By Craig Bryant
Jan 16, 2019
Every company handles time off in a unique way. Some give it in one lump sum each year. Others give it incrementally over time (called ‘accruals’). Some companies do nothing at all, better known as unlimited time off.
Their policy is no policy, and it often carries two characteristics. The first is that time off is given in unlimited amounts. The second is time-off simply goes untracked. The idea behind unlimited time off is that we’re all adults, and we don’t need a policy dictating when and how much we’re allowed to be away from work. There are plenty of companies out there that do it with varied success, and it’s increasingly common with small tech and design shops. But while neither characteristic is necessarily terrible, employed together they can create a big blind spot for employers, and in my opinion, they can be unfair to employees.
Here are four reasons why:
1. Employees won’t take time off. With no constraints or guidelines for how time-off works, employees tend to not consider it as part of their compensation and as such won’t use it. That means longer hours, less time spent decompressing, and ultimately higher churn. This is one of the lessons learned from early adapters of unlimited PTO who shared what they had learned about paid-time off with SHRM.
2. Employers don’t know how much time-off costs. Every year when a company looks at budgets, it should understand how much time off (vacation, sick leave, etc.) costed the company in the prior year, and how much it anticipates it will cost in the coming year. Why? Because like any other expense, it can be wasteful and misused if left untended.
3. If a company doesn’t care about getting its team out of the office, what other aspects of work life don’t they do a great job at? Time off is what I call a “gateway policy” at a startup. Along with payroll, it’s among the first things to be considered from a human resources perspective when starting a new company.
4. Companies that don’t track time off balances probably aren’t tracking it on a calendar either. That means uninformed decisions about when it’s best for team members to be away from work, and that means missed deadlines and poor resource planning.
There are certainly upsides to unlimited time off. One good thing is that there’s less of a bum rush at the end of the year of folks cashing in their final time off before they lose it in the new year. We get a bit of that here. But, the fact is, it’s the holidays. People don’t want to work then anyways, and most offices are closed or only “meh, kinda open” during the latter half of December.
Now. I am not in favor of HR policies for the sake of policies; especially at small companies. What I am in favor of is clarity for employees. Taking the time to create a well-considered approach to employee time off conveys professionalism to your team, and that’s often a missing quality at small, but growing employers.
We used to have unlimited time off and did a pretty poor job of getting folks out of the office. We’ve since moved to a staggered (and generous) time-off policy that gives our team ample time to get out of the office, but also a means of understanding that it’s part of their compensation. That’s why it’s called paid time off, after all.
Moral of the story? Even if you give unlimited time off to your team, make sure you track how much folks are taking and, just as important, ensure there’s a good amount of communication about when folks are taking time off by using a team calendar. It keeps your team informed and fresh, and it paints a better financial picture of your company’s performance.
By Craig Bryant
Jan 9, 2019
Happy new year! Since the late spring of 2018 we’ve been redesigning Kin and, as we gear up to release it to our customers, I’m reflecting on the choices we’ve made along the way. Our company has experienced a reorientation of sorts with the values of real community and social well being. That’s informed our view of Kin’s role in your workplace which has, in turn, informed the design of Kin itself.
Hey doc, are you here?
If you’ve been to a doctor lately, you may have noticed something peculiar: medical professionals spend an inordinate amount of time interacting with screens compared to the time they spend with you. How’s that make you feel? There’s a parallel in the workplace. The digital tools we depend on at work, from project scheduling products to employee feedback services, have nudged their way into almost every interaction we have with coworkers.
Many of these technologies make a workplace like ours possible. Our geographic disparity however (we’re a 100% remote workplace), has made us acutely aware of the value of authentic, direct human interactions in our feedback to one another, or when we’re troubleshooting code. Over the last year, we’ve actively sought to remove technology from situations where the human touch is unparalleled in its power to heal and solve.
As a result, we view the role of these technologies as that of a facilitator, rather than as an object of fascination. The tools we value most (with dozens of choices in any category) are the most frictionless, the most invisible. We certainly explore new technologies, but the bar for welcoming them into our work lives has been raised. We’ve raised that bar for Kin too.
