How-To: Employee Reviews & Objectives

By Alex Yohn

Oct 26, 2015

Kin’s new Employee Reviews are a simple, powerful way to create, schedule, manage, and execute employee and performance reviews. Together with Employee Objectives, we’ve created a suite of effective tools to help you and your employees make the most out of one of your company’s most important assets: good feedback.

Read on to learn more about Kin’s employee review workflow and how each person on your team will be using the tools. If you’d like some help getting reviews setup for your team, we’re here for you! Send us a note and we’ll get some time scheduled to connect.

The Employee Review Workflow

Employee reviews in Kin start with the HR Manager (HRM), who can create a review for a single employee or a cycle of reviews for the entire company. The HRM’s job is to pair up manager(s) and employee(s) to conduct reviews together, and to provide a general timeframe and any specific instructions to managers. Once set up, HRM’s can sit back and track the progress of each review via the Manage Reviews dashboard. 

Once the HRM has created a review, the responsibility turns to the Manager. Their job is to schedule and configure the review with specific types of feedback (employee self-assessment, feedback for manager, and feedback for the company) and then dive in to provide feedback to employees. 

Once scheduled and configured by managers, Kin notifies Employees that a review has been created for them. They can now start entering their feedback, along with any progress notes they have on their employee objectives.

When it’s time to meet for a review, Manager and Employee can share their review feedback by clicking the ‘share feedback‘ toggle at the bottom of each feedback section. 

Finally, once a review has occurred, Manager and Employee both update the review with any final comments along with a sign-off to confirm its completion. Once both have signed off, reviews are marked as complete and become a locked, read-only page for reference.

Learn more on how you and your team will be using Kin’s employee reviews:

Managers & Employee Reviews

Employees & Employee Reviews

HR Managers and Employee Reviews

Employee reviews start with the HR Manager (HRM) in the new section called Reviews. As mentioned above, a review can be created for a single employee, or the entire company, and it all starts with a click on the Create Reviews button. Once in the process of creating reviews, HRM’s pair up managers with the employees they’ll be doing reviews with, as well as assign a category (see below), time frame, and any comments/instructions to managers. 

Once the new reviews are created, all managers who are responsible for leading reviews will receive an email notification asking them to set up and schedule their assigned employee reviews. Note that employees won’t be notified of the review until the manager has configured and saved it. 

What are Review Categories?

Similar to how you might categorize files in the Files section, you can create categories to organize reviews. With this version of categories though, you also have the option of including a timeframe for the review to occur, along with any instructions you’d like to share with managers.

Tip: Get the team on the same page for how your review process will work by leaving instructions. Let your Managers know what feedback topics to select for the review, what to cover during the meeting, etc.

Tracking Reviews

You can see the progress of all reviews from the Manage Reviews page. Click on an employee’s review to see more detail and feedback that’s been shared. This is also the place you’ll come to reassign reviews to a different manager or change the category a review is listed under.

Managers and Employee Reviews

Once a review has been created in Kin, the responsibility turns to the manager to schedule a meeting, setup the review, and provide feedback to employees.

The new Reviews section houses all the reviews you, as a manager, are responsible for completing, along with any archived reviews.

Schedule a meeting and provide instructions

You have the option to schedule a meeting with your employees via Kin. The meeting will be added to the calendar in Kin, as well as the Google Calendar subscription. Do note that the meetings appear as events and there currently is no way for employees to decline the meetings. 

You can also use the message box on a review to send any instructions or comments to your employees about the review – such as an agenda for the meeting, or guidance on objectives.

Tip: Leaving instructions is a great way to set expectations with the employee for how the review will work and what they need to do to prepare. (Update objectives, leave specific feedback, etc.)

Feedback Topics

It’s also your job to select the topics you and your employee will provide feedback on. There are three topics to select from: Self Assessment, Manager Feedback, and Company Feedback. Employees will only see the notes/feedback you’ve entered if you set the toggle underneath the text area to ‘shared’. Also note that it’s likely the Manager and Company Feedback sections are only used by the employee to provide comments back up to managers and the company. 

Employee Objectives

Next up in a review is the Employee Objectives section. Any objectives which are marked as in-progress will automatically show up in the review, where you both can view and/or update any active objective’s progress notes.

Note that employee objectives are created in the Objectives section of each employee’s profile.

