Mentoring and Subtle Bias

A while back, I was speaking to an executive about mentoring opportunities for less experienced managers. This executive felt passionate about creating more opportunities for people to learn and grow, particularly women who want to move up in their careers and tend to get less organic coaching. He spoke about a successful program he had seen at has past workplace.

Monthly, executives would pull employee names out of a jar and take that person out to chat. This paired strong performers with access to a diverse set of executives (and potential mentors). People across the organization really looked forwards to the program. Sounds great, right?! As I dug deeper into how it worked from there, this executive casually commented that he’d take male coworkers out for a beer after work and women out for a coffee to talk career and development.

I wasn’t sure why initially it felt a little bit off to me, but later I understood: the difference between the experience based on gender. I imagine this bias can play out in other ways, too. Let’s get real – I like going for beers after work just as much as my male coworkers. Plus there’s a level of candor, access, and bonding that can happen over a drink that rarely happens over a coffee (in my experience). It’s the same with hitting the golf course or catching a game.

Listen, I’m not judging. It comes from a good place of wanting to make sure nobody feels uncomfortable – a female employee, significant others, whatever. As a gay woman in a people-related function, I can totally relate. I am hyper aware of how my friendliness, teasing, and sarcasm are interpreted by both my male and female coworkers. My intent is to be accessible and open; I never want to make someone uncomfortable or wonder if it’s coming from the wrong place.

Having this conversation made me wonder if I’m exerting the same bias and not affording people the same opportunities based on my sensitivity to others’ perceptions. The truth is, I’m not sure but I want to make sure I’m not in the future. So how can we get better? I think it comes down to asking yourself two questions:

• What are you comfortable doing for everyone?
• What could other people (regardless of circumstance) be uncomfortable with?

Once you know that, consider offering the same “safe” option to everyone – for example, coffee across the board. Alternatively, offer an option for people to choose between – something you are comfortable with and something you think everyone would be comfortable doing. For example, I could offer to take a less experienced coworker out for a beer or lunch – their choice. Then give of yourself as best you can.

Just remember to be cognizant that you are offering the same opportunities across the board to new potential mentees. As time passes, you’ll likely develop closer relationships with certain people and give more of yourself to them. I’d only encourage you to be vigilant about starting from the same place for all.

 

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Picking a tool or vendor

Over the years, I’ve realized just how much my views on the ideal workplace impact how I select the vendors I work with. I remember selecting one of my first vendors at my last job and the CEO (a hugely-influential mentor of mine) suggesting I add a few questions to my vetting process. They stick with me today.

How big is the company? How quickly are they growing? There’s something to be said for selecting a vendor who is facing the same challenges you are as a business. For us, it was being a budget-conscious start-up trying to scale our team and culture quickly. I always felt just a bit better when working with a company our size or a little larger who had been through some of the challenges. It meant that any employee I spoke to – from sales-to-success-to-support had likely faced the same challenges our sales, success and support teams did. Their managers had the same demands. I just felt some level of comfort knowing my vendor knew my pain points really well.

How many customers do you have? What’s your target market? I tend to like start-ups with a solid base of customers, but not so many that I worry that once the sale is closed, they’ll vanish into the abyss and we’ll be up a creek for implementation and support. I also like to know that we’re in the market they are targeting or aiming towards – I don’t want to enter a relationship with a company if they are looking to move upstream from where I see my company in the near-future. If they are looking to really crush the market I’m in, I’m more likely to get service and see features related to my challenges.

Talk to me about your culture? What types of companies choose you? This is concert with me doing some research on my own about a company’s culture and values. I want to work with companies that care about creating a great experience for their employees, because I think it’ll mean better service for me and a product built to help me support an amazing culture. It cuts again to: “How can you serve me well if we’re trying to solve different problems or don’t align philosophically?”

I still look at tablestakes things like pricing and features, but with so many amazing HR Tech solutions on the market, I try to focus in on those supporting a similar purpose. I’m in the midst of selecting a performance management tool. There are dozens of solid options out there – each solving the problem a little bit differently and all potentially presenting a ton of value to my organization. The leading candidate, though, has about 150 clients and their content is really focused on culture more than performance management. Their tool does really neat things on its own, but it sure is reassuring to know that they are thinking about it as a solution not just to help with comp reviews or exiting people, but as a key component to building a high-performing culture.

