DueProps

Noticing Positive Things at Work Can Decrease Stress

 

Over the course of a typical workday, negative and positive things inevitably happen — and many people focus mainly, or exclusively, on the negative ones. But research has found that even small positive experiences are a valuable resource for reducing stress. When people spend time thinking about what went well that day, their mental and physical stress levels decrease by small but significant amounts, and they have an easier time detaching from work. Thinking positively doesn’t come naturally for most people: We’re attuned to paying attention to negative things, which makes it hard to notice positive ones. So instead of ruminating on negative events, make time to relive, enjoy, and share the positive events of your day. Doing so creates bonds with other people and reduces evening stress, improving your sleep — and the better alertness and mood that result can lead to more positive things happening tomorrow.

Managers that use DueProps report that when they incorporate the giving of props to their employee into their daily habits, they actually feel better about their jobs and the performance of their employees. We think this relates to the benefits of noticing good things at work, as discussed in the cited work.

Read more at “The Powerful Effect of Noticing Good Things at Work,” by Joyce E. Bono and Theresa M. Glomb

Accenture and Cisco Latest Big Corporations to Abandon Traditional Performance Review

One by one, the largest companies in the world are doing their employees and managers an enormous favor: Getting rid of the annual performance review. As one of the pioneers of recognition-based performance metrics systems, DueProps cheers on Accenture and Cisco for making the move.

Accenture CEO Pierre Nanterme said that the professional services firm, which employs hundreds of thousands of workers in cities around the globe, has been quietly preparing for this “massive revolution” in its internal operations.

“Imagine, for a company of 330,000 people, changing the performance management process—it’s huge,” Nanterme said. “We’re going to get rid of probably 90 percent of what we did in the past.”

Cisco, for long one of the foremost practitioners of performance reviews to evaluate employees, has decided to junk the practice and replace it with a new peer-to-peer feedback mechanism. The company believes this will foster teamwork and collaboration.

Francine Katsoudas, chief human resources officer at Cisco, said more and more companies were finding that their performance management system wasn't serving them well.

The list of major corporations that have had enough with the forced rankings, the time-consuming paperwork and the frustration engendered among managers and employees by performance reviews is growing. Six percent of Fortune 500 companies have gotten rid of rankings, according to management research firm CEB.

"From an employee's perspective, it's the most hated process that you have. Even leaders are saying they are not getting what they want from the system. And so, the decision that we have made, which given our scale is a very big decision, is that we're going to move away from ratings. And we're going to move away from the concept of the annual review," she said.

Mass Email Worksheet

If your web business depends on user acquisition and ongoing engagement then you're probably going be sending out a lot of mass email campaigns using tools such as Mailchimp. As a recently launched startup, we're just getting a handle on best practices for managing the creation and sending of those campaigns. And based on our short experience so far, we're realizing that having some sort of quality control on email campaigns seems essential to preventing mistakes and costly embarrassment. To that end, I drafted this Mass Email Checklist form.

Download Mass Email Worksheet PDF (Word docx)

I think that sometimes in our efforts to keep everything online and off of paper, we forget that simple forms can be very effective for managing critical workflows and forming the basis of organizational knowledge.

What I'm planning to do with these worksheets as they're completed is to file them in a binder together with printouts of the campaign mailer itself and the Mailchimp campaign report from a day or two later. That way, when the day comes that responsibility for email campaigns needs to be transitioned to someone else, they can be handed the binder and have a quick reference for what we've done historically, how that's worked and a sense of what our best practices might be.

Hope this form is helpful to your business. Please share your mass email campaign best practices with us in the comments and let us know if you have suggestions for how to make the form better.

Use DueProps to help gauge your Positive Feedback Ratio

From a Forbes article on 5 Metrics You Should Be Tracking:

You can learn as much from John Gottman as you can from John F. Kennedy about being a great communicator. Gottman, a psychologist, is the author of “Why Marriages Succeed or Fail”.

In his research, he found that marriages that succeed tend to have five times as many positive interactions as negative ones. And when a couple falls below that ratio, their relationship falls down too.

The same is true at the office, where you’re often connected for years in relationships with people who can either become wary of your criticisms or eager to give you their best effort. Catch people doing good things. Never miss a chance to say something nice, even if you feel a little silly. Then when you have feedback on areas to improve, they‘ll really listen. It may be hard to manage to the 5:1 ratio at the office, but you should be mindful of the balance.

Of course, DueProps only handles the positive side of that metric. But in many organizations, there is no official channel for gathering positive feedback on a regular basis from everyone!

Things That Motivate Employees (More Than Money)

Ilya Pozin recently had an article in Inc. Magazine entitled 9 Things That Motivate Employees More Than Money. It was brought to my attention because a few of those things are solidly covered by the functionality we provide with DueProps, starting with the first:

1. Be Generous With Praise. Everyone wants it and it’s one of the easiest things to give. [...] Praise every improvement that you see your team members make. Once you’re comfortable delivering praise one-on-one to an employee, try praising them in front of others.

