By Alex Yohn
Mar 26, 2013
This is part one of a three-part series on building the other side of your business, your workplace.
In the beginning, every founder should forget the details of building a workplace. You focus on your product or your service. You get your legs under you and push a product out the door, then you begin to hire. You hire a developer, a designer, maybe a business-centric counterpart. All along, without much attention, your two to three-person shop becomes a workplace: a little community where people come, provide a service, and get paid in return. The duties to service this workplace, like paying salaries or fixing computers, are tasks you as founder inherit and take care of. Maybe they’re the red-headed stepchild tasks of running your own business. Maybe you like the diversion. →
By Alex Yohn
Mar 18, 2013
One of the hardest parts of growing the business you founded is letting go of it after you’ve hired and trained. Letting go of every decision. Letting go of things being done exactly how you’d like.
You hang on because complexity grows with the organization, and that makes you nervous. Making decisions takes more time. The team iterates more because there are more minds to meddle. →
By Alex Yohn
Mar 6, 2013
I firmly believe that small companies will dramatically increase their team’s trust by doing a better job on simple stuff like onboarding, time off management, payroll, and benefit enrollment.
That’s it. Fold in perks and things like performance reviews after a while, sure. But, do the simple stuff first, and do it well. That makes the biggest difference to employees and costs the least to implement. Another example of where simplification can reap huge rewards is with HR jargon. →
By Alex Yohn
Feb 27, 2013
What do you think of when you think of HR? I ponder on the shoddy experiences I’ve had with large employers. Bad reviews, or none at all.
A human reading a powerpoint presentation as ‘my orientation into this hundred-million dollar complex of a corporation’. Getting paid for the first time 2 months after starting. The experience of quitting a job and only then being encountered by several concerned people. I’ve worked at these swinging-door places before. I’ll bet you have too. Most of the people working for Kin or We Are Mammoth have as well. The crazy thing about these companies is they have dedicated HR teams who are there specifically to help employees navigate their experiences at the company. So no wonder most employees regard HR with disdain. They’re there, but kinda not. HR fails in both design and function. →
By Alex Yohn
Feb 14, 2013
In early 2012, we needed to grow our team. We needed coders, designers, and an administrative team to support them. So we got busy searching, interviewing, selecting, and onboarding folks for the next 7 months. The problem was we didn’t have a great hiring process. We knew that in order to make the most of the talented people joining, though, we’d better create a refined onboarding experience to get everyone briefed and wired into the team.
Our goal became to ensure that every new team member who walks in the door on their first day would have already submitted their paperwork, read our handbook, and had a good understanding of the projects and people they’d be working with. Likewise, we’d already have them set up with a computer, phone, and network and their payroll and benefit elections would be ready to go. →