Files to Review

Finally, any files the employee needs to complete or review can be uploaded. Employees can also upload files they’d like to share for their review, such as certifications, 360-assessments, etc. 

Now, you’re ready to save the review. Once saved, employees will receive an email notification letting them know they have an upcoming review and that they can start working on their feedback.

Final Thoughts and Sign Off

After meeting, you and your employee can add any final comments and then sign off to confirm the review’s wrapped up. Once both sides have signed off, the review will be marked as complete and become a locked, read-only page for reference.

Employees and Employee Reviews

When a review has been created for you in Kin, you’ll receive an email notification letting you know who is conducting the review, when it’s been scheduled, and requesting that you get started providing feedback.

Once reviews are created for you, you can visit the new section called Reviews under your profile. This is where you’ll access all of your current and past reviews.

Review Details

Details of a review include who your review is with and when you’ll be meeting. Other information, such as your start date and quick links to past reviews, is also listed for reference.

Feedback Topics

The Feedback Topics section is where you provide your feedback as well as where you’ll see the feedback your manager has shared. There are three topics you may be asked to leave feedback on: Self Assessment, Manager Feedback, and Company Feedback. Note that your manager will only see what you’ve entered if you have the toggle set to ‘shared’.

Employee Objectives

Any in-progress objectives you’ve created will show up in the review, where both you and your manager can view/add progress notes.

Files to Review

If your manager has shared any files for your review, they’ll be listed here for you to download. You can also upload any files you’d like to share as part of your review.

Final Thoughts and Sign Off

After meeting, you and your manager can update the review with any final comments and sign off to confirm its completion. Once both have signed off, the review will be marked as complete and become a locked, read-only page for reference.

This month’s spotlight is with Financeit, headquartered in Toronto, Canada. Financeit helps companies grow sales by breaking payments down into monthly installments. They’re a hard-working team making a real impact in their customer’s markets –  having generated more than $1 billion in loan applications while growing their team to 80+ employees with offices in four cities. 

Who are you, what’s your role, and your favorite hand-held food?

[JK] My name is Jane Kim and I’m the HR Manager at Financeit. My favorite would have to be the halibut burrito from Burrito Boyz here in Toronto.

What’s the story of Financeit?

[JK] This month’s spotlight is with Financeit, headquartered in Toronto, Canada. Financeit is a unique company that helps companies increase sales by breaking payments down into monthly installments. They’re a hard-working team changing the way companies do business, and the market has listened. They’ve generated more than $1 billion in loan applications while growing their team to 80+ employees with offices in four cities.

What’s great about working at Financeit? 

[JK] It really is such an inspiring, fun, and challenging environment to be in! What makes Financeit so rare and wonderful is the high level of transparency our CEO, Michael Garrity, shares with the entire team in our bi-weekly town hall meetings. The team also enjoys our weekly yoga breaks, healthy snacks, and team lunches to keep us happy and healthy; a softball team that is still chasing a championship; and a tight knit community where creative, interesting, and fun minds have really made a community.
Plus, we have a ping pong table :)

By Alex Yohn

Oct 2, 2015

As a developer it can be difficult to describe your work to non-coders. Much of what we do on a day to day basis is fairly abstract and takes place under the buffed-and-polished hood of the interfaces we all are accustomed to using. Once in a while though – a tool comes along that helps bridge the gap.

Earlier this week, a project strolled across my twitter feed called JSCity. Put together by the Department of Computer Science at Brazil’s Federal University of Minas Gerais, this program allows you to take any JavaScript codebase and render it into a three dimensional, interactive city (sidenote: this is just one implementation of what’s called the code city metaphor). Take a look at this wiki page, with examples from all sorts of commonly used JavaScript libraries.

So what does Kin’s codebase look like in city-form? Drumroll please:

It’s a rare treat as a developer getting to actually see something that you’ve only ever interacted with abstractly – but more importantly – it’s an excellent opportunity to give the team you work with new perspective on both your work, and the underpinnings of your product. I went a step further and marked up the generated image with some annotations to indicate what features belonged to which buildings:

Your Turn

I highly recommend giving this a whirl if you’re a developer, and taking the opportunity to look at your company’s website or product through a new lens. If you’re interested, here are a few things to keep in mind:

• All the instructions for setting up your own city are on the JSCity Readme.
• You’ll want to remove any JavaScript libraries (such as jQuery) from your project before rendering – the size of the libraries will often eclipse the buildings of your custom code.
• The screenshots are great, but the real magic is getting to move around and interact with your city in 3D.
• One counter-intuitive thing to remember is that the size of the buildings is often inversely proportional to the efficiency of your code (since the height translates to lines of code). So while it may seem majestic to have a few soaring skyscrapers in your city scape, they might be an indication some refactoring is in order. (I’m eyeballing our profile and time-off features as I write this…)

Good luck and happy architecting!

