managing editor of the long-lived satirical news site, The Onion), and Chris Hughes (one of the cofounders of Facebook and, perhaps most famously, the coordinator of online organizing for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, the first true social media–powered campaign of its kind). Simply put, these fellows know the power of online crowds well, and they know how to influence them to click, watch, and share. They know who they’re looking for, how to find them, how to motivate them, and how to get them to vote on videos
—a surprisingly difficult task given how infrequently voting happens. They know that the power of social media as a way to tap social proof and liking has a significant impact on building an “Upworthy” site.
Upworthy drives traffic by posting attention-catching headlines such as
“You’ll never believe how (fill in any topic)” or “This woman did (something) and you won’t believe what happened next” with curated content—images and videos they did not create, and are simply referencing or highlighting. It’s a relatively simple concept that wouldn’t seem to be all that powerful, and yet the growth and impact are undeniable.
While the long-term success of Upworthy has yet to be determined, its rise from an idea to one of the forty most visited sites on the web in less than two years demonstrates the founders’ deep understanding of human behavior. As a result, Upworthy has become, as of this book’s writing, the fastest-growing media site ever on the web.
Valley company owned by EMC, experienced hyper-growth in 2013, and has the unenviable challenge of building an organization with the brightest minds in an industry and location where competition for the best talent is fierce. He explained to us that working with Gen Z means changing the way we look at some basic aspects of retention. Foremost among these is the classic annual review. He gave us an example of what not to do if you want to hold onto Gen Z.
Dan Pink was among those who inspired his thinking.
At a fundamental level, the way that large companies operate and the feedback that they give people is typically far from instantaneous. These kids are used to consistent and constant feedback almost in real time. If they don’t get the feedback, they think there’s something fundamentally broken in the model.
So let’s say we hire someone (from Gen Z), call her Toni, and we put Toni in a feedback deprivation chamber—aka the annual performance review. Here the manager gives Toni feedback referring to an activity that occurred nine months prior, to offer up ideas on what Toni could’ve done better. Toni’s immediate instinct is to wonder why her manager didn’t just give her the feedback in the moment.
It’s very much like Hollywood, where the ratings of your movie in the first few days determine whether your product is successful or not, rather than waiting for the first year to see whether or not your product has revenues.
This behavior, ironically enough, is starting to move upstream to previous generations, causing us to have to adopt a very different model for how we provide feedback and recognize people.
The phenomenon that Patel is describing is not limited to his experiences at Syncplicity and, as he’s found, it’s not just for those who are Gen Z by birth. It turns out that better and more frequent professional feedback is welcome whatever the employee’s age—we simply didn’t have a measurably useful model to provide that for knowledge workers on a daily or weekly basis until recently. If you worked in a factory or production environment you would typically have metrics that provided real-time feedback about quality, volume, throughput, or other such measurable aspects of your job. As a knowledge worker you took for granted that such metrics simply made no sense. Instead you relied on periodic reviews of your performance that were often based on a large dose of retrospective analysis. Even if you were in a sales or direct billable role there was often much more that went into your performance feedback than just hard numbers, such as relationship building, team work, managing others,
attitude, and professional growth. We’ve just taken for granted that these things could not be measured in anything other than a subjective yearly or semi-annual performance review. That’s not the way Gen Z wants to work. They have been raised with an expectation of instant feedback in the way they game and socialize. If your Facebook post gets zero likes there is nothing subjective about the fact that it’s a lousy post.
We caught up with Daniel Debow, a senior vice president at Work.com—
formerly known as Rypple, a company he cofounded in 2008 and which was acquired by Salesforce.com in 2011. Work.com provides just this sort of ongoing real-time feedback for knowledge workers.
We started Rypple by focusing on what non-HR people needed to do every day to manage and coach their teams on a regular basis, and how we could make that more efficient and easier for them in much smaller time commitments than the once-a-year, annual performance review process.
The mind-set that we’ve taken is that we trust people and that people want feedback. They want to get coached. They want to develop. They want to learn.
