By Lisa Arnold
Feb 9, 2021
What is your organization like when the boss isn’t in the room? Is there a muted sigh of relief? A feeling that tasks can finally be accomplished? Or, is there a sense of empowerment that the instructions set in place allow for both structure and creative freedom?
Your answer to this question is the diagnosis of your company’s organizational culture.
Organizational culture can be make-or-break for the life and success of a company. When employees feel unhappy, stressed, or micromanaged, productivity decreases. Culture is also a huge factor in why people leave jobs. 47% of active job seekers cited their organizational culture as the reason they were looking for work.
Thankfully, creating a great organizational culture doesn’t have to involve redirecting cash towards $3,000 espresso machines or high-tech ping-pong tables (although if you can, great!). Often, small changes made at the top level of management can have a big effect on improving company culture.
Here are just a few examples:
Hire the right people
Get ahead of the curve before your employee even steps foot in the door. During the interview process, clearly lay out your company values and see if your candidate is a good fit. When you’re not in the room, these values will guide employee decision-making, so it’s crucial to hire people who know and embrace them up front.
When you hire employees who are a good fit for your culture upfront, you’re also investing in their future happiness in the company- and lowering turnover rates, as well.
Wondering how to hire well? We’ve written a blog post on how we hire remotely for a great cultural fit. Even if you’re in the office, a lot can translate from the process we have in place at Kin. Check it out here.
Create space for recognition and reward
Recognizing achievements among your employees on a regular basis is crucial to establishing a culture worth replicating. Recognizing individuals’ work publicly helps satisfy Maslow’s higher-order needs (social, self-esteem) while also setting a precedent for how work should be performed by others. Creating a culture of positive recognition can also increase employee retention drastically, with some studies claiming up to 60%.
Don’t just provide the recognition yourself. Encourage the rest of your team to contribute. Bhavin Parikh, CEO of Magoosh, provides opportunities at the end of monthly meetings for employees to shout out individuals they feel embodied each company value that month. At Kin, we did this by bringing in Bonus.ly, a microbonus tool that allows us to not only publicly recognize a colleagues efforts, but give them a small bonus, too. It has not only helped us celebrate each other, it’s also let the team as a whole see little accomplishments they may not have prior to Bonus.ly shout outs.
Although recognition feels great and goes a long way in laying the foundation for a positive culture, following up with a tangible reward can give credence to praise. Reward behaviors, not just outcomes, and don’t think you have to tie a dollar value to a specific reward. Taking a team member out to lunch, giving an afternoon off, or even providing an unsolicited LinkedIn recommendation can go a long way in making employees feel their work is valued in a meaningful way.
Show you’re invested in their wellbeing outside of work
Employees are more than just employees. They are spouses, parents, partners, artists, athletes, pet owners, students- the list goes on. Investing in the lives of employees beyond simply the 9-5 benefits the company as a whole. In fact, managers who developed a wellbeing program for employees saw reduced turnover, increased engagement, and better customer service.
Whether it’s a discounted gym membership, bring your dog to work day, or a discretionary educational stipend, the positive results on mental health and creativity can go a long way for your team. In addition, it does stellar things for your reputation as an employer and can attract top talent.
Give everyone a voice
One of PepsiCo’s most profitable products, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, came from the mind of a janitor at a Frito Lay plant. Richard Montañez’s idea for a hot chip inspired by grilled street corn would have gone nowhere if CEO Roger Enrico hadn’t taken his phone call and given him two weeks to prepare a pitch for the product- the rest is history.
The best ideas can come from anywhere in the company. Removing silos in communication and making it clear you are open to ideas from anywhere can contribute significantly to both your bottom line and employee morale. Provide opportunities for brainstorming and give intrapreneurship a place in your quarterly or yearly meetings. Giving team members the opportunity to contribute their ideas and solutions increases engagement and a feeling of belonging.
Aim for transparency
Employees need to feel they can trust senior management in order to perform well, fulfilling the lower-order needs of safety and security. Keep team members in the loop with frequent and clear top-down communication and keep an open-door policy for when anyone has questions that need face-to-face interactions. Don’t hide from uncomfortable discussions. Transparency at the top pays off. Employees are more engaged, retention increases, and problem-solving is made quicker by removing barriers.
