BDD Part 3: Once upon a time…
A story of collaboration between silos
- In Part 1 we saw that aligning individual goals under a common vision using OKRs was one way of fighting silo mentality.
- In Part 2 we saw that to pursue higher levels of flow efficiency you must actively look for ways to reduce superfluous work.
This time, we will follow the story of someone who decided to put these ideas into practice.
The story
Patrick, HR director of companyXYZ, is attending an Operations Meeting with the CEO and other department directors to discuss the needs of the company for the upcoming quarter. In these meetings, each director usually sets out their individual department’s objectives and asks for new additions to their teams if needed:
- Bill is the IT director. His department develops the software products that the company sells and uses for internal purposes. Some of his responsibilities include improving developer experiences, maintaining product stability, and improving code quality.
- Hanna is the Service Success director. Her department specialises in providing consulting services to clients and is responsible for ensuring client satisfaction with the outcomes of their work.
- Hugh is the Marketing and Sales director. His department is in charge of promoting companyXYZ’s brand, increasing sales in specific markets, increasing referral sales, and boosting engagement.
- Alex, the CEO, attends these meetings to find out what the directors’ plans are and to offer help if needed.
After a couple of minutes of chitchat, Alex asks each of them to share their goals and personnel needs for the upcoming quarter.
Hanna began talking about the upcoming project for clientWOW. “This is a very important client blablabla…and we need to help them look good blablabla…and we need to hire 10 consultants for this project to succeed.”
It was Bill’s turn next. “As you know, there is an increasing interest in our software blablabla…and using it internally has made us realise we need to make some improvements blablabla…and we need to hire 5 people: one backend developer, two frontend developers and two people for support and operations.”
Hugh followed. “As you know we want to expand to Asia, so we need a really big Marketing blablabla… if you remember the results from last year blablabla…we have noticed interest in our products in blablabla…it’s a big opportunity to blablabla…and we need to hire a senior role to spearhead some conversations, and a junior position to handle the busywork”.
Patrick suddenly realised that every one of those goals depended on him achieving his goal: to hire people who were a good fit, on time.
“Wait a minute. Don’t you see what’s happening?” he began. “We’re going to end up like last quarter. We were so busy focusing on our individual goals that we ended up competing against each other instead of helping each other out. We kept everyone busy because we had too many things to do, and we still haven’t finished some ‘strategic’ projects from last quarter. What’s more troubling is that we need to make corrections to some deliverables because we overlooked quality in order to deliver ‘on time’. We need to change how we approach this session.” He paused. “For example, how am I supposed to find all the people you need on time? Hanna, when do you need those consultants?”
“In a month, two at the latest”, said Hanna.
“And Bill?”, continued Patrick, “What about the people you asked for?”
“Let me think.”, Bill pondered the question. “The backend developer would need to be hired as soon as possible, the two frontend developers can wait a bit longer. I need the other two by the end of the quarter.”
“Hugh, how about you? How soon do you need the new hires?”
“The junior position needs to be filled in less than a month. It’s the only way we can delegate him or her enough work to keep up with demand. I understand the senior position will take longer, but ideally we will need to find someone by the end of the quarter.” said Hugh.
“So, 17 people in total. Obviously they need to be great professionals who fit in our company culture, right? And 12 of them need to be on board in a month or less, right?”. Patrick waited to see if anyone noticed the issue. Instead, he was met with blank stares.
“I believe we have a big problem in this company” started Patrick. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but my department is facing a problem I would like to share with you:”
We are losing talent to other companies because our hiring process is slow and new hires don’t fit well in the company culture and teams. This is costing us a lot of money and results in high turnover.
Patrick stood up and walked towards the whiteboard.
“I’ll try to explain. I think I need to start at the beginning. How many of you know the process we follow when we need to hire someone?” Patrick didn’t wait for a reply, he started drawing.
“Whenever one of you needs new people for your teams, we begin the process of filling an open position. This process consists of seven steps:
- Identifying the hiring needs. You have already expressed your hiring needs, so this is covered.
- Preparing the job description. To do this we need time from all of you to understand exactly what you are looking for.
- Talent search. Luckily we have a database of people we could consider, but we need some time to search the market.
- Screening and shortlisting. Once we have a list of candidates, we review each one and filter out the ones that clearly don’t fit.
- Interviewing. In this step we meet the candidates and interview them. If they seem like a good fit, we involve the rest of you in the remaining interviews if you need to ask something technical.
- Evaluation and offer of employment. With all the insights generated from previous steps, we decide who we would like to hire and we make them offers of employment.
- Introduction and induction of the new employee. If all goes well and the selected candidates accept our offer, the process is finished.”
“Every open position we have needs to go through every step of the process. Because we have to work with many open positions, and with several candidates per position, we end up with so much work to do that the whole process becomes inefficient.”
“Just a second.” interrupted the CEO. “Didn’t you just say that your department has a lot of work to do? If everyone is busy working, you must be productive. How can you say you are not efficient?”
“Good question”, said Patrick. “In the whiteboard, I have drawn a line which has two colours. In green, I represent the time that each step of the process needs to add value to a single item. In this case, the item being processed is an open position that needs to be filled. In red, I represent the waiting time between steps of the process. During that time the open position is not receiving value. Does it make sense so far?”
The rest of them nodded.
“From the point of view of the position to be filled, the process is efficient when the position is filled with minimal waiting times. The process is efficient if the position to be filled flows smoothly through the process. Flow efficiency is the ratio between the time spent in value-adding activities (green) and the time spent in non-value-adding activities (red).”
