Risk & Business Magazine Benson Kearley IFG Fall 2019 | Page 15

PERFORMANCE REVIEWS
W
hen it comes to scaling
a business, I believe that
the most difficult part
to scale is your people.
You’re faced with two
problems, bringing in more people that
complement and enhance the team as well
as maintaining a team culture that doesn’t
break down when you hit critical mass.
We’ve been really fortunate at Leverage. We
started in August of 2015 with two people
in New York and now we are a force to be
reckoned with, with over 100 people in
16 time-zones. We always have an eye on
team culture — I wrote a WHOLE article
on some of our hacks for that — and on our
ability to give constructive feedback that
effects change.
There are dozens of startups now that
offer products and services to facilitate
performance reviews, 360 reviews, peer to
peer reviews, OKR meetings, etc… but in
a world where organizations are getting
flatter and continuing to grow (no one in
our company has a title) it becomes more
and more difficult to identify and recognize
a job well done or provide guidance. I
want to share our three-pronged approach
to nurturing the members of our team
through constant feedback.
1) PERFORMANCE REVIEWS
About nine months into the operations
of the company we decided we should
create some formal process for reviewing
performance over the quarter and set goals
for the next one. We came up with some
questions and had each team member book
a 10-minute video call with me, one on
one. I would ask them about their goals for
the quarter and things they could improve
on, I’d take notes in Evernote, and then I
would decide whether or not that person
should get a a raise and/or level up to the
next rank. It was time intensive, overly
subjective, unscalable, and completely
incongruent with how we do everything
else. So we changed it to a version that,
from the outside seems less personal, but
has our DNA written all over it.
Every quarter we have an automation
through Zapier which posts messages to
our team Slack channel asking them to fill
out a Wufoo form for their quarterly review.
Seems impersonal right? Autonomy is one
of our core values and scalability is part of
everything we do. Filling out the form is at
Ari Meisel is a best-selling author, productivity
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the option of the teammate, if they don’t
fill it out then they can’t get a raise or be
promoted. When they do fill it out, they
answer a specific set of questions, including
their goal for how many hours they want
to do over the next quarter. All of these
entries go into a Trello board, in a list for
the current quarter. Then at the end of the
month, the managers can review all of the
submissions, discuss for a few minutes, and
make a decision. We then share that with
each person individually and on if they
want to, do we schedule a one on one video
call. Last quarter three people requested a
follow up conversation.
2) TASK REVIEWS
This started out as a way for me to quality
control on tasks. We asked that once
every two weeks each team member book
a call with me to go over their current
tasks, identify any issues, and answer
questions. In order to keep this scalable we
used Calendly to book the calls and they
have a really cool option which is a Group
Meeting. You can allow as many people as
you want to book a single time slot. It will
continue to show that slot as available until
you hit the limit that you set. Sometimes
the call would be with five people, but
more often it was three or less. Recently
these evolved from talking about tasks to a
simple opportunity to connect on a nearly
one on one basis with members of the team
in a mini-mastermind. They could give
feedback and get feedback and guidance.
3) BONUS PROCESS
From a behavioral economics view, this was
one of our most interesting innovations.
One of our key performance metrics
as a team is the number of hours we do
in a given week and it’s on the order of
hundreds of hours. For every hundred
hours we do as a team, a bonus is issued
to a VA. So if we do 800 hours one week,
eight VAs will get a bonus. That bonus,
is 40 percent of whatever you made that
week. This incentivizes more hours as well
as overall improvement to earn a higher
hourly rate. It’s worked extremely well for
us but recently we upped the game.
The new bonus structure is still based on
the number of hours we do each week but
now there’s a twist. Now each week the VAs
who feel they’ve earned a bonus have to fill
out a Wufoo form, checking off the boxes
of the core values they feel they exemplified
and then explain why. This pushes them to
bring their achievements to my attention, I
can give specific praise and in the case they
don’t get the bonus, feedback. Now in order
to prevent them from submitting a request
every week, we scale their bonus based on
how often they apply and actually get it.
So now the top-level bonus will be a full
match, 100 percent whatever they made
that week but if they submit for the bonus
four times and only get it twice, then they
will get 50 percent of the bonus. +
THESE THREE METHODS
MAKE OUR ABILITY TO
SHINE A LIGHT ON OUR
TEAMMATES, PROVIDE
FEEDBACK, GUIDANCE,
AND OF COURSE PRAISE,
COMPLETELY SCALABLE
AND QUANTIFIABLE.
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