At the end of the work day, organizational culture is something that follows team members home in either a positive or negative way. This year, take a look at your company culture and find ways you can make improvements for the sake of your both employees and ROI.
By The Kin Team
Feb 1, 2021
This is the second in a two-part series on performance reviews. The first post dealt with the common mistakes so many organizations make in conducting reviews. This article takes a look at some best practices to help companies make the most of a mission-critical tool for building a successful workplace.
Productive employee reviews take practice and discipline but they’re a critical tool used to build informed, collaborative workplaces. Below are seven best practices that will help any organization make the most of their employee/employer feedback cycle.
Create well-aligned Objectives
Employee objectives which are well-aligned with a company’s own strategic objectives are an incredible way for employees to understand how their individual contributions drive their company forward. They also serve as a roadmap for the employee’s own progress at the company and, as such, they become the centerpiece of employee review conversations.
Once objectives are defined, it’s time to get into the actionable next steps which the employee (manager, employer, etc.) will take to ensure the objective is achieved. These action steps are critical to ensuring that there is regular, measurable progress being made, and they’ll provide a regular boost to morale each time a task can be checked off the list.
Provide productive, actionable feedback
Sachin Shetty at hiring software provider VoiceGlance offers a helpful example of ad hominem criticism versus specific, behavior-focused criticism. To tell an employee “You’re unreliable,” Shetty writes, offers no useful advice and it will likely force them to further entrench that behavior.
Shetty offers an alternative way of phrasing this criticism: “Two times in the past month, your work has been submitted late.” This offers criticism that is both specific and prescriptive, and lets the employee know he/she should make it a priority to hand in work on time.
Another key to providing productive feedback is to avoid being overly impulsive – take time to let initial reactions to an employee’s behavior simmer to ensure that rational and objectivity are present in the feedback being provided back to the employee.
Take Time to Prepare
Good performance reviews require due diligence and planning, even if the company has a culture of frequent, informal employee/manager communications. “Nothing looks worse to an employee than having this important meeting on the fly,” the team at Complete Payroll Processing, Inc. writes. “By taking the time to prepare, you are showing your employee that you care and will take the time to help him/her succeed.”
Managers should create objectives and an agenda for each performance review, and take good notes during the meeting. Demonstrating that level of preparedness helps reinforce the trust it takes in the employer-employee relationship to deliver fair criticism. Then, follow up after the review with any notes, wins and next steps on employee objectives. Finally, make sure the employee is doing the same. Employee reviews are not a one-way street – both parties owe it to themselves to come prepared with well-considered feedback.
Give Feedback Frequently Throughout the Year
Open, ongoing communication is the key ingredient to employee success. Regular, ad hoc conversations with employees coupled with frequent (quarterly or monthly) employee review cycles are a good way to keep feedback fresh and relevant.
“You want to get the best from employees, and real-time feedback on accomplishments and challenges gives them the opportunity to grow throughout the year,” writes Chad Savoy, a VP of sales at Cornerstone OnDemand. “Then come review time, you can focus on achievements and growth instead of rehashing past challenges.”
If there is a disconnect in that ongoing feedback loop, then this sets the performance review up to feel more like a judgement, or at least a college exam. Sometimes, this can be the result of a team leader either lacking time or wanting to punt on a tough conversation.
Real-time feedback means the content of a performance review doesn’t catch anyone by surprise, which Matt Ingold at employee benefits platform provider Benetech says should be considered a leadership failure.
“Too often, leaders side-step the difficult conversations about an employee’s sub-par performance or counter-cultural attitude and don’t hold employees accountable for improvement until they are held accountable to do so by the performance review process,” he writes.
Don’t Mix Pay Raises and Performance Reviews
Productive performance reviews are tools to aid in compensation considerations but the review itself isn’t the time to determine pay raises, as it can incentivize employees to try and ace reviews for financial gain rather than seek honest feedback on their performance.
“Performance and compensation are significant enough on their own, so it’s usually not ideal to mix the two,” the Harvard Business Review offers as part of its series of quick tips.
“So, if your direct report raises the question, thank him for bringing it up and promise to get back to him by a specific date. Take time to fairly assess whether an increase in pay is appropriate. When you do talk about it, explain that a person’s salary is determined by two things: the value of the job to the organization and the quality of the individual’s performance. Ask him to consider both factors, examining both how the job can be made more valuable to the company and how his performance can be improved.”