Use it, then lose it.
As nonsensical as it may sound, one of the objectives of the new Kin is to decrease the time customers spend using it. The five year old app had some user experience problems that we fixed to speed up core jobs like scheduling time off, uploading files, and importing employee data.
More conceptually though, as we reevaluated the myriad workplace challenges Kin should solve, we considered that Kin, like so many other technologies, isn’t meant to solve all of them; people are. If Kin doesn’t help employees spend time working with one another, it’s not designed well. If Kin doesn’t help employees feel more fulfilled at work, it’s not doing its job. If Kin’s user experience isn’t efficient enough, it’s not doing its job.
In redesigning a workplace technology that thousands of people use each day, we considered it our ethical obligation to avoid making Kin the object of fascination in all the ways it’s meant to help. Kin should do its job, then get out of the way.
Looking beyond your attention span
I don’t think the makers of medical record software set out knowing that, ultimately, the quality of the medical care experience may suffer because of an improvement in the portability of patient data. I honestly don’t believe Mark Zuckerberg ever considered that Facebook would subvert humankind’s trust. Yet, here we are. We live in an age where massive technology platforms are nearing ubiquity and we’re learning the price of deferring to technology for an ever-increasing share of our lives.
Kin – its mission and the role it plays in your workplace, isn’t following in those footsteps. Starting with a humble, if time intensive, redesign of our web app, we intend to be a facilitator, not a dominator; a platform that doesn’t vie for your attention, rather a partner that improves what matters most: your workplace community and the quality work it enables.
A new year, a new Kin
I’m excited to ship the new Kin in the next few weeks. There are so many improvements that are baked into it that we’ve seen validated over and over since Kin first launched in 2013. What I’m most looking forward to though is this fresh start for our own workplace. Kin’s codebase is faster and cleaner. Its interface is faster and cleaner too. The new Kin is our team’s springboard to build healthier, happier workplaces.
By Craig Bryant
Dec 4, 2018
When a coworker isn’t firing on all cylinders, sometimes it has nothing to do with work. Life is heavy, in good ways and bad. We move, we get married. We lose loved ones, have surgeries, and go through divorces.
These twists and turns impact our work, yet employers and employees tend to avoid bringing their lives into the purview of the workplace; that inhibits communication and, ultimately, our ability to do what’s right for both coworker and our business.
We’ve had a lot of opportunity this year to practice what’s become a cardinal management rule: before jumping to conclusions based purely on at-work data (missed deadlines, peer feedback, etc.), make sure there isn’t something going on beyond work that explains a coworker’s recent behavior.
If we know that work isn’t the source of someone’s performance problems, there’s an explicit set of actions we can take. We can put them on a four-day work week, take them off mission-critical work for a bit, or give them a month away from work with out-of-band time off. Note how different this is from penalizing or even firing someone for not hitting deadlines or snapping at a coworker. The prior keeps a good employee’s seat warm; the latter makes it empty.
As hard as it is for employers to believe, work isn’t always the most meaningful thing going on in an employee’s life. When we incorporate the entire three hundred and sixty degrees of our lives into our communications at work, it tips the scale of people operations toward empathy and listening rather than policy and consequences. That leads to better community, better retention, and ultimately better business performance.
By Craig Bryant
Sep 24, 2018
In her book Radical Candor, Kim Scott defines two employee types that we all generally fall into. The first one, “the rockstar,” is the steady-as-she-goes worker who provides the constant forward motion a successful business needs. They’re the bedrock of the workforce. The second, which she calls “the superstar,” is a high-velocity employee blazing the trail for the rest to follow. Most of us fit into one camp or the other but, as Scott observes, many employees move back and forth between them over time.
Scott uses these archetypes to aid in better employee coaching (the topic of her book), but the professional fluidity she discusses has helped solidify what I haven’t put clearly to words in the past: sometimes work is the center of my universe, other times it’s just a job. It feels sacrilegious to write that as an entrepreneur, frankly, but I’m certain other founders feel the same way, and I know my employees do too.
