Common knowledge
This post is part 4 of the “Scale teams at breakneck speed — without breaking necks” blog series.
Common knowledge refers to the shared norms, values and expertise that enable employees to do their jobs and work together with minimal friction. Without these, it is difficult to create a productive work environment. For example, someone who is extremely direct will inevitably cause a lot of friction in a team that prides itself on sensitivity. This friction can easily become a distraction from getting work done.
Company values
Company values clarify the direction an organization is trying to go in. Unfortunately, in many organizations there is a gap between aspiration and reality. This can lead to distrust of leadership and poor morale. To stop this from happening, leaders need to consider the “cost” of proposed values before sharing them with the company, and to think about the necessary mechanisms to bring about alignment.
“Cost” refers to the downside of having a particular value. To illustrate, we can look at a sample value from Amazon:
Customer Obsession
Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.
Most businesses would agree that caring about their customers is important. However, few would be willing to pay the same cost as Amazon. If Amazon pledges to deliver products which it doesn’t have or can’t find in its warehouses, employees will actually buy those products from rival stores rather than fail to deliver on its promises. This is unprofitable in the short-term, but helps maintain the reputation that has propelled Amazon to become one of the biggest companies in the world.
“Mechanisms to bring alignment” refers to incentives and processes within a organisation aimed at ensuring everyone in the company works according to the same company values. A famous example of this is when Zappos offered to pay people to quit after a philosophical change/reorganization of the company — and 14% took up the offer. This is a big sacrifice — having such a large percentage of your workforce leave couldn’t have been easy to handle. However, in the long run this will mean Zappos will find it easier to move forward, as the the people who would be tempted to go would likely have created friction for the radical change that Zappos was undertaking.
Onboarding
The process of getting new employees up and running provides an excellent opportunity to instruct new starts not only what to do but how they should do it and why it matters. This is clearly a really important focus with 1 in 25 employees leaving due to poor onboarding.
It doesn’t need to be complicated — Google found that they were able to improve the time taken for an employee to reach full productivity by 25% simply by sending the hiring manager a reminder checklist just before the new hire started.
Google splits its onboarding into two parts — a centrally organized corporate phase which lasts for around three days, and the team-based phase led by the new employee’s new line manager.
Rather than inundate the manager with lengthy emails and content, the HR team simply provide a simple checklist of five critical tasks:
Have a role and responsibilities discussion.
Match your new hire with a peer buddy.
Help your new hire build a social network.
Set up onboarding check-ins once a month for your new hire’s first six months.
Encourage open dialogue
Work Rules! by Laszlo Bock, Former SVP of People Operations at Google
This is smart approach because it emphasises the importance of new starts understanding how to answer their own questions. If candidates are expected to “pick it up as they go along” by themselves, they take considerably longer to gain the necessary context they need to do their jobs effectively and generally settle in better.
There is of course plenty you can add to this — for example in the onboarding I had in my team there were objectives around directly communicating to customers and passing exams which demonstrated product-knowledge, but this really is icing on the cake if all of the points in the Google checklist have been met.