On the outskirts of Baltimore, Maryland resides a killer brewery, DuClaw Brewing Company. They’ve brewed and marketed more than 40 unique beers, and will be distributed in eleven states by the end of the year. DuClaw Brewing has found fluidity at play in more than just the beer they brew – it also drives their team’s ability to tackle challenges creatively and employ everyone’s skill and talents regardless of role.  

Who are you, what’s your role, and your favorite hand-held food?

[ER] Kin has taken what was once a paperwork/scheduling/logistical nightmare for me and turned it into a fast, efficient, paper-free after thought. Keeping track of vacation days and scheduling leave took so much time when our staff was small that when our rapid growth and expansion started a few years ago, I quickly realized that managing vacations could become a full time job. But Kin not only simplifies the record keeping and scheduling through the calendar, it also adds the graphs for people that are more visually oriented. Everyone can use the system easily, which allowed us to essentially divide responsibility for time-off management among the entire staff.

“So much of what we already do relies on individual team members being self-starting and self-reliant, that Kin was a natural fit for us. It not only reinforces that ethos, it also makes it easy for individual team members to be self-sufficient.”

Anything notable going on lately? 

[CQ] We recently expanded our distribution territory into Ohio and South Carolina (joining Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Northern Virginia, West Virginia, Washington DC, and North Carolina), and looking to add Kentucky by the end of the year!

By Alex Yohn

Sep 8, 2015

This is a three-part series of articles on building, growing and supporting company culture. The first article in this series discussed whether a startup’s culture can survive its initial phases of growth. This article will take a look at something even more foundational: A company’s core values, how it can identify them, and how those values can fit into the larger idea of company culture.

Inscribed in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi was a phrase that recurred throughout the works of the Ancient Greeks: “Know Thyself.” Plato’s own works repeat this maxim several times.

Self-knowledge has been an important concept since the first human communities formed because it informs the reasons we act and behave as we do. The same maxim applies to organizations, too, which just like individuals, can know themselves through thoughtful reflection.

This is the point of developing core values within a company. These values let employees and clients know what your company stands for, and help organize the actions of every team member toward your company’s goals.

This self-knowledge at the organizational level forms the foundation upon which company culture is built.

Identifying Your Company’s Core Values

It’s very difficult to nail down a set of core values that define a company and guide every team member’s actions. Writing down and trying to adhere to a handful of general virtues feels inauthentic. Instead, core values tend to reveal themselves over time.

Business coach Roberto Erario, writing at the Function Point blog, offers several angles of approach that he advises his own clients to take when identifying their companies’ core values. Here are three of them:

1. List a handful of situations that could serve as microcosms for what the company is all about. Erario’s examples: “a client had a problem that your team solved quickly and with care; your team worked hard to meet an important deadline but made sure to have lots of fun while getting the work done.” Then, find the common thread among those events.
2. Pick out a handful of people within the organization whom you feel would be good ambassadors for the company, then describe what among those individuals’ character traits lead you to each choice.
3. The counter to point No. 1, Erario recommends listing a handful of business situations that were especially frustrating. “Include situations where you thought ‘this is a such a waste of resources’ or ‘this person is not showing any commitment at all,'” he writes. Then, identify what values were not lived up to or were violated in each instance.

Putting Those Values into Words (and Ensuring Those Words Have Meaning)

Next comes the hard part. You have to take those values you uncovered, which are likely still nebulous, and turn them into clear statements that team members and clients can all immediately understand.

“Core values should make sense to outsiders and employees alike,” Casey Scott writes for The Newsletter Pro. “Then, when everything is clear and concise, it becomes easier to apply your values to the real world. Team members can recognize and celebrate others within the organization who are living the values and contributing to company culture.”

(For reference, check out The Newsletter Pro’s Core Values.)