 

Forget what HR tells you to do … do what works for your team.

Let me back it up a little bit. I’m not saying to not follow whatever performance management process your company has in place – we’ve worked really hard to put something in place as a baseline to ensure people are getting feedback in some scaleable format. I’m also not saying to not listen to HR’s coaching – many of us geek out about this sort of thing and love to help you become more effective at delivering feedback. I am saying not to let yourself be limited by whatever system is in place – see at as a framework to build off of.

We need to do a reboot of performance management at my current company, so I’ve been reading up a bit, studying new tools and thinking about how to best combine simplicity, regularity and efficacy in a scaleable system, while leaving room for teams to do what works best for them. Here are some key components for any manager thinking about performance management.

Regular feedback. I meet with everyone on my team once per week. Each person fills me in on anything they need help with, talks about things they have accomplished and asks any questions they have for me. I save the end of our time to ask questions about how they’ve taken on a project, why they’ve made the the decisions they have, or how well something went. Then I provide my feedback on anything that jumps to mind based on the prior week. Rather than forced feedback covering a long period of time, it’s timely little bits of highly-specific feedback (at least, that’s the goal … I have off weeks).

Career planning. Several times a year, an informal check-in on career goals is helpful (and greatly appreciated). Talk about their big picture goals; don’t dance around the fact (or get angry with the realization) that they likely won’t be with you and your company for forever; figure out the skills they need to hit their goals; and figure out the projects and coaching you can realistically provide for them right now. If you are committed to their growth long-term and figure out how to help them, you will almost certainly get more loyalty and effort from your team.

Ask for feedback. If you are helping your team grow, there is no reason for you not to leverage them to help you grow. Ask what you are doing and not doing well. Ask how they like to be managed and what is driving them crazy. Some of my biggest growing moments as a manager came from open feedback from my team. You’ll need to earn trust first – nobody is going to give tough (but helpful) feedback to their manager if they are worried it’ll come back to haunt them. Which also means that you shouldn’t ask for feedback if you aren’t ready to hear it (I’ve seen this turn sour a number of times).

Do an intake. If you take on a new team or new person, do an intro meeting. I have one I do 1-2 times a year that covers seven questions and helps me immensely as a manager.

• What do you love to do?
• What do you hate to do?
• What are you awesome at (overlap allowed)?
• What are you bad at (overlap allowed)?
• What are your goals – career and skills to acquire?
• How do you like to be managed?
• How do you not like to be managed?

This allows me to deploy people on things in their wheelhouse, challenge them with projects that will build skills they’ll need to hit their growth goals, and saves me some hard lessons in managing them the right way. It also lets me give more helpful context to the projects I assign them (ie. “I’m giving you this project because I think it’ll give some skills needed to hit this goal”).

The wrap: Talk to your team about how they want feedback. Ask them about a system that works for them. Be open and honest with them. Commit to growing them. It may seem counterintuitive to be committed to getting someone promoted (or hired to a bigger role elsewhere), but it will pay off in performance and engagement. It’ll likely help with retention, too (because people ride out the hard times for a good manager). Being a good manager is a lot of work – giving feedback and managing performance are both a huge part of it. Find a good mentor, read up, experiment and ask for feedback. It’ll pay off in your career growth.

 

 

Picking Mentors – HR Novice to HR Guru

I’m not a guru (I only play one on the interwebs), but I think I’ve graduated from novice with a lot of help from a lot of people. Some I stumbled on through luck or some prodding, some I sought out. If I was talking to a younger version of me (with fewer gray hairs), here’s what I’d say:

Work for someone you can learn from. Provided you have the flexibility to be patient on job offers, only accept one working for someone you know you can learn something valuable from. Pick someone super smart. Pick someone who is an expert in their field. Pick a great leader. Provided the job ticks off your other needs, always choose the role reporting to someone who awes you with some characteristic or skill.

I have a list of people I’ve interviewed with over the years that I would have loved to work for, solely because of how much I thought I could learn from them. Only two of these people are in HR. And mind the other side of you tenure at a job. It may be time to consider another role if you don’t feel you are still learning from your manager, or at least invest in some other avenue of learning

Find HR thought partners. My CEO at Buildium, Michael, acknowledged I was relatively inexperienced and encouraged me to find experts to use as thought partners, even if it cost the company money. I used an HR consulting company called Insight Performance and worked closely with the amazing Amy Scannell. Early on, I’d call with a question and follow her recommendations. Later, I’d call with a solution and ask if I was missing anything. Over four years, I developed in large part because of her mentorship.

