By Alex Yohn
Oct 22, 2019
A few years ago, I sat in a room with my executive coach, Traci, unloading a list of feelings I was experiencing with work. I told her I found it hard to get excited about business opportunities that’d normally have me leaping out of my chair. I was void of the flow of ideas I use to fuel our business. The company, and my relationship to it, felt gray and foggy. “Yeah, you’re burned out,” she responded matter of factly. It was like someone walked into the blacked-out room I was in and flipped on the light switch I’d been searching for.
Getting to burnout
For the first few years of my career, I formed a work habit that proved great for my employers but not sustainable in the long term for me. I was learning on the job and, in software, there is always some new skill or approach to get lost in. The double duty of learning while doing was a dream for me because every day I walked into fantastic problems that I’d have to figure my way out of. My weeks were epic. Eighty hours one week, ninety the next. I remember vertigo. I remember getting home one night and crying in my wife’s arms because a website for marketing booze wasn’t getting finished fast enough. I cried over a marketing website!
I got out of the work-for-them vortex when I co-founded We Are Mammoth, but the only thing that really changed was that now I was the one calling the shots. What shots did I call? Work more, sell more, learn more. Owning my own business was a shot in the arm – a new source of learning curves and the sense that we’d fail or succeed because of our efforts, not those of an executive team. So it continued for the next decade; a hustle of growing and hiring, of revenue peaks and valleys, of new products and investments. It was every hat every day.
Running a company like that doesn’t afford a lot of downtime, and what I began experiencing around 2014 (a year after Kin had launched) was foreign to me. It became increasingly difficult to focus on my work – both the routine stuff and the juicy bits like new features or products. The moments where engine and driver were one became fewer and farther between. I didn’t read the tea leaves because of my workhorse tendency to work through the pain. It took almost three years of this before Traci gave me my prognosis.
To be honest, Traci’s remark didn’t create the stir in me I wish it had. It took the better part of a year along with a major change at our company to appreciate just how big an impact burnout had on my life.
Coming to terms with burnout
Two years ago my partners and I decided to split up after eleven years of building a business together. It happened at a low point in our financial performance, so the change was accompanied by a lay off of a large part of our staff. It was a miserable time. I spent the subsequent few months wondering what might become of a company I now wholly owned but which might not have the energy to continue on. The company at that time reflected my own feelings of work: gray and foggy.
The question of whether my burnout played a role in the lead up to this period never occurred to me until recently. Did it contribute to the company’s lack of solid financial performance? Looking back, my answer is no. In fact, the period prior to this pivot point was a very productive time in our history – we had reinvigorated the team with new product ideas and research fueled by a business vision that would fortify it for years to come. The problem was that it was the right plan at the wrong time – the company simply couldn’t afford the runway we needed to really take flight.
Where burnout did play a role for me was in the period of time between the layoffs and what I’ll endearingly call our “renewal.” The feeling of drifting without a rudder had never been stronger until my sense of mission became clearer – something that, just a couple of years earlier, wouldn’t have been such an opaque experience. I was burned out. Plain and simple.
How burnout has steered a new chapter
Needless to say, the company survived. Not only that, but it came out stronger and more focused on the other end. As I write this, we’re approaching two years of solid performance. As for whether burnout plays a role in the company we’ve become? Absolutely.
Because the ownership of the company is now singular, I hold singular responsibility for our vision and business strategy — my strength. Our day to day operational leadership, however, is almost entirely in the hands of our COO, Lisa Arnold, and our engineering director, Grant Black. This reflects my relationship with work well because I’ve removed myself from the aspects of operations that I’m not well-suited for but which they both thrive in.
Another important way we’ve changed our company isn’t due to burnout per se, but it certainly helps me combat its effects: we’re an entirely remote workplace with a penchant for taking time off. Our team has done away with commutes and we ensure everyone utilizes their paid time off regularly. Coupled with the close attention we pay to workloads and purpose-driven work, our team has fewer spouts of exhaustion. I spend fulfilling time at work, and the rest of it is spent refueling with my family and friends, with travel and cycling.
The change that has had the most profound impact on the company, however, has been candid communication. If I was going to rebuild our company, I needed everyone who was coming with to open up about their lives and relationship with work, and it’d have to start with me. That requires a lot of guts and humility; two qualities our team has in good supply. Our 2019 team seems to work just as much with their hearts as we do with our heads – a practice that’s as good for our business as it is for our workplace.
Leading with honesty
I’ve been working in this industry for twenty years now, long enough to know that the work ethic it romanticizes and the products it creates can have a very negative effect on mental health. I know because I’m a victim of it. Accepting burnout has felt like acknowledging defeat at times; an end to the workhorse I was. I think a lot of people feel this way, which is why I’m sharing my experience.