Marketing veteran Andrea Goulet Ford writes at her BrandVox blog that one quick way to give these words real resonance is to simply start each statement with a verb.

“For example, if you want your employees to act with empathy when interacting with customers, instead of just saying ‘empathy,’ you could say ‘embrace empathy,'” she writes. “Embracing empathy has way more meaning than just the word empathy.”

Ford also warns organizations not to follow their values so closely that “you develop a cult in the process.”

“You can laugh, but it does happen. It breeds a culture of uber exclusiveness where outsiders are shunned, newbies aren’t welcomed, and creativity and innovation are stifled. Find a balance between new ideas, perspectives, and rules of engagement and you will be fine.”

Empowering the Team

Next, help these words you’ve found to describe your company’s core values translate into action. This happens at the individual level, across all team members.

Scott recommends that team leaders “escalate the celebration of your core values to activities and events” to bring those values to life.

“When your team members are participating in something bigger than themselves, they make real connections,” he writes. “The company’s values, and by extension, its culture, transform into something tangible people can grab onto and take with them.”

When there is a disconnect — if the core values fail to resonate with a team member, whether by disagreement or misunderstanding — that team member can become disengaged quickly.

“This might mean that the employee simply doesn’t like what the company does, but more frequently, this is caused by a lack of clarity on what the company does in the eyes of the employee,” writes Don Harkey, CIO and partner at People Centric Consulting Group.

Harkey reiterates Scott’s recommendations: “Employees should be exposed to the great things your organization does.”

This is where strong leadership comes into play. The best way to translate your company’s core values into the work that team members do is to explicitly connect their work with the values, the mission and the vision you’ve laid out.

“Employees know what to do,” Jeff Haden writes at Cafe Quill. “They’re trained and guided and mentored. They know their jobs; they know their tasks, their processes and their guidelines.

“What many employees don’t know is why they do what they do. Processes are great, but rolling out a process without explaining the underlying reasons for that process is a dictate — and no one likes dictates. Explaining the reasoning behind a process helps employees inform that process rather than simply be trapped by its constraints.

“When employees understand why, they no longer simply follow — they also lead.”

4 Examples of Well-Thought-Out Core Values

Perhaps the easiest way to demonstrate how a company identifies its core values is to see how others have done it. Below are four especially good examples.

Devbridge Group: A Software Design and Development Company

“When we tried [to write down our core values], the only thing we had in common, it seemed, was premature hair loss,” Devbridge Group President Aurimas Adomavicius wrote in June. “Couldn’t agree on values. Didn’t seem genuine. After several attempts, we shelved the concept, rolled up our sleeves, and got back to what we knew how to do — make software.

“Seven years have passed and what I realize in retrospect is that we weren’t ready. We had little in terms of identity, so trying to establish company values was like trying to cook a meal without the ingredients. Honest company values can only capture the essence of what the team already believes, not what you wish to force feed into your organization.”

Here is Devbridge’s resulting list of company values (notice the verb-first phrasing):

• Make Great Things
• Have Fun
• Seek Mastery
• Embrace Transparency
• Take Ownership
• Deliver Results

Officevibe: An Employee Engagement Software Company

“The first thing we did, was define our mission,” Officevibe Director of Content Jacob Shriar wrote in 2014. “This is important, because it really sets you up for the rest.

“In one sentence, if we had to sum up what we’re trying to do, this is it. Build the most epic place to work, have fun, and innovate.”

Connectifier: A Recruitment Intelligence Company

Connectifier co-founder and CEO John Jersin told Pingboard in January that he hadn’t yet begun to consider values or company culture until the founding team made its very first hire.

“After we got a signature on an offer letter, we slid into a low level panic about how to make the office seem less lonely,” he said. “Whether we needed to start buying snacks and even whether we should play music during the day. Over time, we stopped worrying about the little things; realizing our culture was more about why we did things, rather than what we did. In other words, culture is about our values and how those values influence the actions of the company.”

Connectifier expresses its values and mission in a couple of statements right on its About page. Below is the description for the listing “Who We Are.” Notice how the team’s tech background is so core to its identity, though the core values themselves are not explicit:

“Connectifier is an AI company. Our goal of building intelligence into employment platforms requires a heavy focus on distributed systems, information retrieval, and scaling. As such, our team draws from places like Google, Amazon, Stanford, Microsoft Research, NASA, Carnegie Mellon, and Berkeley National Lab.”