Our investors hosted summits where I was able to network with other HR professionals. Annually, we were able to hear what others were trying, things that had gone well, and lessons learned the hard way.  It’s here I met one of my HR crushes, the incredibly amazing Christine Song. I still find myself learning from her amazing LinkedIn article shares and occasionally bouncing an idea off of her for feedback.

Lastly, blogs and conferences were a great sources of inspiration and expertise. I religiously read upstartHR, then met the super talented author, Ben Eubanks at a conference. Keeping up to date with what was on his mind helped me keep a thumb on what was going on in the profession and challenge my own thinking and beliefs about the right way to do things. It made me grow and evolve. Getting to interact with him and ask for feedback was amazing.

 

Network. I hate the thought of schmoozing people in a large room, so I try not to. That doesn’t mean I don’t see incredible value to expanding my circle through smaller events, speaking on panels, and offering to feedback to people who ask. I’ve found myself with a groups of individuals that have taught me a lot about different functional areas and other business problems. I have found that as I’ve learned more about all aspects of a business, I’ve become better at my role.

The wrap. I’ve been incredibly fortunate to stumble into some amazing mentors who have shaped the professional I am today. I didn’t really start to see the value until in my thirties, but I wish I had started earlier. Don’t limit yourself to people in your profession – there is something to be learned from anyone who is really good at something. Ask them about the biggest lessons they’ve learned, the biggest mistake they made, things they wish they knew earlier in their career and anything else that comes to mind. You’d be surprised at how much it helps you navigate things you face.

 

Poached from Marketing – The Four P’s

I’ve been given the opportunity to really learn from different departments at my last two jobs. At Buildium, I was seated with customer support, marketing and finance at different times. It’s been incredibly valuable in shaping how I think about my field – I like to steal whatever concepts or systems I can from my peers and apply them to people strategy. I’d like to talk more about what we can learn from other functions in this and future blogs because I think it helps raise the bar.

Today, a bit from my friend Geoff Roberts, co-founder of Outseta. I asked him to talk to me about a core concept of marketing:

“The 4 P’s of the “marketing mix” is a foundational concept in marketing that’s been popularized since the 1950’s. The first “P” stands for Product, which is the good or service that is being offered. Product should fulfill existing consumer demand, or be compelling enough to create demand on it’s own. The second “P” is for Price, which is the amount of money the consumer is willing to pay for the real or perceived benefits of the product. Price has the most direct implication on revenue. Place is the third P. Place describes where a product is sold and how it is delivered. This could mean specific stores or geographies where the product is offered, or even the specific displays used within a physical store or the positioning of a product within an online store. The final “P” is for Promotion, which is the mix of activities related to advertising, public relations, or direct marketing or sales promotions that are used to promote the product. There is significant interplay between the 4 P’s with each needing to be carefully considered to effectively marketing a product.”

 

I’ve spent some time before talking about applying marketing principles to recruiting, but not how it can be applied to your people strategy. Let’s “redefine” some of the 4 P’s first:

Product: Your culture as a whole. What and how you are building a product for a customer factor into what your culture is. Ask yourself, what are we going to try to deliver and how are we going to do it from a people and behavior perspective?

Price: How much you want to pay to the talent that will build and deliver services to your customers. The stage of company will really impact this (think bootstrapped versus well-funded).

Place: Easy peasy. Where are you trying to draw talent from and why.

Promotion: Once you understand the culture you want and how much you can pay people, it’s time to figure out how to drive interest in the company and roles to get well-qualified butts in the seat.

Now let’s put those four together into a couple of examples to show why I think we can use them to drive a sound people strategy.

Scenario #1

Ginger is starting a consulting company to advise tech companies on how to scale their businesses with as few headaches as possible. Instead of just focusing on one function, she’s going to have a boutique shop with industry experts to provide clients access to many areas of expertise under one roof. She’s got functional experts lined up in different cities around the US, but still needs to add several functions and find a way to build her clientele list. She’d also like to develop prospective clients in Boston, Austin and the Bay Area. She has a little money in the bank thanks to three clients, but want to be cognizant of costs. Let’s look at the Four P’s.