Our own best practice is to have distinct compensation discussions outside of quarterly employee reviews. Our compensation considerations begin internally (at the executive level) at the beginning of the quarter in which an employee has an annual anniversary. Then, come the anniversary, we have a one-on-one with the employee (again, outside of normal performance reviews) to catch up high-level on how things are going. That’s when we discuss compensation changes, how we’ve come to our decision, and what feedback the employee may have for us.
Offer to Get a Second Opinion
In this series’ first post, we mentioned that biases can factor into the way an employee’s performance is evaluated. Well, even if biases are eliminated from the employer side of things, there’s still the issue of perceived biases on the employee’s side.
According to a recent NCMM survey, more than 4 in 10 respondents said they felt managers played favorites during the review process.
Strategist and Duke University professor Dorie Clark at The National Center for The Middle Market (NCMM) suggests instituting second-level reviews, such as peer reviews or reviewing employee feedback with a manager’s own boss, to overcome any such perceptions. “Employees will be a lot less willing to learn from their performance reviews if they feel the system is rigged,” she writes. With the knowledge that feedback is coming from more than a single source, employees will be less likely to feel like the deck is stacked against them personally.
Demonstrate a Commitment to Strong Work Relationships
The employee review experience can be daunting at times, inevitably adding to our already stressful daily lives. That’s why it’s important to spend a few moments at the end of a review reaffirming the reasons for the process itself: to understand and build stronger relationships with your team members, and ensure everyone is getting the most out of the organization.
Jen Dary, founder of the talent strategy consultancy Plucky, frames this as building a community of colleagues.
“Embracing failure, giving credit for successes and providing support for people to be human builds strong relationships between a community of co-workers,” she writes on her Medium blog. “This affects retention rates but also allows employees to be more efficient, effective and powerful workers because they work better through the inevitable distractions of conflict, burnout and more. They highly appreciate the healthy community that they work for.”
images by:
StartupStockPhotos, mickey970
By The Kin Team
Jan 28, 2021
Since introducing Kin, we’ve learned a lot about creating effective employee objectives.
When our CEO Craig Bryant originally dove into the science and art of creating good employee objectives, he focused on an approach popularized by Marnie E. Green, author of Painless Performance Evaluations: A Practical Approach to Managing Day-to-Day Employee Performance.
Green’s approach to writing different employee objectives is broken into four categories:
- Essence of the Job Goals
Define tasks that will be required to complete the job, should be very personalized to the individual position and employee
- Project Goals
Activities that the employee should pursue with a clearly defined beginning and end
- Professional Development Goals
What the employee will learn in the next six months and a year that will help their professional growth
- Performance Goals
Very basic, but what time the employee should show up, what they should wear, etc.
When writing employee objectives, applying the principles of S.M.A.R.T goals helps to create a more defined objective. If you’re unfamiliar, the basic idea of S.M.A.R.T. objectives are that they are:
- Specific (simple, sensible, significant)
- Measurable (meaningful, motivating)
- Achievable (agreed, attainable)
- Relevant (reasonable, realistic and resourced, results-based)
- Time bound (time-based, time limited, time/cost limited, timely, time-sensitive)
Keeping S.M.A.R.T. objectives in mind, here are four employee objective examples, one for each of Green’s categories. You and your employee will want to tailor each of their objectives to be unique. Consider the role, the department, company initiatives, budgets, and of course, reality.
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Objective example: Analyze and report social media metrics every Monday morning
Essence of the Job goals are specific enough to provide direct guidance to the employee. These are actions that the employee is going to take on a regular basis, be it every day or every week as in our example.
While there are a few ways to structure the sentence, making sure that your objective passes the S.M.A.R.T. goals test and applies to Green’s categories is key.
The analyzing and reporting of social media metrics is a responsibility given to a specific employee. There might be only one person on your team who can do this.
“Every Monday morning” is a great example of a time-bound objective. It’s clear to the employee when the metrics are to be reported and is measurable by whether or not the employee reports the metrics each week.
Using this example, you can replace the words before “every” with the duty of a specific job and replace the words after “every” with a relevant time-bound constraint.
A few more examples include: update the executive team on marketing initiatives every Friday, write two blog posts about the company every month, or enroll new employees in our direct deposit program every time a new hire is being onboarded.