I’ve learned that burnout isn’t the end of productivity, but it has required a fresh approach and plenty of patience for me. It’s made a better leader of me, as it’s forced me to work with my constraints and, in turn, develop the leadership and trust in the people I need to run the company.
As an employer I know right from wrong, just as anybody who willingly looks at the facts should, and I don’t want my team members to experience what I have. There are certainly better routes to career development. While I want my team to bring their best to work each day, I don’t want our company to block out the sunshine in their lives; our work is important, but it’s simply not worth the human cost of pushing employees (or letting them push themselves) to burnout or even deeper toward its darker brethren of mental illness.
By Alex Yohn
Jul 1, 2019
On July 24th we’ll be saying goodbye to the old Kin and rolling every customer over to the new Kin. That means from that day forward customers will no longer be able to switch back and forth between the two versions. Until then, every user can click the banner at the top of the screen when they sign in to give the new Kin beta a try.
Why?
One of the best parts of the new Kin is the speed at which our team ships improvements and fixes. At this point though there are big feature improvements we want to begin releasing that we won’t be able to support in two places. Given the team’s velocity and the fact that a majority of customers have already moved over, it’s time to make the transition.
So where’s Kin headed?
Our near future roadmap is focused on three facets: interface, utility, and portability. Our work in Kin’s interface will continue to make working in the tool more efficient. Our efforts in utility will improve the employee review experience as well as give time off analytics and reporting an upgrade. Finally, portability – we’re going to do a better job working with other apps and data, starting with improvements to our API.
As we’re hoping you’ve grown accustomed to already, you’ll continue to see regular, incremental improvements released and, when anything big is headed your way, we’ll make an announcement via our blog and email.
Sign up for a demo of the new Kin.
If your team still hasn’t made the switch, we’ll be doing public walk-throughs of the new Kin daily from July 9 through July 16th. You can sign up for any day, and even offer them up to your employees.
Thank you.
It’s due to our customer’s feedback that the new Kin has improved so quickly. Thank you for your ideas, suggestions, and bug hunting. We’re excited to chart new territory with you all moving forward.
As always, we’re here to answer your questions or talk about this change. Please contact us at TheTeam@KinHR.com or by reaching out directly from within Kin.
By Alex Yohn
May 10, 2019
In just a few days, a new Kin will be released to beta. Our mission of the new tool is to speed up the time it takes you to get your work done. We don’t think you should be spending any more time in Kin (or any workplace software for that matter) than necessary. Kin’s new design is addressing that charge in quite a few ways.
If you’re interested in taking it for a spin, sign into Kin as you normally do and you can click over via the banner at the top of the page. All of your data is the same, regardless of which version of Kin you choose – there’s no migration or additional set up required.
Get your work done more quickly.
The most noticeable change you’ll see is that we’ve rebuilt Kin’s navigation. We’re no longer tucking features into ambiguous sections (such as “Company”), and the secondary navigation is neatly housed together with the primary navigation. There’s also a global create button in the upper-right corner to quickly create time off requests, reviews, and so on.
Upload and share files faster
One of Kin’s most valuable features, Files, got an overhaul to the way you upload, edit, and share documents. We streamlined the experience of uploading multiple files at once, and we improved the way you add capabilities to your documents, such as digital signatures.
Manage time off with better clarity
Time off is the most used feature in Kin, and we redesigned both the employee’s tool and those of the employer to improve insight into things like time off accruals and historical time off requests.
As for creating new time off policies, we’ve built in some best practices we recommend, such as the types of policies you should offer, and recommended allotments of time.
If you’ve ever been confused about your company’s accrual rates, there’s a helpful visualization of how your time off policies calculate balance increments.
Expect more frequent improvements
We built Kin from the ground up using Vue.js – it’s a huge improvement over the old Backbone.js app in terms of speed of product improvements and overall maintainability. This is all to say that we’re looking forward to speeding up delivery of some long overdue features and improvements.
Dozens of smaller improvements
The small improvements we’ve made around the app are too numerous to note here. You’ll see ’em sprinkled throughout the app though – time-off exports, for example, got a fresh approach. So did the controls you use to sort and filter your team’s data in the top bar of each page. Employee reviews are simpler to create in a one-off manner as well – a small step toward making reviews easier and more effective for you.
It’s in beta for a reason
We’ll be in beta for a short while which means you can switch between the new and old versions, if you’d like, while we wrap up some loose ends and polish the corners.
What’s most important for us during this beta period is your feedback; the new Kin is great, but it’s not finished. Your thoughts on how we’re doing will help us smooth out the rough edges we know the product still needs.
To get in contact with us, please either email us at TheTeam@KinHR.com or schedule a chat directly with Melissa in the lower right hand corner of your browser.
By Alex Yohn
May 5, 2019
According to a Harvard Business Review study, up to 70% of employees don’t clearly understand their company’s strategy and objectives. Even worse, they’re not sure how their contributions ladder back up to achieving those objectives. Connecting employees’ work to the company’s business mission and making sure the alignment is crystal clear seems obvious, but it’s clearly just not happening.