• Product: Her team is distributed, so openness and collaboration are key traits emphasized in the culture. Being spread across multiple timezones means they can’t share work hours easily; instead they establish a three hour “core-hour” window where everyone is expected to be online and responsive to the team. Otherwise, employees are able to set their own hours, so long as they are responsive to clients and hit their results. Ginger establishes generous vacation and leave policies to fight burnout.
• Price: While there is some money in the bank, she’d like to keep salaries lower to hedge against business being slow for a bit. Ginger establishes bonuses based on company performance so that if the business meets or exceeds expectations, everyone shares in the success. Realistically, though, they cannot pay market rate in the most competitive markets.
• Place: The business aims to penetrate tech markets in several areas, but will have a challenge paying market rate in those cities. Instead of looking for experts in those cities, she focuses on advertising on remote-focused boards. Not having critical mass in any one city also saves on real estate. One area where she sees a local presence as important is with the Business Development roles. For those roles, she posts only in the markets she’s trying to penetrate.
• Promotion: The job opens up doors to working with some really exciting companies. Everyone who joins will have autonomy and the flexibility to build their work life around their personal life (outside of core hours). Ginger decides to focus on the flexibility, ability to work from anywhere, balance and autonomy as selling points for the job in ads and company postings, then taps into her network for referrals (and offers a referral bonus).

Scenario #2

Josh’s passion project – an app with thousands of subscribers and a large potential market – is off the ground. he wants to add customer-requested features quickly. He just closed on a massive round to hire more developers to push product updates, and sales and support teams to help grow and support their base. The people that helped Josh launch are all in Boston and like working together, so they’d like to hire devs solely in Boston. Josh has been at failed start-ups before. While he believes they need to hire devs in Boston to be successful, he’s looking for other ways to save money.

• Product: The team puts in a lot of hours and wants their new office to have common space for collaboration and to let loose, but also quiet places to code. It’s clearly a “work hard/play hard” culture and they are investing in space, perks and benefits that make being in the office more enjoyable. Because they want to innovate, the team carves out time and development budget for all engineers to experiment with new technologies and take on pet projects. They want a performance culture and decide to have a quick hook with people not working out.
• Price: They have money and want experienced devs able to contribute immediately in a pricey market, so they are willing to aim for the 75th percentile for roles in the short term. They can’t afford to spend this level of money for all roles, so the team decides to get creative elsewhere.
• Place: While hiring the dev team in Boston is a no brainer, their investors suggest a different approach for sales and support – building out a team in Nevada or Utah where costs for real estate, salaries and business taxes are lower. This would allow the team to pay market rate for talent with favorable economics.
• Promotion: For dev roles, the team focuses on popular dev job boards, sites focused on tech in Boston, and show up at tech recruiting events. They have a PR firm working to get word out about their new HQ, the fundraise, culture and the market for the app. People like to work on the latest and greatest tech, so they just need a little brand recognition.

Making Sense of it All

It’s easy to miss an opportunity to look at all the components and levers available in people strategy. The Four P’s may not fit like a glove, but it is a good reminder to take a step back and look at the whole picture. What are you trying to do? What do you have in place now? How do you want to get there? What can you do to get there effectively? Like marketing, the right mix is critical. Change one thing in “product”, and you need to take a look at if and how the other P’s should be adjusted.

 

Employee Engagement – Addition by Subtraction

Employee engagement is a hot topic these days. New tools and technology platforms are being released to help companies monitor real-time engagement levels and make recommendations on how to improve. Companies are investing out the wazoo to make a meaningful impact with the hopes of driving recruitment, profits and productivity. And, yet, literature keeps being released indicating that Americans are not that engaged with their work.

I’ve struggled with how to keep engagement high in the tech industry. It’s really easy, in my opinion, in small organizations. Or in organizations that are innovating and doing really cool things. People organically feel they are making real contributions to something that matters to them. But as you get bigger, it gets harder. As you stop playing on the cutting edge, it gets harder. Why?