If you’re still having trouble coming up with essence of the job goals, you may have already written a few. Take a look at the job description that the employee applied for the job with. The duties and responsibilities are not only a great place to start for these objectives, but sometimes your objectives are already be written for you.
This is one of the few times a copy-and-paste does the trick.
Objective example: Launch our new app to the app store by the end of the year
Project goals tend to fall outside of your employee’s regular day-to-day activities. The projects associated with these goals are in addition to your employees existing work. This could include creating new systems to manage internal work or creating a new product.
Our example focuses on a large feat, for sure. Launching an app is no easy task. It requires more folks than what would normally be responsible for an objective and may fall more on the project managers and other leaders on your team than you.
Project objectives may not have been discussed along with the other types of objectives talked about here, but they are just as important. Projects move businesses faster and with more strategy.
Regardless of the project outcome, going over the results, and having your employees held responsible for them, is the key to your employee’s growth.
Creating project goals is as easy as listening for the outcome of the project and holding your staff accountable with time-bound restrictions.
Remember to communicate your expectations and be sure that your employee buys into the objective.
Objective example: Complete the HubSpot Marketing Certification by the end of Q1
Professional Development goals connect the employee and your company on a shared path of growth. These goals are not bound by the day-to-day duties of the job, but rather focuses on learning opportunities.
If your company is using HubSpot for inbound marketing and sales, gearing one of your employees in the marketing department to obtain one of their many certifications will help both the company and the employee.
Your company will reap the benefits of having a skilled employee in the software you otherwise might not have had and your employee will benefit from the expanded skill set they have under their belt.
“By the end of Q1” creates a time-bound objective. What makes this a great employee objective isn’t just how it’s written, but the work done behind the words.
Can your employee complete the certification by the end of Q1?
The “A” in S.M.A.R.T. goals is the key to a great professional development objective. If your employee can agree to the action and the time limit on the objective, then the goal is achievable. This requires you and your employee to chat it out!
Be open to them about how great of an opportunity the goal is, suggest a timeframe or two and agree on what would work best together.
With this example, think of “it would be nice” situations. What credentials are available for your employee to use to advance their career and make progress in your company? This isn’t necessarily a certification, it could be a class, a conference, or even connecting your employee with a mentor in your company.
Other examples of a professional development goal could be: attend two SaaS conferences this year or re-certify for an HR credential by August.
Objective example: Reduce customer service response times from 48 hours to 24 hours
Performance goals should really be called performance improvement goals. While not a strict adherence to Green’s perspective, the addition of improvement provides a better understanding of when to use performance improvement as an objective.
With an employee not meeting standards, a performance improvement objective puts the responsibility of achieving the goal solely on the employee.
If the 48 hour period is thought to be unacceptable and a negative mark on the employee’s performance, this goal would be paired with a performance improvement plan where the employee would be required to meet this goal or risk consequences.
Performance improvement objectives that are created to better gauge whether or not the employee can grow in the role are an important way to mitigate any potential concerns about the employee performing at a specific level.
Whether your employee has not met the standards of the job or they are on their way to taking the next step and growing, a performance improvement objective helps put a plan in place to move your employee to the next step.
A next-step performance improvement goal is structured the same way, but it’s used as a way to simply gain increases and efficiencies.
Other examples of a performance improvement objective include: double website traffic over the next 12 months or increase sales revenue by 15% over the next six months.
Help your employee achieve their objectives
All four categories of Green’s objectives, with S.M.A.R.T. application, are needed for your folks to thrive at your company and it’s important to create objectives employees actually care about.
Clearly defined employee objectives make performance reviews easier. And when your employee achieves these goals, be sure to share the news of their achievements.
By Lisa Arnold
Jan 22, 2021
Creating a great onboarding experience for an employee is crucial to their long-term success at your company. From the interview process, to the first day, to the first three months, there are factors in each step that help your new colleague determine how long they’d like to stay, how committed they are to the work and how much of a cultural fit they’ll be as they become comfortable with the team. That’s a big reason why we created Kin.
Before Kin, whenever we would hire our own team members, we would create a personalized one-page website, called Starting Point, to welcome them onto the team and deliver information prior to their first day. It contained email addresses, phone numbers, short bios of our team members, links to the tools we used most frequently and other facts, such as a great place to get some lunch in the neighborhood.