Traditional annual performance reviews are often feared by employees and dreaded by managers, which makes them much less useful than they could be, and there had to be a better way.
The analogy I use is that it is like going to the dentist. If you go to the dentist once a year and you never floss or brush, it’s not a very fun experience. You dread doing it. That was the performance review. If you floss and brush all the time, you’re doing regular maintenance, and at the checkup it turns out you’re in great shape—it’s the same idea.
Work.com uses many of the mechanics of gamification, such as progress indicators toward a goal, badges that show that a certain level of experience, expertise, or skill has been attained. The system also uses social commentary and feedback similar to what you see on Facebook or LinkedIn, but in this case colleagues and managers provide public feedback on a job well done or encourage people toward meeting their publicly stated goals.
It is probably no surprise that technology start-ups were some of Rypple’s earliest customers, but it has since moved well beyond tech. Debow says:
Facebook became a big customer and an early partner in developing the products, as well as Mozilla and LinkedIn. They were asking, “How do we manage the workforce of tomorrow? Because they’re here today. They’re in our
offices now.”
We saw Silicon Valley was a kind of cultural canary in a coal mine, because what happened there has spread out into society five years later. Now thousands of companies are using our approach, not just companies in the Valley.
More importantly, much more traditional, mainstream companies like The Home Depot and 1-800-Flowers have come to the point where this just seems like it’s the next step in how they manage and engage their employees.
you’re interested in better performance from Gen Z, Debow suggests redefining the role of managers. While middle management, in particular, is often seen as part of the problem in traditional, hierarchical businesses, these managers can be the ones who lead and ensure that the changes your business wants to put in place are done on a regular basis. According to Debow:
As a company, to get rapid adoption of new behaviors, you have to say, “We need our managers to engage in these behaviors. We need those behaviors to happen repeatedly, consistently, and scalably through the organization. We need people to be onboarded effectively. We need people to consistently have a person to speak to them and talk to them about what’s going on in their life, their career, and their job. We need people to have goals that are aligned with what the organization wants, but also what they want.
Those are behaviors that people engage in and they’re simple behaviors.
When I say simple behaviors, I mean very simple things like “We want people to express gratitude when other people do a good job,” which is validated and scientifically proven to reinforce the behaviors that companies are looking for.
“We want sales managers to coach people rather than crush them,” which is also proven by behavioral data analysis to result in a better sales organization.
By the way, as Debow confirmed, desire to be coached isn’t limited to younger people. A core premise of the Gen Z Effect is that, while you can be born into Gen Z, you can also choose to be Gen Z by your attitude and behaviors because, at the end of the day, this is really the new face of human behavior.
Debow says:
Initially, there’s no question that younger people understood us and, generally, older people were skeptical. Now, six years later, the level of skepticism is much lower, which is just the nature of how people adopt innovation. We have hundreds of pragmatic proof points from companies in almost every industry that are using our approach and seeing results like sales volume going up because of better and more frequent coaching of the sales team.
Work.com is not the only one seeing a disconnect in the way companies have traditionally handled employee–manager feedback. We also spoke with Survey Analytics president Vivek Bhaskaran, who launched a new offering centered on employee feedback, called FlashLet, in early 2014. Survey Analytics is a cloud- based company that has a long history in providing online survey capabilities for a variety of purposes, but this is its first “purpose-built” application designed to address the problem of getting useful employee feedback.
Bhaskaran has a philosophy about feedback similar to Debow’s: feedback needs to be an ongoing process. He also has taken a novel approach to employee satisfaction ratings by creating a system that takes the pulse of an organization on a regular basis:
There is a bit of a conundrum in feedback. We are pushing toward increasing the frequency of feedback, but frequency is usually inversely proportional to the depth. You can’t really ask somebody to spend twenty minutes every week providing feedback. They’ll always find reasons to avoid it. Alternatively, you can ask them to invest twenty minutes of time every quarter, or maybe every six months, but that gives you old data.