In the rush to keep up with the Google’s of the world, I think companies have spent more time adding perks and benefits than anything else – I’ve certainly been guilty of thinking this way. The kicker is that data shows these sorts of additions don’t increase engagement. These ‘nice to have’s’ certainly are capable of bloating the budget and sticking around for a while, though. When I reflect on my two or three most engaged moments in the workforce, here are the commonalities (hint: they aren’t perk-related!):

• I was given a huge piece of work with little direction on how to do it, but plenty of cover and support from my manager. (Autonomy)
• It was clear to me and those around me that this work was my clear priority. People understood the consequences of a missed deadline. (Permission to say no to other things)
• Financially, my needs were taken care of. I wasn’t rolling in dough, but I was making ends meet and able to save. (Self-explanatory)
• The projects were impactful to the business. (Purpose)

So these last few months I’ve been thinking about ways to create a workplace where people are highly engaged with a limited budget. Maybe the problem in the US isn’t that we haven’t added the right thing to the mix, we just haven’t really figured out how to effectively remove what holds people back from connecting to their work. Here are some ideas:

Meetings. I hate when my weeks are carved up dashing to ineffectively-run meetings  where it’s not even clear that I’m needed. There are certainly incredibly valuable and productive ones, but they seemed to be in the minority many weeks. When I was most engaged in my work, I had permission to decline all but the most essential meetings. And guess what? The business kept running. People sought me out when they needed my opinions. And I had larger chunks of time to dedicate to my project (which resulted in both a happier me and better work).

If we want a more engaged workforce, let’s explore a new level of discipline with meetings. Scope out the agenda, attendees and time needed. Let’s understand the politics at play that tend to inflate the number of attendees, and also work on our communication channels so we aren’t leveraging time together strictly for status updates, and are instead using it for important discussions and decisions best made collaboratively.

Micromanagement. To have a workforce committed to their work and invested in our goals, we need to give them skin in the game. They need to know they can make an impact. Provided you’ve hired the right team, your people will want any given project to be successful and want to take ownership of it. As managers, we tend to get in the way of that happening (usually unintentionally). For one, we may have a similar, but not identical, idea of how to execute – we just don’t have the time to do it ourselves and decide to ‘delegate’. It becomes very easy to give someone an idea to execute and become overly prescriptive in how it’s accomplished. Unfortunately, this removes some of the more engaging aspects of a given project.

Give your team clear goals and objectives and flush out strategy to take on the project. Once you are clear about the end result, and understand their approach, try to remove yourself a bit from the situation and let them do their thing. Check in regularly. A helpful trick for me is to make sure I’m asking more open-ended questions than making statements in check-ins on the project. Framed well, your questions can help coach. If the project is too big to allow failure and you need to be really involved in it, consider explaining that upfront: “Hey guys – I like to give you autonomy, but the Board is watching this one closely, so we’ll need to do it a little differently. Just bear with me on this one.”

Busy work. Every time I rolled out a new process or initiative, there was a certain amount of ongoing work to support it. Before I knew it, it felt like my team spent more time caught in the weeds with maintenance work than doing forward-thinking projects. That’s tough to remedy, and I’m not sure I have the answer other than it’s worth periodically looking at where your team is spending their time and assessing if there are things that can be eliminated.

Look at the purpose of your organization and team. If something doesn’t tie up to that or the basic function of running a business, it should be a candidate for review. This may mean a shift to automation, or empowering others to do the task without leveraging your team, or deciding to drop a task altogether. Make sure your team has time to do more than just busy work. And contextualize the less glamorous parts of the job by tying it up to company purpose or goals. People want to use their brains and not be on autopilot all the time. As managers and leaders, it’s our job to strike the right balance.

I think all of the above can truly impact the engagement of your team and give you a leg up on recruitment and retention. None require a real financial investment, but do require a much harder shift in thinking and management. Frankly, adding a beer fridge or foosball table is much easier to sell and execute. And the difference is noticed immediately. But none of that will keep your employees coming back for more and producing at a highly-engaged level.

 

 

AI and HR – Friend or Foe?

Artificial intelligence has been on my mind a bit, as its implications on our workforce and society are staggering. Our economy is moving towards automation – first came the programmable tasks, drastically impacting our manual workforce; now AI is replacing other jobs – whether it’s fund managers (for investment portfolios) or answering questions in customer service chat windows. Heck, with the rise of Siri, Alexa and similar products – the technology is going out to consumers in a way never seen before.

Several years ago, I saw a presentation of IBM’s Watson and potential HR applications. I’ll admit, it scared me a bit. With an HR bot able to handle a large chunk of questions, and automation/self-service taking up other aspects, that means a lot fewer HR jobs out there as technology penetrates the market. I felt defensive of my profession, and that a bot was incapable of duplicating the experience of a live human.