The goal? Get new hires feeling like they’re part of the team before they were actually, well, part of the team. That way on the first day, they felt like they were already in it all along. They knew names, they knew the tools they’d be introduced to, and of course, they knew where to grab a great bite come noon.
Little things like this led to big results. In fact, we have some of the longest tenures in our industry, with many people that we’ve hired as we’ve grown still being at Kin. The folks that have left still stay in touch for the most part. We even work with a few of them as they’ve gone on to create their own companies.
These types of great relationships amongst the team don’t happen overnight. They start well, they’re nurtured throughout the time people spend at Kin, and then, they’re often expressed in the software we create.
Here are a few examples of the way our tool has evolved to create a better employee onboarding experience – both at Kin and in your organization, too.
Create a personalized onboarding page to welcome new hires
Just like Starting Point, Kin has the ability to create a quick and easy onboarding page that gives new hires the exact information they need to succeed and be comfortable on their first day. It includes a quick welcome note, tasks they need to accomplish before and on the first day, an overview of the tools they will be using, a quick look at the teammates they’ll be working most closely with, and the ability to ask any questions they may have directly on the page to their HR Manager.
In our welcome note, we typically give a brief outline of what their first week will look like, helping them ease any fears that may come with not knowing what’s next. Overall, this sets the tone of transparency throughout the organization because the employee knows exactly what is expected of them over the next few days.
Make paperwork the easiest part of getting hired
The feeling of coming in on the first day to a pile of benefit forms, direct deposit forms, handbooks, policies and more doesn’t make for a great first impression. With Kin, you can send these forms out ahead of time so the new employee can have them completed prior to the first day and be ready to roll when they get there.
Everything through Kin’s HRIS is digital. You can add as many forms, booklets, handbooks and policies as you’d like. The new hire and the HR manager can sign and fill out forms right within our tool. We also have areas where you can collect information like emergency contacts, addresses, frequent flyer numbers and more to create a profile that has all employee data in one place. The employee can also edit this at any time, keeping everything up to date.
We typically send these out at least one week in advance, giving the new hire plenty of time to get everything set. When they start on the first day, after we’ve made sure their technology works and they can access the tools they need, we do a quick run through of the paperwork. There, we make sure there are no questions, sign off on what we need to on our end and turn them loose on their next onboarding task.
Behind the scenes, our people operations director, Dee, begins filing the paperwork and getting them all set. It’s important to us that they immediately are paid on the pay cycle we’re on, so getting the direct deposit and tax paperwork set needs to happen fast.
Make requesting PTO easy-peasy
One of our most “sticky” features about Kin is its PTO tool. Our team doesn’t email their manager to request time off, nor is it a Slack conversation. The entire workflow happens in Kin.
An employee can easily request time off with just a few clicks and it goes directly to their manager. Their manager can approve or deny the request right within their email, or go into the tool if they’d like to see more information.
Paid time off is crucial to a good working relationship with any employee at any stage of their tenure. By showing new hires how easy we’ve made it to request the time, we’re removing any trepidation they may have about approaching their manager for the time they need down the line. Just a few clicks, and you’re done!
Setting expectations upfront
After a few weeks of getting settled into the role, we work with our new hire to give them some concrete objectives that they can actively work towards. These objectives are loaded into Kin as part of Kin’s employee feedback tool. Employees can update them regularly with what they’ve accomplished toward the objective so far.
This part of the tool keeps the “eye on the prize,” so to say. It allows for our employees to know their main focuses, and to continuously work towards them while informing their managers of how they’re doing. It by no means removes the need for manager-employee conversations to be regularly taking place, but it does provide a great location for team members to keep track of their progress, and a good outline for those conversations.
By The Kin Team
Jan 18, 2021
This post is the second half of a series that explores the importance of vacation time and how small companies can manage it. The first piece looked at how employees can use their time off to create a healthier work-life balance. This piece looks at how employers can manage vacation time optimally.
Vacation policies are a delicate balancing act that look different from one organization to the next. No matter a company’s size or industry, though, its time-off policy must be fair to both employees and the employer.