Lightning Lab: A Digital Accelerator in New Zealand

Tech entrepreneur Dan Khan wrote last December about his own experiences with communicating core values for Lightning Lab:

“At one event we hosted at the Lab, we received a negative comment about our core values, suggesting thirteen were too many to be useful and three would be more appropriate. I thought about this over the next few days  —  I’ve seen plenty of companies who have values like ‘Integrity, Trust, and Honesty,’ but these are ‘table-stakes’ for me, and after considered thought I stood by the values we created.

“Why? Because my team and I referred to our values daily (and by number!) to help drive and promote our desired behaviour, especially aspirational values like ‘#7. Ask for help more than we think,’ ‘#9. Feed the ecosystem,’ and ‘#10. Be grateful for the help we receive,’ all highly relevant in the giveback ecosystem that startups and accelerators operate in.

The Resilience of Core Values

Khan’s story in particular highlights a key benefit of having well-thought-out core values: They form a resilient constitution. Having that stable foundation is certainly important to startups and accelerators, as he said, but even mature organizations are buttressed by their values during lean times.

“While core values are stable, the marketplace certainly isn’t, and that’s where interim beliefs emerge,” Chris Cancialosi writes at Forbes.

“For example, if market share dips, your organization must shift its focus and adopt new guiding principles in response. While these company-wide tenets may be reactionary, they’re no less important. They can be the driving factors that trigger a change in behavior or a new initiative that helps you stay competitive.

“As your attention shifts, a chasm can form between your core and interim values. This is where frustration is born. The key is to only implement interim values that directly support your core ones.”

images by:
Bhoj Raj
Javier Calvo
Ryan Wong

By Alex Yohn

Sep 3, 2015

In just a few weeks’ time, we’ll be releasing a feature that helps our customers manage employee reviews and objectives. It’s been a long time coming, and customers have been asking about it pretty much since day one of Kin (way back in 2013).

Early in our design and research, we learned that most companies (including our own) don’t want or need comprehensive performance review software. Their primary need is with the administration of reviews and objectives. The cursed “annual performance review” is partially the product of not having the resources or time to provide more frequent get togethers with employees.

So, rather than build a highly prescriptive, highly customizable tool, we’re addressing the lowest common denominators that will have the biggest impact on our customer’s efforts to keep engagement high and feedback flowing.

Our goal with Kin’s employee review software is to bring people together, then to get out of the way. We want Kin to be a facilitator in the employee review process, not the object of discussion itself.

Here are a few sneak peeks of the new tools.

Employee Objectives

Employee objectives are mission critical to helping employees stay aligned with company goals and growing professionally. We did a nice little write up on the what’s, how’s, and why’s of employee objectives a few weeks back.

Kin’s version of employee objectives is simple. Both employees and managers can create them, then both sides work toward the goal of completing the objective. Kin tracks progress, notes, and feedback.

Then, when it’s time for employee reviews, just crack open Kin and have a look at all the goodness going on in an employee’s objectives.

Pssssttttt! We actually snuck this feature in a few weeks ago and it’s ready for all of our customers to start using in advance of the bigger release in a few weeks. Here are some more details.

Scheduling and delegating employee reviews 

Ensuring check-ins with employees happen regularly when a company is small is easy – ya swivel your chair around and start talking. When the team grows though, it gets tougher to have off-the-cuff discussions with employees. That’s when it’s time to formalize the review process and ensure the entire team stays connected and well-aligned.

In Kin, HR and operations folk have the tools to set up waves of reviews (monthly, quarterly, etc.), group employees with managers, and then assign a time-frame for when the reviews should happen. Once they’ve saved a group of reviews, they can track the progress and completion of the reviews.

The review itself

For the review feature itself, we’re keeping things simple. In addition to tracking progress on their objectives, employees are asked to provide feedback on their own contributions, that of their managers, and lastly, on the company. Likewise, managers can give direct feedback to an employee and it’s all shared in a single, clean, and legible page.

Productive feedback == better collaboration == successful workplace. 

Employee reviews get a bad reputation because employers let bad process (and software) get between them and constructive conversations with employees. Kin’s new tools bring the right mix of software, flexibility, and administration to help companies and their employees stay aligned, productive, and moving ahead.