I’m passionate about our company’s mission of helping companies build healthier, happier workplaces, but the very notion that my team and I sacrifice every ion of energy working on it betrays our own values. We have to live what we preach, and the routine practice of identifying work’s place in our lives helps us build our own healthier, happier workplace.
So, how does a company like ours get more out of life than just work?
Get work out of the way.
We’re a remote workplace. That alone means we spend less time traveling to and from work, and more time at home. In my case, I eat two out of three meals with my family each day – the one meal I don’t get to eat with them is lunch, which my kids do at school.
Another benefit to remote work is the time efficiency with work itself. Not every work day is eight hours, which means if we find ourselves with a couple extra hours, we’re not holed up at the office staring at a screen. Likewise, the days we work longer don’t preclude us from dinner with our partner or bedtime routines with our kids.
On the topic of workload, how much is enough? My coach, Traci Barrett, gave me a succinct management tip for keeping high-performers (superstars) busy: “Always keep their plate full, and they’ll tell you when they’ve had enough.” For team members who fit the rockstar persona, I’ve found them to be more protective of their time. You won’t find them lingering at 5:31 in the afternoon looking for the next challenge so the onus is on us to ensure their time is used wisely and in as predictable a manner as possible.
Get to know one another.
How much should employers get to know their employees beyond work? I believe as much as possible. That doesn’t mean prying, forcing fake friendships, or trying to be omnipresent in every one’s life, but there’s no way to wholly know a person based only on their contributions at work. Getting to know what’s going on in someone’s life beyond business helps us dial up their velocity at work or tune it out for a few months while something more important has their focus.
Lisa, our COO, is an open book in this regard. She’s a tireless family member, furniture restorer, and entrepreneur. Because Lisa keeps me in the loop on the significant going-ons in her life, it’s easier for us to tweak her work when life gets stressful or, frankly, when it’s more fulfilling than work .
Our job as employers, in my opinion, is to mentor employees on their professional path while they discover whatever life has in store for them. That often means reminding one another that work simply isn’t as important as whatever is going on outside of it.
Life is finite. Work isn’t.
In our recent Kin newsletter I challenged our readers to examine how they respond to the question “So, what do you do?” How we answer speaks volumes about our sense of purpose and identity. Many of us, especially in the U.S., define ourselves outwardly by the work we do, yet we’re all deeper than that. I’ve never seen an obituary reading: “So long Stacy, you were a great lawyer.”
A workplace might be the most efficient means of putting our talents to work, but it’s the hard, unanticipated experiences outside of work that develop those talents in the first place. Depriving ourselves or our employees of the opportunity to learn those lessons short circuits a fulfilling journey through life. As employees, our work suffers. As employers, our turnover rates increase.
Work, in case you hadn’t noticed, is always on, like a river. Life rarely gives you the same look twice. You miss it, it’s gone. It’s incumbent upon us all to engage both with intent, but remember: you’ve got fifty years of a career happening while fifty years of life comes and goes too. Work, learn, and live like it.
By Craig Bryant
Sep 5, 2018
Each morning our remote team signs into work via Slack. So does Kin, with a nice little message about birthdays, out-of-office notices, and work anniversaries. It’s nice to get the update in Slack as opposed to signing into Kin directly – one less browser tab to fire up each morning.
This little feature is something any company using Slack and Google can enable, and it only takes a couple of minutes to set up.
1. Connect Google Calendar and Kin
The first step to getting Slack aware of Kin’s events is, strangely enough, subscribing your Google Calendar to Kin. We wrote a tutorial in our help center to get this set up.
2. Connect Slack and Google Calendar
The next step is to get your Google Calendar events sent over to Slack. Slack, in turn, has a simple tutorial for that as well.
That’s it. At Kin, we have Kin events sent to the channel which the entire company has access to. We’re a pretty small company though. The integration is flexible enough to accommodate larger organizations which may not want to see 35+ events each morning in Slack … just use the filters in the Kin calendar to get the correct team work group’s calendar events showing, grab the subscription URL, repeat the steps above for each one of them, and you’ll be rocking in no time.