“Fair” in this case is more nuanced than it would seem at first blush. Consider what happens when an employee accrues years of unused vacation days, for example. Those go on the company balance sheet as liabilities, the Wall Street Journal‘s Rachel Emma Silverman points out, and a company must be prepared to compensate the employee if she leaves or retires.
At the same time, an unclear time-off policy — or a company culture that promotes workaholism — benefits no one. “An employee who works, works, works is stressed and zombie-esque,” U.S. News Careers editor Laura McMullen writes. “One who vacations now and then is rejuvenated and more focused. Which would you rather work with?”
Here are three big-picture things to think about when setting your company’s own time-off policy.
How to Manage Vacation Requests and Time Off
We have written before about the importance of approving time off via email. When employees request time off, managers receive an email that contains a time-off balance, who else is out during that time, and the ability to approve or decline the request right there in the email.
Beyond the details of processing time-off requests, author and former Harvard Business Review editor Karen Dillon has a handful of thoughtful tips for how managers can handle vacation requests.
Her first tip touches on something that is important and often overlooked: “Don’t be judgmental about how people spend their time off. The employee who is deeply involved in competitive dog shows will be just as recharged by spending a week doing that than the employee who wants nothing more than to sit by a pool at a pricey resort. As a manager, it’s not your job to judge or prioritize how people choose to spend their time off.”
As far as accommodating everyone’s vacations, Dillon suggests a company could implement a rota system so that certain employees get to choose their vacation days first, and make sure that list of people with first choice changes annually.
Another option, she writes, is to simply close up shop for a week or two. This approach frees managers from any criticism about playing favorites, and it ensures everyone takes their vacation days.
That last point is important: America seems to have a real problem with employees failing to take all of their vacation days.
Does an Optimal Vacation Policy Exist?
It’s up to each individual company to determine how many days off an employee receives. Paychex subsidiary SurePayroll recently conducted a survey of 259 small business owners to find out how much paid time off they offer employees, and three-quarters of respondents said 10 days or less.
Time-off policies themselves tend to fall into one of three broad groups:
- Employees get a fixed number of vacation days at the beginning of a work year.
- Employees get a certain number of vacation days each year, but unused days roll over.
- Employees have unlimited vacation days.
Interestingly, when employees have a fixed number of “use it or lose it” vacation days, they are much more likely to actually take all of their vacation days, The Atlantic‘s Joe Pinsker writes.
Pinsker cites data from the U.S. Travel Association, which found that 84% of employees working under “use it or lose it” policies take all of their time off. When employees have the option to roll their vacation days over, however, less than half use all of their annual paid time off.
Across all companies and all industries, Pinsker writes, 41% of Americans leave at least one vacation day on the table.
Why Employees Fail to Use Their Paid Vacation Days
The immediacy of “use it or lose it” vacation days helps explain why those employees actually take the vacation days that already belong to them — that policy leaves little room for ambiguity.
When policies do leave room for ambiguity, such as when vacation days are unlimited and go untracked, employees tend to err on the side of appearing industrious. Our CEO Craig Bryant has written before about the ins and outs of an unlimited paid time-off policy. As Craig notes in the article, our company made the switch to a staggered time-off policy because the unlimited days “did a pretty poor job of getting folks out of the office.”
In some company cultures, workaholism unfortunately is sometimes rewarded. As Pinsker writes, “One of the [U.S. Travel Association] report’s most telling statistics is that 15 percent of senior managers said they view employees who take all of their vacation days as ‘less dedicated’ — and that’s just the percentage who would admit it.”
Creating a Clear Vacation Policy
Laying out an unambiguous time-off policy will help alleviate employees’ fears that their vacation requests could make them seem “less dedicated.” Each employee’s vacation time is theirs, after all. Doing this also communicates a level of professionalism that is often rare among smaller teams.
Payroll software provider Execupay has some helpful guidelines for creating a paid-time-off policy. At minimum, the company suggests, any policy should include:
- “Who is eligible for PTO
- The amount of PTO provided
- How PTO time accumulates
- Whether they can carry over from year to year, and if so, how many
- The use of PTO during FMLA leave, if your company is subject to the law”
Let none of this research dissuade you from creating an unlimited-vacation-days policy, though, if you feel this would be successful at your own company. Two things are necessary for unlimited vacation policies to work.
First, you still need to track each person’s vacation days so your team can know who will be off when. Tracking also helps you understand how expensive this policy is to your company, and it also can communicate to your team that you want to make sure they take enough vacation time.