Recently, I read “The Future Of Work: The Intersection Of Artificial Intelligence And Human Resources” in Forbes. It helped reframed the debate to me from either/or to a partnership or an if/then situation. I’ll be honest, I hate the majority of paperwork associated with my job. It’s brainless work that’s less impactful to the business and its people. It doesn’t energize or engage me, but it needs to get done to provide a great experience for employees. Similarly, there are a ton of simple questions that get asked fairly often.

If we had an HR bot embedded in HipChat at Buildium, what would have been the impact?

• I could have programmed reminders for deadlines, nominations and surveys to go out at specific times of the month or year. This would remove the possibility of me or my team sending it too late because of bandwidth issues.
• We could have programmed the bot to answer questions about benefit eligibility and enrollment, rollover, time off, holidays, raises, perks and payroll. People would get these real time versus waiting for an email response or for someone in HR to be available to answer.
• My Ops folks could have programmed answers about security codes, requesting travel, expense reports, ordering equipment, company events, etc.
• Onboarding reminders, check-ins and surveys could have been automated. After a week, we could remind you to review the interview process on Glassdoor. After three months, we could ask you to review the company.

There is a defensive way of thinking about that … it costs a job on my team. We budgeted plenty of time each quarter for responsive tasks. Many of these would be replaced by a bot. However, because there was so much time allotted to customer service (our employees), many larger projects or initiatives never got launched because there wasn’t enough time. Others ran late because reminders or the process was manual.

If we had a bot able to handle even 50% of these tasks and questions, we could have kept our performance management process regular and innovative. We could have spent more time on figuring out career development and finding a learning platform that supported employee and business needs. We could have scaled some of the personal touches we had to eliminate because we just didn’t have enough time. We could have not missed opportunities for feedback. Training and onboarding could have been markedly improved!

Progressive companies will still want that work done, so the HR profession will endure and free up more time for professionals to focus on the big things. In this case, it likely would have drastically increased the productivity of my team in meaningful work. Their engagement and job satisfaction would have been higher. I see two downsides. One: Those drop-in interactions when people have a question are a great way to check in with how people are doing. HR needs to foster great relationships throughout the organization to be effective. Two: Companies that don’t see HR or People Ops as strategic will use it to cut costs.

I think I land in a place where I think bots could help increase the efficacy of the function, and increase the time spent on meaningful and potentially innovative work. HR will need to be more deliberate about finding other ways to have informal interactions with their employees. Personally, if it helps free up my time to think about and experiment with better approaches to improving the workplace, I’m all for it.

“The Power of ‘Why?’ and ‘What if?'” Applied to Performance Management

I recently read a great article in The New York Times called “The Power of ‘Why?’ and ‘What if?’“. The gist is that businesses need more people asking questions . Doing so may help us be innovative and solve problems better. I’ve been spending some time (on my couch, obviously) thinking about performance management. Almost universally-hated, people are finally taking a closer look at the system and solutions. This seems like a great system to attack the problem.

Why do we do performance management (in its current form)?

• To help inform compensation decisions
• To promote and coach growth
• To address performance issues
• To give feedback regularly
• Because we’re supposed to do it
• It helps “rank” employees
• To “document” issues (HR made us do it!)
• To review goals and progress

Why do people hate it so freagin’ much (in its current form)?

• It takes too much time
• Too much negative feedback
• It’s demoralizing
• Ratings or stack rankings (when used) suck for all involved
• It’s not the full picture – often there isn’t input from those closest to performance
• Comp decisions tend to overly-emphasize the most recent quarter’s successes and failures
• The process isn’t a balanced two-way exchange of feedback
• Feedback isn’t delivered in a timely manner – it’s coming way too late
• Annual, in particular, is really tough
• It seems like the review is structured to justify the compensation change to the employee
• Pressure on managers to use the review to justify compensation changes they may not agree with

What if we … ?

• Tied compensation to market data and trusted managers to put people within a market-based range depending on performance?
• Looked at compensation more frequently?
• Decoupled compensation and performance conversations?
• Pay people a lower base plus regular discretionary bonuses based on performance or completion of projects?
  • What if this pushed under performers to self-select out?
• Tied reviews to projects or initiatives wrapping up instead of to a quarter or annual schedule?
• Let employees drive the process and ask for general or specific feedback when they want?
• Focused on utilizing people’s strengths, versus calling out negatives?
• Actively coached weaknesses?
• Had regular, informal career coaching?
• Judged managers/leaders by how much they helped their employees grow and develop?
• Had managers receive coaching and feedback from their teams regularly?
• Did away with the manager altogether and relied on peers and mentors to provide feedback?

