation which now drives up to 120 experiments per month.

Pani told Insider the secret to that success has been the company's wellness days. While GoDaddy provides its employees with unlimited paid time off, over the last year, regular wellness days were added and have led to employees showing up to work more refreshed and ready to present new solutions and ideas, per Pani.

Insider talked to Pani about what makes wellness days so special and how they're driving a culture of innovation within the company.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Would you explain how the company uses experimentation to drive innovation?

If we look at the foundation of who we are as a company and what we believe in, we are all about empowering every single entrepreneur in the world — no matter their age, race, gender, or socioeconomic background — to pursue an independent venture. So everyone in the company is wired to see our purpose here to enable anyone to be successful. So you take that and extrapolate it to the team and say, "Anyone can come up with an idea."

What do you do to actually make your ideas real? We build a framework to make that happen. You come up with an idea based on observations, you create a hypothesis based on those observations, and then you run a test. So it all starts with empowering people to take their enablement seriously — and that framework persists throughout the company.

We share our experiments in a Slack channel. Our CEO looks through all those experiments. I probably comment on about 80% of experiments. So there's a lot of direct engagement with the people who are setting up the experiments and running [them], and there's a lot of questioning and answering happening. It encourages people to embrace that culture.

What's an example of an employee at GoDaddy using observations to drive experimentation? What was the ultimate outcome?  

In our June experiment showcase, we featured 12 experiments ranging from a simplified search on mobile devices to the launch of our AU domain. One specific "Do no harm" experiment proposed by a product manager was all about removing the COVID-19 response widget in our website product. This experiment didn't work, as we found that customers could still be feeling the effects of COVID-19 and want our help.

As far as GoDaddy's philosophy pertaining to PTO, how are you thinking about that, especially with regard to driving innovation?

We have a concept of "wellness days." We experimented this year and we got feedback that led to results for the second half of the year. We have a hypothesis that if we had more long weekends, then our employees would be happier. So we actually planned on having a wellness day every month of the year when there wasn't a long weekend.

In July, for instance, there is a long weekend with July 4, June had Juneteenth, and May has Memorial Day. But in April we didn't have a holiday, so we planned a wellness day to make sure there was at least one long weekend for everyone in the company. We've gotten incredible feedback from the employees that really appreciate it being introduced.

Can you talk about how you found that additional time off to be beneficial in terms of driving ideas among team members?

It created time and space for our teammates to think and take care of themselves. At GoDaddy, one of our values is living passionately. We believe that to truly take care of our customers, we begin by taking care of ourselves. Living a life of meaning and personal fulfillment enables us to be at the top of our game. One item to note, this is a foundational value and is not used in hiring, performance reviews, or promotions.

How do you analyze the success of these initiatives?

There's always the live feedback on Slack and employee channels. They can ask questions and have their peers respond back to them. You have the senior executives responding to questions, so it's a constant feedback loop there.

I'll give an example. When we did these wellness days, the chief people officer was tracking how many responses she had received from different pockets of the company. She was looking into the frequency. She was looking into the time from when she announced to how long it took to hear back. Is the message getting across to the team? Because we used both email and Slack, which mode worked better?

The feedback on Slack came back better versus email. So obviously, we saw that as a better mode to communicate to our employees. Also Slack gave people the ability to respond to the message in the private. So those are the types of things that she's done in this case.

We also have regular town halls, and I personally run "Ask Me Anything" (AMA) sessions. And because I have teams spread out around the world, I'll typically have a session with each team that is relevant to their time zone. So let's say there's a team in Melbourne, Australia. I'll have the meeting as close to their regular business hours as possible. And then the same thing with another team in South Africa. So no single location has a disadvantage from the kinds of perspectives. These are some of the patterns that make it possible.