If you have any questions or need help, please let us know at TheTeam@KinHR.com.
By Craig Bryant
Jul 26, 2018
Two years ago we began using character assessments and coaching to understand how we operate as individuals and, in turn, how that shapes our work. Our hope was that, through a better understanding of our interactions with one another, we’d improve autonomy and team communication. In most every way, it has.
A new brand of communication at work
Our internal communication has improved because each person has a firm understanding of both what makes them tick and that of the person they’re working with. That enables a whole new brand of communication which helps us identify challenges earlier than had we otherwise avoided talking about them.
It’s also helped us understand how each of us fits into the organization – we have a mix of personalities from task masters and introverts to a-types and extroverts. Knowing how every one fits into the organization has improved our role alignment and troubleshoot more efficiently when something isn’t working – a topic I wrote about recently.
Bringing (the best of) work home with us
What we didn’t anticipate from our coaching experience is that the practice of understanding ourselves and others would have just as much utility outside of work where the traditional effect of the workplace is typically measured in terms of stress.
The things I’ve learned about my own internal wiring as well as how others perceive me has been invaluable for me – it’s helped in my marriage, as a parent, a friend and, most recently, as a communication conduit for my extended family, who had been stuck in a rough spot for quite some time.
I wanted to know whether others on my team had the same experiences – were the exercises we go through at work to be more mindful of our interactions with others helping beyond work and, if so, how?
“After having Jon (Lisa’s husband) take some assessments too, I realized that he compliments my weaknesses and vice versa. Jon truly enjoys managing projects and has a great ability to keep track of details and push things forward with solid planning, facts and logic. While he’s not necessarily going to create a huge vision, he’ll make it come to life and ensure it’s successful. Likewise, he’s not completely risk averse, but it takes him longer to be comfortable with a quick change of plans than it does for me. My excitement for the new plan usually wins him over quicker, though. He’s the yin to my yang.”
– Lisa, COO of Kin
“I’ve learned a ton about myself and what makes me tick. I’ve been able to refactor my approach to conversations and it has allowed me to get to a clear solution more efficiently. This has helped my relationships outside of work as well. I can tell someone ‘Look, this is who I am, but this is how I want to be, and this is how I’m getting there. Likewise, I can zero in, in a non-emotional way, on how someone else needs to be engaged with. It’s helped me understand me, but it’s done just as much to help me understand others.”
– Grant, Engineering Director
“I tend to overanalyze things and get frozen in indecision. I wasn’t aware of who I truly am as a person before, so when presented with challenging question like, ‘What do I want to achieve professionally?’ I simply didn’t know where or how to start. I now have the ability to see how I work and communicate with people day in and out – it’s like a light has been turned on and I can see everything around me better. It doesn’t solve the problems so much as help me read the situation and understand why I work the way I do and why I am who I am in a more connected way.”
– Anthony, UI Engineer
“Since doing assessments with the Kin team, I have been open to a whole new way of thinking about my working habits and patterns. For example, I have been trying to get into shape (trying) and hitting the gym more lately. The process reminds me of learning a new exercise and seeing yourself in the mirror for the first time. You might think you were doing the exercise correct and just needed to keep pushing through, but only until you see yourself from another perspective do you notice how you keep swinging your knee out, or leaning forward too much. Only until you get that outside perspective do you know what you need to do to course-correct and fix those bad habits or patterns you naturally fall into.”
– Gage, Design Director
Employers have an interest beyond the workplace
Given that satisfaction and fulfillment in one’s personal life has an inevitable effect on how we perform at work, I’ve come to recognize the workplace’s ability and, perhaps even responsibility, to have a positive, profound effect on how people function outside of work.
Just like at work, life throws all of us curveballs at the least attractive moments – there’s simply no way to avoid that. What we’re armed with now though is a better way to talk through the issue, understand the various players who are needed to resolve it, and to do so with coherence and intent.