It’s encouraging that some tech companies seem to be looking at the problem of performance management (and connected issues) differently and are building tools for a different type of solution. Similarly, it’s awesome to see companies looking at the data and impact of the “old” way of doing things, and using that data to drive changes. Adobe’s switch to Check-ins being a rather high-profile example.

What are your thoughts on performance management? Or, rather, what are your questions surrounding it?

Transparency and Salaries

Some former co-workers emailed and touched on the idea of salary transparency. My initial emotional reaction to this has always been “uh oh”. That doesn’t mean I’m against it, but it does acknowledge that there is a huge amount of risk to rolling something like this out without the right forethought, culture and strategy.

When you talk about an organization focused on transparency – whether it’s with company performance, finances or salaries – the goal is to show people that you have nothing to hide because you truly believe you are being fair and you have a sound strategy. Transparency also functions as the check/balance/accountability system to address any issues. But that removes the human element and our cultural biases from the equation. And we are all human bringing our own experiences to the mix.

The first time I looked at payroll files in a job, I was surprised to see what some people were making. In my head, I compared their performance to the money, to their peers’ salaries and to my salary. But I knew it was part of the job and I’d have an opportunity to influence compensation based on performance. But that’s not easy for everyone to do in a productive way. So why would anyone open up the books? Can it work? I think so in some places. I think these are the pieces you need in place for it to potentially be successful.

Leaders who communicate well. This is a multi-prong requirement. First, you need leaders who can communicate the why’s behind the switch – both to current employees and to candidates. Most people won’t have experience with knowing their peers’ salaries and probably will feel a little nervous about the concept. Your leaders need to be able to sell the benefits and the reasons behind the philosophy. After roll-out, be very cognizant to take note of the good its done or things you were able to fix because of the switch. You can use these as examples explaining the value you policy has to the organization to future candidates.

Secondarily, you inevitably will have more people coming to you asking about why their salary is less than someone else’s in a similar or identical role. Or a high performer asking why they are paid equal to an average performer. Your leaders will need to be capable of having very frank discussions with their teams on performance – where people are strong, weak and how they can improve to hit their salary goals.

A solid formula or philosophy on pay. This is beneficial everywhere, but there is room for more employee discontent when compensation is fully disclosed to all parties within the organization. Expect you will need to answer “why” a lot. In most organizations, it’s just “why aren’t I paid more?”. In your organization, it’ll be “why is Joanie paid ‘x’ and Andrew paid ‘y’?”

I’ve seen case studies on companies that incorporate position, tenure, performance, management and location into a formula that spits out a salary. While everyone may not be happy with the end result, it is completely understood why people receive the compensation they do. Other companies base comp entirely on market data. You may approach it however works best for your organization, but be sure you have iron-clad reasons behind the “why’s”. Use the transition to salary transparency to audit the fairness of your pay structure and address any inconsistencies. Opening up the books and having a system is probably the best lever to pull to address salary gaps you didn’t intend to create (i.e. gender differences).

Transparency (and accountability) within the organization. Trust your team to know your company goals, strategy, priorities and finances. Communicate why those decisions were made and what you hope accomplish with them. Share what other teams are doing and what their KPIs are, then share the results. Broadcast the wins and acknowledge contributions. Talk about your investments in people (compensation, benefits, perks, etc). Be open about the market rate for different roles. When your team can see the big picture and understand what everyone is doing to hit goals, it’s easier to put compensation into perspective.

Wrap up. You likely already trust your leadership, HR and finance teams with salary information, so there’s little reason others can’t learn to function productively with it if given the same visibility. But also be ready to help people through the transition by answering their questions honestly. In HR and Finance, you go in expecting you’ll know this information. Others never had that expectation and it can be a longer adjustment.

 

I think the upside to transparency is always better than siloing information – whether in pay or other areas of the organization. However, it’s also much harder and requires a much more deliberate communication strategy with leaders people trust. If you don’t have that in place, the downsides can be much worse than the status quo. Companies have become more open with some aspects of their organizations … it’s interesting to think about if salary transparency is the next wall to fall.