BOOM SHAKA! DueProps is all about fostering continual praise amongst team members. Our props make it fun and interesting to find opportunities to say "thank you" to someone that has put in a worthy effort. The fact that our props are publicized via a shared activity stream means that praise is naturally conveyed to the rest of the team in a constant and visible format.

4. Never criticize or correct. No one, and I mean no one, wants to hear that they did something wrong. If you’re looking for a de-motivator, this is it...

One of the cornerstones of the DueProps philosphy is that it is better to manage people with positive reinforcement only. Negative reinforcement (including criticism) is a minefield better left unnavigated, especially when trying to manage creative and technical talent that can easily find other work. Instead, use DueProps to constantly give recognition to desired behaviors and use the absence of praise as an opportunity to discuss opportunities for better outcomes.

5. Make everyone a leader. Highlight your top performers’ strengths and let them know that because of their excellence, you want them to be the example for others. You’ll set the bar high and they’ll be motivated to live up to their reputation as a leader. 

Functionality we're cooking up right now is going to allow you to see who is tops at particular types of props. Which means that if you're using DueProps, you'll have hard evidence on who are the top Speed Demon or Awesome Blogger or Sweetness superstars in your organization. You can use that data to heap offline praise or actual rewards on the people who you want to emphasize as leaders as well as those that you have proof as being worthy of being examples to others.

7. Give recognition and small rewards. These two things come in many forms: Give a shout out to someone in a company meeting for what she has accomplished. Run contests or internal games and keep track of the results on a whiteboard that everyone can see. Tangible awards that don’t break the bank can work too. Try things like dinner, trophies, spa services, and plaques. 

Sometimes it's hard to remember to give shout outs and spot recognition, simply because it's yet another thing to remember in addition to everything else. The great thing about DueProps is that it's a system that once implemented, becomes part of the everyday culture of your company. So it's not hard to remember to give recognition and small rewards, because it's just there and everyone already is using it.

9. Share the rewards—and the pain. When your company does well, celebrate. This is the best time to let everyone know that you’re thankful for their hard work. Go out of your way to show how far you will go when people help your company succeed. If there are disappointments, share those too. If you expect high performance, your team deserves to know where the company stands. Be honest and transparent.

This point is the most significant for us as far as unique functionality that no other recognition platform offers. As a DueProps admin, we expect you to set a bonus pool amount that is shared fairly amongst the users of the system at the end of every bonus period. It's up to you when to close out bonus periods, although we suggest that you make them monthly.

Since the amount of the bonus pool budget is arbitrary, you can vary it up and down depending on your business circumstances. Had a really good month? Bump the pool up by a few thousand dollars and really show your team that you appreciate how they worked together to achieve success. Our roadmap includes the ability to automate addition and subtraction of bonus pool money based on company goals, and the ability to vary the amount of bonus budget allotted on a per-team basis.

Thoughts on the size of DueProps networks

Thanks to our study of similar solutions, we know that the DueProps concept works on a  departmental (or divisional) level, or at companies that are small enough that everyone knows each other. The theoretical maximum desirable user count is probably similar to Dunbar's number, around 150 people. You can’t roll out a single monolithic due props network instance across thousands of people in an enterprise because the activity streams would be mostly filled with meaningless content. You'd be forced to implement Twitter-like functionality to cut it down to a manageable list of people that you "follow."

DueProps currently contains a hastily-implemented, lightweight, implementation of "followers/following" functions precisely because our biggest pilot customer brought aboard close to 200 people in a short timeframe and generated so much content that it was impossible to keep up with adequately.

Upvoting (a.k.a. "liking" a particular instance of given props) can especially only be done to the extent that you know someone and you’re able to make a value judgment as to whether what they did is something that you agree they should get props for. I would think that it doesn't make sense to upvote random props where you have no idea of the context in which they were given.

It's clear to us, from a product design standpoint, that we need to facilitate the creation and affiliation of small (10-50 people) loosely-coupled networks of DueProps users under the umbrella of a larger organization, whether that's a big Corporation or volunteer group, or university, or whatever makes sense.

Beyond the UX mechanics of facilitating the creation and affiliation of networks, we also need to keep in mind the kind of reporting tools that we provide. Some of them will be extraordinarily valuable across larger enterprises. We also should probably be more flexible about allowing different groups to integrate and having different bonus budgets for different groups as opposed to a single company that in most cases, won't have an overarching bonus pool. (It could definitely have specific sets of prizes for individuals winning the most props overall, or most of a certain type. We've imagined things like the top winner of Speed Demon props for the year would get a Ferrari rental for a week.)

The Name Change: DueProps

The question of whether we're working on an incentive compensation system or a recognition system has occasionally tripped up my customers since I originally introduced the name RightBonus earlier this year. The truth is our system is both. It packages up the functionality in such a way that is complementary, with the tie-in to bonus compensation providing a hook that should increase engagement of employees that might otherwise see recognition as a chore or "hippy-dippy/kumbaya" imposition by management.

Why DueProps?