At Kin, we make clear steps to avoid that disconnect. Each year, we roll out our major company missions and objectives during an all-hands meeting called Summit. It’s an exciting time where we unveil our vision for the company over the next 12 months and review/celebrate all we’ve achieved throughout the last year.
Once we get the team fired up for the future, we get to work on setting expectations around how their work will contribute to the bigger picture starting with career development calls. These are one-on-one video chats that cover everything about an employee they wish to share while getting down to the core of why they love their job. The goal is to find a connection between what engages our colleagues at work and the objectives we need to achieve to grow our business.
We take those insights from the calls and start on our next step in the plan: making them actionable and transparent. To do that, I create feedback reports and distribute them to people who work closely with that team member. No confidential or relationship-damaging information is in the report. It is simply feedback that can help the company as a whole.
We then turn that feedback report into objectives and key results (OKRs) that align with what our colleagues are best at and feel most effective in. These OKRs ladder back up to our company objectives directly so the employee can clearly see how they are progressing the company forward while feeling engaged and aligned with their own missions.
For example, we have a new employee whose biggest motivator is making an impact on the team and leaving a legacy. We have paired him with a senior-level colleague who is working on a major company objective focused on modernizing the workplace technology stack for a long-term client. Letting our new employee lead the charge on this huge initiative after leadership lays out the strategy hits all of his marks. It also allows us to achieve a massive goal while knowing we are fully engaging our team members to do so.
Once we determine everyone’s OKRs in relation to our company’s missions and objectives, we distribute it to the team. This way, we’re aligning our folks contributions to the top-level missions and making each other’s goals transparent across the company. It also makes it readily available and documented. You can see an example of it here:
Want to use this for your team? We’ve created a template to get you started.
It’s our job as leaders to not only grow our companies but ensure our colleagues understand how important they are to our success. By intentionally aligning your team’s work to the bigger picture, your company becomes a well-oiled machine filled with engaged colleagues who know that their leaders believe in their work and their ability to drive progress forward.
By Alex Yohn
Apr 22, 2019
Each year remote work takes up a larger and larger share of the global workplace. It’s grown 115% in the last decade alone, and about 70% of the global workforce works remotely at least some of the time. Employers everywhere are learning what it takes to offer a fulfilling employee experience in the absence of in-person interaction, but a lot of discussions on remote working’s downsides cite isolation as a detractor. A recent article in Reuters, for example, says remote workers feel less committed to their job compared to their on-site compatriots due to isolation. I think the blame is misplaced.
While isolation is likely more common in a remote workplace, in and of itself, it isn’t a bad thing. In fact, according to my all-remote team members, isolation is an important ingredient in making remote working successful. The increased time to focus leads to more efficient work hours which, in turn, lead to more time for life beyond work.
Below are a few remarks from a recent Slack discussion with my team:
“Be it freelance or working remote you’re either okay with being alone outside an office or you’re not. It’s something you find out pretty quickly. Generally it seems far easier to be a remote employee when the majority, ideally everyone, is fully remote.” – Anthony, Chicago/Denver
“Leaning into being fully-remote means that you have to learn how to make up for the lack of physicality and be a little more self-sufficient, but you get to make each day be the right mix of interaction and isolation that you need to get your work done.” – Reid, Chicago
“If you don’t treat your employees like real, intelligent and complex human beings then it doesn’t matter if they are across the room or across the country, they will be looking across the internet for a new job.” – Molly, Pennsylvania
“Maybe because I’ve had the opportunity to get a blend of past situations, I know that physicality isn’t what makes [work] isolating.” – Roti, Baltimore
So, if there’s inherently more isolation in remote working, what does an employer do to make it the good kind, rather than the kind that drives employees out the proverbial door? A few core tenets of our remote workplace culture come to mind:
Core work hours
Our team spans all timezones in the U.S., which makes it easier to share core working hours (ours are 10 AM – 4 pm Central time). Lots of our work can be done asynchronously but human relationships are inherently synchronous – we want to, we need to, work together with other people.
There is no other place
We’re 100% remote. There is no office where the preferred staff works, so there is no exclusion so long as we remember that, in a remote work setting, out of sight is out of mind, which puts the onus is on us to be proactively inclusive at discussions and meetings. Even when we had an office in Chicago, we made the remote employee experience just as good (and fast!) as our experience on site.
Work isn’t everything. It shouldn’t be.
Our team is a gabby bunch online, so we have a pretty fertile social community going on, but we don’t grab lunch and coffee together, or hit the bar after work on Thursdays. Put more plainly, we don’t fill the physical community need that most people have. To fill that gap, it’s important that every team member embrace life beyond work with family, friends, and hobbies. Our work environment aids that by doing whatever we can to respect core work hours, weekends, and generous vacation and personal time off. Equally important is that we don’t just share our work when we’re online, rather we all make strides to share what’s going on beyond our screens in life.