Second, as author David Burkus writes at HBR, trust needs to be baked into your company culture. “[T]here’s some evidence to suggest that showing trust in others actually helps them trust you more,” he writes. “Researchers who study game theory consistently find that when one person shows faith in another, the second person’s faith in others also rises. They’re also more likely to pay that trust forward, by trusting third parties who weren’t involved in the additional transaction. So there’s some theoretical evidence that implementing such a policy not only takes advantage of existing trust, but builds additional trust.”
Or, you could just do as Authentic Jobs‘ co-founder Cameron Moll did and mandate that everyone take a minimum number of vacation days off.
How Companies Can Encourage Employees to Use Their Vacation Time
A company’s leaders ultimately need to set the tone for the company’s vacation policy. This includes ensuring everyone takes their allotted time off and fostering a culture that doesn’t make people feel hesitant to take their vacation days.
Here are three ways employers can do this.
Create a Pro-Vacation Environment
“If you are in management, you are very likely part of the problem because you make your employees feel like they can’t take a day off,” adventurer Brendan Leonard, who blogs at Semi-Rad.com, writes of the American reluctance to take our vacation days.
“You know that Bob, in a typical day at his desk, is only working about 60 percent of the day anyway, when he’s not looking at Facebook, eating lunch, or sitting in meetings listening to all your amazing ideas. You might as well encourage him to take a week or two off, so on that Monday he comes back into the office, he’ll actually be productive because so much stuff backed up while he was gone.”
Forbes contributor Adam Hartung even has a new application for vacation tracking: “No company tracks how often a boss calls, texts, emails or phones a subordinate when on a holiday. No company tracks how often a boss requires a subordinate to ‘check in’ with the office while gone. Nobody pays any attention to how many hours an employee on vacation uses their mobile device or PC for company business while, ostensibly, ‘vacating’ their work in order to relax and recharge.”
Hartung’s idea might be tongue-in-cheek, but it’s not a bad one.
Senior Leaders Should Be Public About Their Own Time-Off
“Many managers and senior leaders get very public about taking time off and taking it in long stretches,” Burkus writes in his Harvard Business Review piece. “That way the message is clear that taking vacation won’t hurt your performance review or career prospective.”
And if employees are still loathe to take time off at that point, then there is always the mandatory vacation option.
Set Minimum Time Off Quotas
Companies with unlimited paid-time-off policies seem to have found success by mandating that employees take a minimum number of vacation days.
Authentic Jobs‘ co-founder Cameron Moll did this: Employees there have at least 12 holidays and 15 vacation days to take off. Marketing software giant HubSpot does something similar. HubSpot COO J.D. Sherman told The Washington Post‘s Jena McGregor that the company’s stated vacation is “two weeks to infinity.”
images by:
Mark Bosky, Adam Zvanovec, Bogdan Dum
By The Kin Team
Jan 18, 2021
This is the first in a two-part series on performance reviews, something that many organizations and their employees struggle with. This article looks at performance review failures: The misconceptions that make these reviews so frustrating, and the horror stories borne from these experiences.
A handful of huge companies have done away with traditional annual performance reviews. Accenture, McDonald’s and the company that evangelized Draconian employee evaluations throughout much of the 20th Century, GE, have all adopted new methods of reviewing employee performance. GE rolled out its new performance management strategy at the end of 2016 and still utilizes it today.
Annual performance reviews don’t make sense for multiple reasons. But employee evaluations don’t fail simply due to infrequency. Perverse incentives, prejudices and basic human nature regularly torpedo performance reviews. Here are four things that many organizations get wrong when they conduct performance reviews.
Performance Reviews Are Linked to Incentives For Employees and Managers
“I once worked in an organization where the managers were held accountable for increasing engagement scores,” change management expert Jason Little writes. “Unfortunately the annual bonuses for these managers were tied to making that number go up. What do you think happened? Perhaps even more disturbing is how proud this organization was of its ‘high, and constantly increasing, engagement score.'”
Tying performance to bonuses and raises seems to make sense, at least in theory. The hardest workers get rewarded for their efforts. In practice, that’s not what happens. Katherine Wood, Managing Editor at the HR blog Talent Tribune, writes at OpenView Labs that dangling carrots this way undermines employee reviews because both participants — reviewer and reviewee — focus their attention on what they need to do to earn more money.
