Risk & Business Magazine Spectrum Insurance Fall 2019 | Page 15

PERFORMANCE REVIEWS
REVIEWS
PERFORMANCE
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 who
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 — a nd
on our ability to give constructive
feedback that effects change.
Ari Meisel is a best-selling author, productivity expert, CEO, real estate developer, green
building consultant, and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School of
Business. His proprietary process, the Less Doing System, is the foundation of his company Less
Doing, which offers individuals and enterprises road-tested methods to optimize, automate,
and outsource everything. The goal is to learn how to work smarter, instead of harder.
LESSDOING.COM
I want to share our three-pronged
approach to nurturing the members of our
team through constant feedback. 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 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 only
if they want to, do we schedule a one-on-
one video call. Last quarter, three people
requested a follow-up conversation.
1) PERFORMANCE REVIEWS 2) TASK 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. This started out as a way for me to do
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.
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.
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  —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. 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 of
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.
15