Flow efficiency = Green / Red (%)The pursue of flow efficiency is about minimising (ideally eliminating) the red segments.
“I’m curious”, said Hanna, “I noticed that the red lines are much bigger than the green ones, why is that?”
“Good question Hanna, let me explain”, said Patrick. He started drawing in the whiteboard again. “In each step of the process, my team and I need to handle multiple items at the same time.”
“Each item corresponds to an open position. Having to handle a lot of items in parallel”, Patrick continued, “has a number of side effects:
- We cannot start looking for candidates for a position until we have received enough information for the job description. Ideally, you have a clear definition of what you want and you send it to us. The real story is different. I am sure we all have long email threads defining the needs for the roles. Some cases have required tagging and special classification because different aspects of the role had been discussed in separate threads.
- Your expectations for the role determine the number of candidates we need to consider. The more candidates we need to consider, the longer it takes to look for them. This generates more work in the form of reporting, classification, coordination, etc.
- We are very good at our job, so we normally find many candidates for each position. However, having a lot of candidates means that we need to review each one more than once. Some are a clear fit, others need more reviews. The problem is that we cannot remember every detail, so we spend a lot of time reviewing the same information over and over again.
- Then we need to interview them. On average, interviews take around 45 minutes each. Imagine how long it takes us to interview every candidate. This step requires more work in the form of interview notes, manual logging of relevant information in corporate tools, emailing you the information of clear fits, etc.
- After the initial interviews, the candidates who we believe could be a good fit need to interview with you and your teams. If we are lucky, you or someone in your team schedules a meeting with each candidate. What normally happens is that we end up scheduling those meetings for you. This generates more work for us, and even more when a meeting needs to be rescheduled.
All of these extra activities require work. The more open positions we have in parallel, the more work we need to generate to manage it. That is why there is a lot of waiting time, and that is why the red lines are so big.”
The CEO raised his hand. “I hear what you are saying, but I am not seeing how this relates to your initial statement.”
“I am getting there”, said Patrick. “We have seen there is a lot of waiting time between steps in the process. Why is this costing us money?:
- The best candidates opt out of the process or get hired by other companies.
- Rescheduling interviews results in frustration and it hurts the brand. Some candidates don’t appreciate this and look elsewhere.
- If we aren’t fast we face the risk of priorities changing, so personnel needs change. If this happens we need to start the searching phase again and/or need to review the remaining candidates again.
- If we aren’t fast we risk employee burnout.
The first three imply that we may hire people who are not the best fit in terms of company or team culture. The fourth one may lead to higher turnover rates. In any case, all these changes mean more work for everyone involved in the process, not just HR. Having to restart one or several steps in the process is costing the company a lot of money.”
Patrick saw he had them. Before anyone could interrupt, he continued.
“I know you all have a lot of work. I can imagine what you’re thinking: ‘Dude, welcome to the club! We are all overworked’. I also know that if we don’t change the way we look at the hiring process none of you will get the people you need on time. If we want to hire at least 12 people in a month or earlier, we need to reduce the average hiring time by at least 40 percent.”
“40 percent! Are you serious?”, said Bill. “How do you propose we do that?”
“What if we tried to do things differently during this quarter?”, asked Patrick. “Let me draw what I have in mind.”
“Our goal is to find the best available fit for each open position as fast as possible. To do so, we need to have less waiting time between steps of the process. Thus, I am going to need collaboration from all of you at every step. We can figure out the details later, but I have some ideas we could try: Instead of long email threads, we will get together to write the job description. It would be great if someone from your team could participate. After all, the people we hire will become their teammates. We can handle most of the candidate search, but we are open to referrals too. The interviewing process would be much faster if you and/or someone from your teams were present from the beginning.”
“It looks like you have given this a lot of thought!”, said Hanna. “I don’t know about the rest of you but I’m sold.”
“Yeah, I’m in!”, said Bill. “I believe my teams will enjoy this way of working more. Some of them have been waiting to participate in the interviewing process for a while.”
“One more thing.”, said the CEO, “How will we know we solved the problem? What will we measure?”
They all pondered the question for a few minutes. It was important to gather evidence on the outcome of this experiment.
Each of them came up with a different metric. After discussing each option, they realised there were similarities, so they simplified the results. They would know they solved the problem if:
- It took less time on average to hire someone. They decided to keep the 40% decrease suggested by Patrick.
- Existing employees felt valued and stayed in the company. Consequently, the turnover rate should decrease. They decided on a 10% decrease.
- There was an increase in employee satisfaction in the quarterly eNPS survey. They decided on a 15% increase.
“This looks promising”, said the CEO. “If we want to be successful we need to commit to this goal as a team. We will take a short break and then spend the rest of the morning looking for things we can all try to achieve this goal.”
“Even if we need to adjust our initial, individual goals?” asked Hugh.
“If you need to, yes.” answered the CEO. “We saw that failure to meet this goal puts all your individual goals at risk.”
The result
By the end of the day, everyone had created an OKR aligned with Patrick’s. They decided to meet weekly to inspect progress towards the goal and to collaborate on next steps. This level of transparency helped build trust and fight silo mentality in the departments.
Endnote
This is an example of how a team of directors promoted collaboration between their departments that initially worked as silos. They were able to align their individual goals under a common vision by creating OKRs focused on flow efficiency.
Will this work? Find out in Part 4.
Thanks for reading.
Cheers!