This leads to inflated, inaccurate evaluations, which is exactly what Little describes in his experience with engagement scores.
Constructive Criticism Can Feel Antagonistic
“In 2013, psychologists at Kansas State University and other institutions studied how different kinds of people react to negative feedback,” the New Yorker’s Vauhini Vara writes. “They invited more than two hundred employees of a university to rate how they felt about a recent performance evaluation, and asked questions meant to categorize the employees based on how they approach personal goals.
“The researchers figured that people who seek out learning opportunities would react better than those who avoid situations in which they might fail. This was true — but even the avid learners disliked performance reviews, they just disliked them less.”
Meetings in which two or more people sit down to evaluate an employee’s performance can be constructive, but these meetings are absolutely fraught with social nuances. Any formality moves that interaction out of the realm of conversation and into judgement, which can stoke basic social responses that completely undermine an employee’s motivation.
Scheduling this interaction as an annual event amplifies these effects. “Performance reviews feed a pernicious tendency: Don’t address today what you can put off ‘til tomorrow,” attorney Jathan Janove writes at Business Management Daily. “Unfortunately, surprises are stressful, sometimes even when they’re good. When they’re bad, such as delayed performance criticism, the combination of surprise, delay and formality often proves toxic.”
This is where human nature runs head-long into the best-thought-out employee evaluation policies. Failing to deliver feedback, negative or positive, regularly and without ceremony neglects just how dynamic people are.
As Bill Koza, President/CEO at Counterpoint Advisors, says, “People change, the company changes, the market changes, goals change, requirements change, and so on.
Objectives and Objectivity Get Lost in Personal Biases
“In a recent study of almost two hundred and fifty performance reviews, the tech entrepreneur Kieran Snyder found that three-quarters of the women were criticized for their personalities — with words like ‘abrasive’ — while only two of the men were,” the New Yorker’s James Surowiecki writes.
This is the flipside to the people-being-people perspective. The managers responsible for conducting performance reviews are susceptible to the same biases, prejudices and pettiness that all people are. Sometimes, this can manifest as outright sexism, and many women find the deck stacked against them during performance reviews.
“For women trying to earn a living this is hardly earth-shattering social science,” writer Becky Bracken points out at SheKnows. “Heck, I’m only one woman, and I’ve been called strident, aggressive, told I was a bitch, and was asked if I worked as an exotic dancer in the evenings. All comments from male supervisors. And those are the only ones I can remember.”
More subtle prejudices can seep into evaluations, too. Sometimes, a sense of tribalism can influence a hiring decision, and that colors every aspect of the work relationship. “Employers tend to hire people they expect to like,” The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson writes. “They expect to like people who are similar. And they’re more likely to rate people higher if they hired them. As a result, people whose personalities and backgrounds are different from the boss tend to get lower ratings.”
At its core, this is one person judging another’s personality rather than his or her performance. There is a way to avoid this ad hominem approach to performance reviews, which the next article in this series will cover.
Performance Reviews Directly Inform Decisions to Fire People
Though recently re-evaluating, for half a century General Electric implemented and advocated for strict systems for ranking employees. Stanford professor Bob Sutton told Quartz, “[GE was] creating a bigger distribution between the haves and the have nots in their workforce, then firing 10% of them, it just amazed me… [Because when] we looked at every peer reviewed study we could find, in every one when there was a bigger difference between the pay of the people at the bottom and the top there was worse performance.”
This is essentially the same argument against tying pay to performance reviews, only the carrot is swapped out for the stick. A single performance review does not turn up sufficiently reliable intelligence that organizations can identify whom to let go.
This approach is both demoralizing to employees and ineffective. In fact, Lillian Cunningham, the Washington Post reporter who first broke the story about Accenture’s new approach to employee evaluation, writes that the vast majority of managers dislike the way their companies handle performance reviews, and “90 percent of HR leaders say the process doesn’t even yield accurate information.”
“Employees that do best in performance management systems tend to be the employees that are the most narcissistic and self-promoting,” Brian Kropp, HR practice leader at CEB, tells Cunningham. “Those aren’t necessarily the employees you need to be the best organization going forward.”
images by:
Pixabay Ben Rosett, bjaved98