We asked Bhaskaran about the very popular 360-degree evaluations, where peers all fill out detailed feedback surveys on one another in order to provide a comprehensive view of how each employee is perceived by others. These have been a standard for decades in many organizations. He told us, “People no longer want 360-degree evaluations. Everyone we’ve talked to tells us they are close to useless in such fast-moving organizations; people turn over too often;
the dynamics of their problems change week to week.”
So, what solution has Bhaskaran come up with?
I believe you can ask somebody to spend one minute each week to click on one link. Just like they would to do a “like” on Facebook. That’s a relatively
innocuous thing to do, but you’d be amazed at how much data you can get out of that over time. You’re not getting a lot of deep data but you do get broad data that can be very useful and is close to real time.
So what I’m suggesting is that you do a weekly “pulse” survey. It’s almost like going to a clinic if you’re not feeling well. They always do certain things no matter what your condition. One is to take your temperature. Temperature alone isn’t going to tell much, other than the fact that there’s something going on with your immune system or your body’s ability to regulate itself. It’s a symptom, an indicator. That’s what weekly pulse surveys do; they point to a problem. It has to be easy, quick, and anybody should be able to do it.
Employee engagement has to be a top priority, especially with Gen Z. If your employees are not engaged—don’t feel engaged—then it doesn’t really matter how smart they are.
If you assume that employee engagement is going to make or break the business, then the first thing you need to do is to somehow create a baseline for measurement of employee engagement and satisfaction.
Ask Gen Z how the last year was and you might as well be asking them to drive by looking in the rearview mirror. They want instant feedback, and I’d claim they need it in order to perform in a world where managing in real time is the only way to successfully respond to threats and opportunities.
At Google, the feedback process takes a very specific route via what the company calls upward feedback surveys (UFSs), which are filled out by employees to measure their managers. Those surveys are seen by the manager’s manager as a way to collect actionable feedback that flows both up and down the company’s relatively flat structure. This began as “Project Oxygen,” which was intended to answer the question, “Do managers matter?”
The surveys address twelve to eighteen different facets (shown in table 5-1), including whether managers treat their employees with respect, give them clear goals, share information with them, and so on.
Table 5-1: The Project Oxygen Eight Behaviors for Great Managers9
This sort of feedback demonstrates whether managers are engaged in the process of actively managing their teams. By providing feedback to their managers, associates have an opportunity to influence the organization.
The measures are tracked across the company, and trends are followed over time to gain a broader picture of the quality of Google’s people management, including performance profiles of managers themselves. This method measures teams and the company as a whole rather than focusing solely on individual- level employee reviews, which are the only measure of performance done in many organizations. An explicit set of measurements for managers also makes workers’ satisfaction with their managers a foundational element of Google’s strategy for managing people within the organization. While the raw data itself will not ensure great managers, both the data and the cultural environment that provides improvement-focused feedback—rather than penalty-driven feedback
—mean the demise of the “pointy haired boss” syndrome (for Dilbert fans), with bosses who are clueless about the negative impacts they have on their teams.
This trend toward measuring management and teams is another example of the pyramid being flipped upside down. Traditional human resources, or HR, is often the “compliance” arm of an organization, tasked with making sure that employees are doing what their bosses told them to do. Gen Z flips this model so that managers are held accountable to their own team and, as warranted and evidenced by feedback, are required to correct their own behaviors.
In traditional hierarchies, people are often pushed into management positions when they have no interest in, natural talent for, or training for the role—the classic outcome of the Peter Principle, which assumes we all rise to the level of
our own incompetence. It’s another danger of the affluence pyramid, where the only way to progress in your career is to climb the ladder into territory where you may not want to be or are thrust into a role you are not suited for.
Conversely, if you don’t learn and adapt in your current job, you may fall victim to a Gen Z variation of the Peter Principle, according to Gary Burnison, CEO at Korn/Ferry International:
The Peter Principle, which asserts that employees will continue to get promoted until they reach their level of incompetence, has evolved. Today, employees don’t need to get promoted to become incompetent. They will become incompetent in their current jobs if they don’t grow, adapt, and evolve. If you stop growing and learning, your job will outgrow you. If you grow and learn faster than your job, employers will always want you.10