Loneliness at work is real.
Work can be lonely if a job is the only thing we have going in life or if a workplace culture isn’t inclusive enough to pull is into it – but that’s true regardless of working remotely or not. It’s entirely possible that negative feelings of isolation and loneliness are compounded when working for a company that offers remote work but doesn’t fully embrace it, but I view that entirely as an organizational problem, rather than the fault of remote work itself. Like any community though, feeling engaged and fulfilled is equal parts giving to and taking from others around us, coupled with a strong organizational design to support it all.
Oh, and one more thing about remote working, from Reid:
“The other perk of working from home is that no one has to see me awkwardly rolling around the floor on a tennis ball trying to work the knot out of my back.”
By Alex Yohn
Feb 11, 2019
Imagine that your employer keeps a reserve of gold coins in a conference room down the hall. According to the employee handbook, employees are entitled to unlimited gold coins. The employer is cool with that, they don’t even track who’s taken what. That’s right. You can walk into that room, grab as much gold as you can hold, not tell anybody and, in turn, nobody tracks it. Tomorrow you can do the same thing. And the next day. Back to reality now. Switch out gold coins for paid time off and you essentially have what many employers consider to be an employee benefit: unlimited time off.
All that glitters isn’t gold
Amidst the recent wave of layoffs in the journalism industry one company in particular, BuzzFeed, was blasted for trying to weasel out of paying former employees for unused paid time off. While the company ultimately did right by their former employees by paying them out, it laid bare a bait and switch scheme employers use to save money while appearing to be progressive workplaces. The scheme is called unlimited time off.
Unlimited time off is great in theory: adult employees are entrusted to decide when and how much paid time they take away from work. Employers lovingly pay for that time off as acknowledgement for the hard work employees put in. Everybody is happy and there are palm trees.
In practice however, most employers aren’t interested in employees taking more time off, and that’s exactly why unlimited time off policies are so alluring; with no actual policy attached, unlimited time off can play to the house’s favor, because employees take less time off. While there are myriad reasons why, it mostly boils down to employers creating a non-finite resource of an otherwise well-structured benefit. There’s no urgency for employees to take it, and they’re left judging one another for doing so. As for management, they’re tickled with the results; more work, less pay, less taxes.
It’s the law, son. Just kidding.
Inadvertent or not, former BuzzFeed employees got hosed and the only means of redemption for them appears to be that their former employer worked across state lines which means some former employees, namely those in California (where a pay out is mandated by state law), got paid while residents of other states ultimately wouldn’t have been paid were it not for their activism.
Since most states have no enforceable point of view on the matter (California being an exception), former employees rarely have the means to demand pay for the unmeasurable amount of time off they may or may not have been entitled to from an employer that may or may not offer time off at all. See what I did there? For example, in Illinois there is, in fact, a recommendation that employers pay former employees for accrued, unused paid time off. It’s mostly toothless though, as there’s no law stating Illinois employers have to actually offer accrued time off. That’s the regulatory sound of one hand clapping.
Creating structure in the realms of the unlimited
Unlimited time off without practical guardrails is, simply put, a way to lure job prospects into a workplace. Once they’re in, they’ll quickly realize the benefit is nothing more than smoke and mirrors.
So what are some practical guardrails employers can use to comply with what an ethical time off policy?
- Unlimited time off should be offered in tandem with minimum time off; a number of days (start with 18) that employees are required to take leave from work. That minimum number of days off ensures employees get away from work, and it gives the employer a benchmark for accruals when someone leaves the organization.
- Determine a time off ceiling – how much is too much? It’s a question employees have, and one that employers should know the answer to. If you’re fine with fifty days, but one hundred is a problem, fine, let everyone know.
- Track it. Time is money, and time off is an expense, so create a tracking and approval process, because paid time off costs a business money regardless of how little employees use. Any business interested in their money should know how much money they’re paying for employees to not work.
- Write it all down, share it, and make sure employees understand your company’s commitment to keeping employees engaged at work through regular breaks from it.
Note that employers using unlimited time off as a compensation ploy will scoff at these suggestions, because they do three things: they ensure employees take time off, they put oversight back onto management where it belongs, and it holds employers accountable for paying employees for earned, unused time off.
There is such thing as good, unlimited time off
Employers should be interested in employees taking time away from work; it builds a more resilient team, and more dedicated team members. Employers who offer unlimited time off should be lauded in that regard, but they need to go the whole nine yards and put their money where their mouth is, via policy. Good time off policy takes more than an “All you can eat time off” sign on a company’s door to build responsible, well balanced employees. It takes design, practice, and the desire to do what’s right for employees past and present.