PSM W4 / Prototyping / Baby steps today towards a better future
December generally it’s a month when a lot of things happens inside companies. Some teams rush to deliver everything before the year ends, other teams start planning for what’s to come next year, whilst a few others take some time to look back and do some retrospectives and lessons learned about the year we are leaving behind.
Depending on the team you are working with, you could be doing none, some, or all of the things I’ve just mentioned. However, and regardless of your team, there are 2 things that inevitable at some point during December everyone is thinking about. The first one is the Christmas Party, and the second one its the Bonus.
I hope not to disappoint you if I tell you that I am not going to talk about Christmas Parties in this reflection. But I hope to get you interested if I share a prototype we just launched this week regarding Bonus in the company I work with some very initial flavours of Self Management.
Let’s see how it goes :)
Bonus is a one-way conversation
In all companies I’ve worked so far in my career, the process goes something like this for the person receiving the bonus:
“Your Line Manager invites you to a meeting to talk about Bonus. You get a bit anxious because you don’t understand so much about how your bonus is calculated, and also you don’t know if you will get it and how much of it.
Then you arrive to the meeting, your Line Manager gives you a quick speech about the Bonus (that you are not able to understand because you are anxious), and then tells you which is your Bonus for this year. You say ok thanks, and then you leave. You get the bonus in your bank account”
Give or take a few things, this is more or less what I’ve personally experienced and seen with Bonus in the companies I’ve worked for.
Now, as this year we knew Bonus was coming we started preparing a bit in advance to see if we could offer our people a better experience during the Bonus Period. In other words, everyone knows that its always cool to receive that extra cash by the end end of the year, but we started wondering some of the following questions:
- How might we help our people connect what they are doing on a day to day basis (Performance) with recognition for a job well done (Bonus)?
- How might we help our people understand and care more about how do we calculate bonus and why we do things in this way?
- How might we help our people take some ownership of the process? (and not just wait for someone else to tell them what’s their Bonus for this year)
In other words, we knew we wanted to design a better experience for our people, but we also knew we didn’t want to make massive changes today as that could mean a lot of disruption to the company, especially at the end of the year when everyone is doing a lot of things.
Better Futures?
The first thing we had to think about was why we are doing this? and, how does it look a better future for us in regards to Bonus?
So we tap into some research about what progressive organisations are doing in regards to Rewards. We learned that there are some companies today asking peers to rate each other (Does this person contribute (much) more or (much) less compared to me?), some others use the Advice Process to define the bonus of their people, whilst others take a more “team-based” approach and allocate a pot of money to teams that deliver excellent results for them to distribute it amongst the team (If you are interested in Rewards in Self Managed organisations, check this great post written by Corporate Rebels)
All the above sounded super cool and really exciting initiatives to implement. However, we knew that despite it was super necessary for us to have a “ look into the future for some inspiration’’ we didn’t want to forget the current context of our company and our people.
In other words, all the above-described practices are being used today by companies that have already taken some steps towards Self Management. If these companies are today getting the benefits of Reward and Bonus approaches in which teams and people themselves are responsible (and not a Line Manager), I am assuming they didn’t change those practices overnight.
In other words, we decided we didn’t just want to “lift and shift” (or copy paste) practices from other companies as that was going to be a recipe for disaster.
What’s the smallest thing we could do today? Create the Space & Take Ownership
So, we knew we wanted to leave a few things behind, and we also had some ideas of potentially better ways of doing and experiencing Bonus in the future.
We needed now to define which were those small “Safe to Try” things, that could help us move a little bit forward towards a better place. When presenting the ideas to the team, this is what I shared with them:
How might we take a small (but essential) piece of a future vision, and quickly create a prototype that allows us to explore the future by doing, by getting feedback from people, by identifying tensions, so we can improve and evolve the idea?
I also told them that we were going to experiment with something new within a short period of time (5 weeks) and that we were not aiming to change the whole Bonus process all at once. Today we only wanted to give some “Baby Steps” so we can start building the very basics (mindset, behaviors, skills) of a better future.
At this moment in time, Baby Steps for us means 2 things: Create the Space & Ownership.
1. Create the Space: We know money is a taboo topic, especially inside companies. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do something to address the questions our people have about reward and bonus. So the first prototype we launched this week was a 90 min session that we named “Bonus Conversations: Me, My Bonus and I”. During these sessions we gave people the opportunity to understand more about bonus, how it is calculated, and we offer them the opportunity to ask plenty of questions. The whole point here was to create “safe and intimate spaces” (10 people max) to talk about important things in the company, in this case, bonus. We managed to run 3 sessions during the week, and that gave us a great opportunity to learn and iterate twice the design of the session in less than 5 days.
2. Ownership: The second “Baby Step” was all about people having more ownership of their own Bonus. As mentioned above, so far was the Line Manager the one “owning” the process and allocating a bonus to each person, but we also knew about a more desirable future (people themselves being responsible for it).
So we encouraged people to do “something else” whilst getting the bonus. This “something else” was to do some Self Reflection. The invitation we extended the team was:
“Do you want to grow whilst you get your Bonus?”
If they accepted our invitation (this was optional) they were encouraged to spend some time self reflecting about their 2019 performance and how do they think this could align to the bonus they receive. Below you will see the list of questions we are using as a first prototype to help our people Self Reflect:
- Which contributions I made during 2019? How am I contributing to our purpose?
- What went really well?
- Not so well?
- What would you do differently?
Honouring everyone’s individual change journey
As this was the first time we were doing this at the company, we offered options to the team so to honour and respect everyone’s change journey and personal needs. In other words, by offering flexibility and a series of options for them to choose (and not just one mandatory option defined by the company to implement Bonus this year) we hope we were encouraging them to make their own decisions.
Having different options meant potentially different experiences within the same “Bonus Process 2019” for people in the team. And this “extra bit of complexity” was fine for us as we wanted people to be able to decide and answer the question “What do I want?”
In other words, if this year someone doesn't want to get involved and just want to get their bonus, it is fine. If some other member of the team wants to give “one baby step” and do the self reflection exercise, that’s cool too. And if someone wants to take it a bit further, and take “a few baby steps” by “playing and experimenting today with this possible future” we also offered them the possibility of doing the the exercise of suggesting (not defining on their own) a bonus rating for themselves and also getting some advice from others to get some external perspectives regarding their individual performance.
By offering several options and not just one, we might have made our life a bit more complex today (as we needed to design and explain 4 options rather than just one as we have done previously), but we are hoping that in the long run these “baby steps” will allow us to build some ownership and self-reflection skills within the team.
Long Term Vision? Work = Growth
By prototyping the above-described initiatives, we are offering the team the possibility to achieve something else rather than “just more cash in my pocket by the end of the month”.
We are offering our people the possibility of tapping into their intrinsic motivation (Growth) whilst their extrinsic motivation is being visibly impacted (Bonus).
We are offering our people tools to empower them to take control and understand more about their performance and how it links with the Bonus they receive.
Last week during the course, we spoke about Deliberate Development Organisations, and how powerful it could be if we could transform our work practices in development opportunities. And this is exactly what this prototype is all about:
How might we transform our Bonus experience (which so far has been only about money) to also enable people growth? Or in other words, can I get my bonus AND AT THE SAME TIME grow and learn something about myself that I didn't know?
I know we are still far from those progressive organisations in regards to how they approach rewards and bonus practices. But I truly believe that the initial prototypes we started testing this week (Safe spaces to connect and understand + Ownership through self-reflection) are some “Baby Steps” we needed to take so we can move towards better futures.
Thanks for reading!
