Time, Bias, and Transparency

Today marks the end of my first month working full time with Door Space. I’m still getting used to the schedule and the incredible forward moving environment we’ve made for ourselves. In the past month I’ve met with countless entrepreneurs, contacts and potential customers. I’ve rediscovered my love for twitter and found my new favorite hashtag. We at Door Space have brainstormed product names for our signature platform. We’ve written our core values and are working on a product that will have active users imminently. I’ve learned a bit about myself and the community we are serving. There are three things that stand out to me that we view as incredibly important in maneuvering and growing in our roles at work: time, bias, and transparency.

Time

Our product is a talent development management platform. Time is extremely valuable to our users, including the human resources professionals and the employees they serve and manage. Nothing is more annoying than sitting on the phone or continuing to send email after email requesting information that, in reality, should be available at the click of a button. Door Space, I believe, will create that button. Personally, I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to schedule meetings with people. I’d rather spend time actually talking or meeting than trying to find a sufficient time. Doodle is usually the go to tool for group scheduling. However, many alternatives exist. I plan to try them out and figure out which one I like most so that I can recapture some time.

Bias

One of our goals at Door Space is to reduce biases in viewing employees’ achievements and performance. We believe that data, if gathered and reported in a structured way, are the keys to reducing or avoiding such biases. Earlier this week I read about three biases which result in bad hires: choosing the self-promoter, hiring based on looks, and ignoring context. This is a theme lately as Facebook was just blasted for saying that its lack of diverse hires is because of an inadequate talent pool. Kaya Thomas wrote an amazing response about her experience as a Dartmouth computer science student and iOS developer. She states “I haven’t even started my first full-time job yet and I’m already so tired of feeling erased and mistreated by the tech industry.” This is so sad to me. But there is no denying that conscious and unconscious biases exist in hiring, and not just in the tech industry.

Transparency

In many large organizations there is no transparency over what skills, knowledge and credentials are attributed to any one employee, and among the organization as a whole.

Transparency enhances trust and trust increases engagement and retention.

Until recently I was not aware that this was a thing — that it would be incredibly useful for the employee to see the records of their own skills, knowledge and credentials reported in the same way that HR and management sees them. Transparency enhances trust and trust increases engagement and retention.

So, it has been an incredible month. I hope that I am able to continue to grow in my new role. I will be posting every Thursday to update our past week here at Door Space. Please check back next week and follow us on Twitter as well!

Photo: Paris Time by Tyler Merbler on flickr. Licensed under creative commons as attribution only.