Props is short for "Propers" The entire word is used in the song "Respect" by Aretha Franklin in 1967...

all I'm askin' in return honey is to give me my propers when I get home

The term "due props" is another way of referring to giving someone their due respect and happens to be the name I chose for this project when I started prototyping it at Hashrocket over a year ago. Somehow the domain name dueprops.com was not available back then so I settled for the lesser duepropsapp.com. Then miraculously, the previous owner of dueprops.com let it expire. I grabbed it last week.

A Pivot?

To a certain extent, we've pivoted in that the emphasis is not on peer distribution of a bonus pool, but rather peer recognition. (The RightBonus feature: fair and transparent allocation of a bonus pool) is a key benefit of using our system and provides a big "hook" for engagement, but it isn't the core function. Hence the name change and re-orientation of our focus.

Recognition is known to increase employee happiness and retention (lower turnover). That's a key win for our customers, so it's what we're going to emphasize.

RightPay

Our corporate name is still RightPay, Inc., which reflects our strategic desire to diversify into other types of applications in the HCM (Human Capital Management) space.

Progress (and sneak peak)

It's been a long time since I had time to post here. Figured I'd force myself to give some love to our blog readers. As you can see above, our product development effort has come a long way. This is a real screenshot of the product's activity timeline for everyone at RightPay, Inc. as of tonight. A couple nights ago we reset the data on our production deployment and started using it for ourselves in earnest on the production site, instead of our staging server. This means we can put all sorts of testing and garbage data on staging and clear it whenever necessary instead of trying to use it for dogfooding the product.

The sweet layout and award graphics are by our own hotshot designer Cody Sanfilippo, who has now been working with me full time for over a month. He'll be blogging here soon.

Most importantly, we are finally starting to roll out to our early access customers. If you've signed up for access via the Launch Rock widget then expect to hear from me sometime in the next few weeks as we ramp up the usage.

Stay tuned, much more news on the horizon. -- Obie

Employee Feedback and Reinforcement

Feedback is a critical component of living systems. Our senses naturally receive feedback as inputs to all of our actions. Our brains integrate feedback into our lives as part of our learning activities. Further, let's define performance as the attitude, actions, and tasks that result in a particular outcome. In the context of the workplace, we refer to feedback as information and data about performance that allows an employee to change for the better.

Even the most dysfunctional workplaces are full of information and data. And it's easy for people to confuse information and data with feedback. However, if information relayed to someone does not indicate how behavior is to be altered then it does not constitute valid feedback. A data point by itself does not carry a significance towards change; it must be in the context of a message that serves two functions: 1) communicating where an employee stands relative to a given performance goal and 2) what changes to make to move closer to that goal.

Very few companies foster sufficient, valid performance feedback in their organizations. Much of what is assumed to be feedback is just un-actionable information and data. Compounding the problem, different job roles require different forms of feedback. Managers that aren't specifically trained in the art of crafting feedback are unable to provide it effectively. Employees also need coaching and assistance if they are expected to provide actionable feedback to their peers.

Feedback is by itself an insufficient condition for employees to reliably improve their performance. Long-standing research has shown that feedback must be combined with reinforcement if a change is to take place. The psychologists Ilgen, Fisher and Taylor found that the effectiveness of feedback depends upon the extent to which it functions to lead the individual to anticipate a reward. They cast doubts on the effectiveness of just feedback in provoking change. Their study suggests that feedback and reinforcement are very different concepts and that motivation for positive change are attributable to reinforcement rather than just feedback.

Part of what we're attempting to do with RightBonus is to create reliable mechanisms for coupling reinforcement in the form of tangible rewards. Our minimum viable product focuses on cash bonuses, but our roadmap (forthcoming) will feature other types of rewards as well.

This post is the first in a planned series of articles discussing attributes of effective feedback, reinforcement (positive & negative), goals and extrinsic vs. intrisic rewards in the workplace.

RightBonus MVP Alpha Release

(Note: RightBonus is in closed alpha at the moment. Trying to have a beta release ready by early April.)

Eliza and I are strong believers in Lean Startup methods and "getting real" so we spent the first month of full-time work on RightBonus nailing down our MVP (Minimal Viable Product) feature set. Our goal was to deliver a version of our application with a minimal feature set to our initial alpha customers as soon as possible.

First, a definition: the minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.

Eric Ries - Minimal Viable Product: a guide

Earlier this week we deployed our Alpha release and are considering it our first true MVP version. The major features: 1) being able to nominate a fellow employee for an award and 2) upvoting, are present and working. Supporting functionality around creating a company network and getting your employees onto it as an administrator are also in place.

Stuff that's notably missing? Copy! I cringe as I use our internal deployment and realize that the forms are barebones and missing vital instructions and overall user-friendliness. That aspect will be addressed in the next couple of weeks.

To close this post on a celebratory note, I must mention that earlier this week we signed up our first customer to trial the app and provide actionable feedback, a major milestone for any young web startup. Early next week I'll be identifying a few more enthusiastic early adopter companies to bring aboard as alpha customers also. Then the real fun begins: Continuing to iterate rapidly while incorporating real customer feedback into the loop.