Hello, World!
Hi. We’re the team at Rhabit. We’re obsessed with measuring.
This comes pretty naturally to us — as it does for most people, because we’re humans after all — and like most people, we spend a great deal of time trying to understand our world. Once we start to understand our world, of course, we start trying to change — change ourselves, change others, sometimes the world itself.
We’re always trying to optimize ourselves in some way or another— and one of the primary ways we get there is by measuring things. We measure our progress with goals or milestones. We measure our prowess with scores. We measure our impact with metrics. We measure our health with things like our weight, or our blood pressure.
We sometimes measure our own self-worth in numbers that mean something to us, but less to others — our possessions, our salary, our twitter followers — right or wrong it’s just how we’re wired. We’re wired to measure.
So when we as people look at our work lives, we want to understand — understand how we compare to others, how we’ve changed, what we’ve accomplished— so we need to measure. We want to know if what we’re doing is effective — are we any good at what we’re doing? Are we the best? We’re not the worst are we? Are we the worst? And once we have a measurement, some metric, some sense of understanding, we then seek to control it. We seek to change.
My projects keep missing their deliverable dates, can I understand the cause? What could I be doing differently, what could I change?
I just got promoted to my first management role. Do I understand what it means to be a good leader? How am I doing and what do I need to change?
Leadership keeps pushing back against my plan. I need to understand how I can be more convincing. What can I change about my approach?
We want to get better, we want to be valued, to feel engaged, to feel a sense of mastery and accomplishment in the things we do. Once we feel like we have a handle on where we stand, we move on to the next part of the cycle. We’re ready to seek growth.
We take actions, we try new tools, we seek out information, advice, knowledge — we seek to learn — and if we’re successful — we grow.
And then, the dust settles… and the cycles repeats — this constant cycle of measuring, understanding and growing.
What’s changed about this cycle in modern work is the speed at which this cycle has to occur for us to stay ahead, to stay effective, to be our best.
Information is exchanged faster and more efficiently than ever before. Ideas move between people, teams, and organizations almost instantaneously. The tools for producing great work are increasingly more powerful.
You can combine things like Trello, Gmail, Slack, GitHub, and Heroku and take an idea, mix in the right people, and produce something that delivers value to customers at such an incredible speed to market that it boggles the mind. We’ve lived that here at Rhabit, and so we’re keenly aware of how quickly and perpetually work changes and how dynamic the roles of people in an organization are.
So what does that increase in speed mean for us as people who seek to measure, understand, and grow?
It means the tools we use for gathering context around our interpersonal skills, our performance, our work culture should be just as simple, functional, flexible, and efficient as everything else we use.
The tools for operating businesses and building great products have brought incredible innovation and efficiency to our lives and our companies — and now it’s time for us, the humans, the people and teams that create these experiences, to be empowered by similar innovation.
We used to send letters, then we sent emails, now we send slack messages, dm’s, and snaps.
We used to fax documents, then we scanned them, now we author, sign, and share them through the cloud.
We used to fill out performance reviews on paper, then we filled out word docs, then — the webforms came.
Web forms for performance reviews, web forms for 360 assessments, web forms for engagement surveys. They get prettier and prettier, but nothing is fundamentally changing, no true innovation is occurring — there’s no meaningful measurement, no consistent quantified data, nothing that helps us truly understand how we can get better, nothing that genuinely enables growth.
People want to get better — they want to develop, to master, to grow. We all do. But we can’t keep up with the speed of innovation and modern work with today’s tools. HR and People Ops want to get there — they want to be the arbiters of growth and drivers of strategy, not the purveyors of tedium that they’ve become.
People Ops and HR still long for true innovation in the way we measure, understand and grow the people that can make our companies incredible.
The solution is so close — it’s right at our fingertips — the error signal, the feedback, the sometimes subtle signals that we need to improve, the data— the things that aren’t captured in web form, that don’t show up on a review, that fall between the cracks of HR processes, the data we so need, the results of measurement, the material of understanding, the foundation for growth.
So that’s what we’ve built at Rhabit. We’ve made the innovative, hyper-efficient platform for building a high performing data-driven feedback culture. We empower your most precious resource — your people — to measure, understand and grow themselves into incredible teams, leaders, and organizations.
Stay tuned for more, and get involved with the conversation. You can always check out what we’ve got going on at Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn as well.
With data-driven love,
