Your Work Team (Likely) Has a Baseball Problem; Tracking Social Credit May Help
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Some of the most important things that happen in a workplace today are not being counted.
In a time where big, visible OKRs dominate most performance management processes, the million little things that help teams become the best versions of themselves — taking notes, booking rooms, planning offsites, getting birthday cakes, tidying common spaces, running team meetings, onboarding teammates, fixing bugs, giving feedback, asking difficult questions, listening (or creating space for everyone to get a chance to speak), including someone who is feeling excluded — are grossly undervalued.
Not only are they undervalued — but too often, the dutiful among us who perform these tasks are also undervalued — in salary and title — even though these contributions are critical, if not essential, to a team’s success.
Fifteen years ago, the same was true for the game of baseball.
Home runs, with their often majestic and transcendent arc above the walls of a stadium, were big shows and visible even to the casual observer. They were valued much more than a timely, accurate throw from the outfield even if it saved more runs. Singles seemed much better than walks, pitchers who got the final three outs more important than the ones that got the six previous ones, and catchers with strong arms more than catchers who could make a ball look like a strike.
Fifteen years ago, baseball, with its relatively slower pace, also happened to be the most statistically tracked sport in the world. Almost everything was counted — from walks and strikes to innings pitched and flyballs caught. With this trove of data, luminaries like William James and Billy Beane would pose radical ideas about what really mattered to winning and build higher performing teams at a much lower cost.
The same transformation that happened 15 years ago in baseball, is starting to happen today in the office.
Teams of researchers from companies like Google are starting to take a deeper look into what makes certain teams more effective than others. After conducting hundreds of interviews over the course of several years, the early findings reveal something surprising:
No matter how researchers arranged the data . . . it was almost impossible to find . . . any evidence that the composition of a team made any difference (in performance).
Until recently, Google, like most companies, invested heavily in the idea that a company of individual All-Stars should produce All-Star performances. Counterintuitively, the research is revealing almost the exact opposite. What matters to a team’s effectiveness is not how individuals perform on their own but how the individuals interact with each other, sometimes by design but largely by accident.
Is it normal for everyone to have an equal chance to speak or for one person to dominate the conversation? Is it normal for one person to take all the meeting notes or was that responsibility rotated between team members? Is it normal for people to feel comfortable asking difficult questions?
These group norms seem to be the key to creating an environment of trust — where everyone feels safe enough to contribute in all the big and little ways that help a team succeed.
With this insight comes the challenge — if positive group behaviors are so important, but largely invisible among the redwoods of team and company OKRs, is there a way for them to be appropriately valued on a day-to-day basis?
Social trust and safety are not just important within a company — they are foundational building blocks for a well-functioning society.
Countries with high levels of social trust like Norway, Sweden and Finland enjoy both higher qualities of life and economic outcomes.
China is taking a unique approach to improve social trust by closely monitoring the transactions an individual has within society — from bad driving to smoking in non-smoking zones to posting fake news online. Based on these behaviors, each individual merits a social credit score.
An individual with poor social credit will have certain freedoms taken away, from taking planes and trains to getting the best jobs and attending the best schools, to even slowing down a person’s internet speed.
But social credit doesn’t have to be about monitoring everyone at all times.
At Thunkable, we thought we would try a different approach.
Rather than monitoring our teammates for potential transgressions, we created an app that allows us to reward coworkers for completing thankless tasks — as a way of encouraging positive group norms and building trust within the team. For the past several months, we have learned that this simple tool can actually influence behavior on our own team in unexpected ways:
The social credit app has given light to the hundreds of thankless tasks which would otherwise have gone unnoticed and unpracticed — from picking up our biweekly lunch deliveries to fixing an annoying bug to more often than not, spending a few hours to help a teammate achieve their goal. We have seen more love for responding to hard customer support questions and more bagels brought in for breakfast for no reason other than it’s Tuesday. For managers, it has also given light to the individuals on the team who go above and beyond to make the whole team better.
So what was the reward for having the most credit? We decided that the person with the most credit would get to choose our lunch spot on Friday — -which is a big deal in the startup world (and a huge privilege at Thunkable).
Designing a less creepy mobile app takes some thought especially in an age of GDPR.
One of the interesting things that you can do when you design and build your own work apps, is that you can fully control what data is collected and stored. You can become your own data gatekeeper, and for a topic as sensitive as this, keeping data private is paramount.
Not only is the social credit app backed by a private realtime database powered by Firebase, but it is designed to only store a single field of data per person.
The app itself has no memory — no history is stored. This may make it difficult to formally incorporate into regular performance reviews, but this was by design. If a teammate is behind in social credit, this could impact their motivation to do good this week — at least that is the feedback we got from one of our teammates when we introduced this tool.
So we decided to reset the data every week, giving everyone a fresh start. Being able to reset social credit each week was important to motivate everyone on the team, not just the do-gooders.
Also, anyone can add credit but the app does not know who added the credit (no login is required). This anonymity enables users to reward good behavior with less anxiety, with no threat of revenge or even compliments.
Remix an app without code on Thunkable
Thunkable is the platform where anyone can remix an app on Android or iOS, instead of starting from scratch. Users start from an existing app and drag and drop different designs and services into their app to make it their own. See our growing a list of sample apps.
Step ① / Copy the sample app into your account
Just click on this link. If you are not logged in already, you will be asked to log in with your Google account.Step ② / Live test the sample app to see a preview it on your phone
One of the coolest features of the Thunkable platform is the ability to see your app on your phone as you tweak it, also known as live testing. You can live test any app on Thunkable with our iOS or Android app.Step ③ / Remix
First, create your own free Firebase account and project. More info on how to set this up.Second, add your own photos of members of your team. We recommend circular cropped photos which you can make on Google Slides with their crop tool.If your team is smaller than 13, you can remove the buttons that you don't need. If your team is larger than 13, you'll have to add additional buttons and the corresponding logic in the Blocks tab.
Step ④ / Share the App
Unlike other apps that you may want to distribute widely, you probably only want to share this app with your team. One way to do this is to download the app on Android or iOS and share the .apk (for Android) or link (for iOS) with your teammates. There are special installation instructions for each platform that you’ll want to take a look through (iOS / Android)On Thunkable, you can also share a copy of your app project and have your teammates live preview it on their phones. You’ll have to make sure to share your private Firebase API key and database URL for them to add data to your shared database in the cloud.
Despite the attention that A.I. gets, I think the next frontier in workplace productivity is re-imagining how humans work together. In my previous job, I asked my colleagues, “what percent of their team’s potential were they actually achieving?” (The average was 10%). I’m really excited about the research that teams at Google and elsewhere are conducting to better understand what makes teams effective — and tools like social credit that can nudge teams towards being the best versions of themselves. If you have thoughts about this topic or are getting stuck trying to customize this app for your team, feel free to reach out to me at albert@thunkable.com
