Chapter 1 - HR Matters
IN THIS LESSON
Talent Scorecard
Setting employees up for success & creating alignment
How it Works
This template is a simple framework designed to facilitate one on one conversations. The framework keeps things simple so that you can focus on having sincere, direct conversations with your team - because that’s what scales best.
Parts of this template are based off the Self-Determination Theory created by Richard Ryan and Edward Deci which says there are three main components employees need in their work-life to perform at their best and stay engaged:
Relatedness: Your employees should feel connected to their team and cared for by their manager, this creates trust and allows employees to flex their skills or take risks on new ideas.
Competence: Employees crave continuous growth, they need to feel stretched and valued for their contributions, they should be allowed to bring their own experience and intelligence to their role.
Autonomy: Employees should have space to perform their jobs and choice in how they achieve success.
Something that is often taken for granted is that start-up culture organically encompasses these three components. Relatedness is easy to accomplish when your company is under 30 employees because everyone knows each other, and the organization is typically still flat at this point. Competence is fulfilled because your company is scaling so rapidly that employees will have numerous opportunities to take on new roles. And autonomy is often the foundation of start-up culture as founders don’t typically micro-manage.
Once your company starts to grow however, these components can get stripped away. When management layers are added in and the company feels like it’s doubling in size every week, it becomes more challenging to naturally build trust across the team and maintain your unspoken culture.
This template explains a framework that you can use to incorporate relatedness, competence, and autonomy from the beginning of an employee’s tenure with your company so that a culture of engagement isn’t lost through the growth-curve.
Step 1: Outline Culture and Core Values
At a certain threshold, company culture can’t be “unspoken” anymore. What everyone may have understood intrinsically at 12 employees will start to get lost once you hit 30 employees. It’s valuable to write down your core values as well as a description of what it looks like to successfully practice those values. This way, you are telling new employees what is expected from them and aligning your expectations objectively with what they need to do to contribute successfully to your culture. This is the best way to build trust (Relatedness) from the outset.
This part of the framework will be the same for every hire you make, so you only need to write it out once and then copy and paste into every new hire framework thereafter. An example of what this might look like can be seen below:
Culture Success is defined and measured by ...
We Go All In
This isn’t a job for people who aren’t 100% committed, being on the ground floor and in the trenches of a high-growth start-up takes dedication to the cause. You're excited to roll up your sleeves and dig into big challenges.
We Geek Out
Process optimization, continuous improvement, efficient flow, and design are all fun to imagine and even more fun to implement. You are resourceful and proactive; a doer who is productive, efficient, and impactful. You think through all the options and have the confidence and gravitas to recommend the best solution.
We Give a She*t
You put the team ahead of the individual and believe in the collective goal; this is more than just a job to you. We all check our egos at the door to move the company forward.
Step 2: Outline Contributions and Technical Depth
The next two pieces of the framework will be specific to the role you are hiring for. First, list out the core responsibilities for the role. This will be 5-7 things off the position description that the employee will spend most of their time doing. We call them “contributions” because it indicates that people are contributing to something greater than themselves, and this helps show how the work they do every day contributes to the greater success of the company (Competence). After contributions, list out the job requirements or qualifications for the role. We call this section “technical depth,” because it represents the skills or prior experience necessary to perform the job.
For both the contributions and technical depth skills, write out what it would look like to perform each line item successfully and how you plan to measure performance against each one. By including success metrics, you are creating alignment between you and your new hire. When employees know exactly what is expected from them and what it looks like to be successful, they won’t need as much hands-on management. You have given them the standard of performance and the employee now has free reign to run towards that (Autonomy). It also prevents managerial blind-spots because you are creating measurable performance indicators for your expectations instead of subjectively evaluating performance.
Contributions Success is defined and measured by ...
Technical Depth Success is defined and measured by ...
Lead the team of product owners and other engineers to deliver great experiences to our customers.
-Team productivity - backlog, team velocity, team satisfaction, effective deployment of tools and processes that support the team
-CSAT score from our customers
Prior experience building out processes that capture the user experience. You know how to motivate the team to be empathetic and user-focused
-Implementation of process that iteratively captures the user experience and prioritizes feature requests based on their feedback. -Establish team performance metrics that include user feedback and motivate the team to help the end user
Step 3: Set Clear Expectations
At this point - you should have outlined: Culture and Core Values, “Contributions,” and “Technical Depth” with each of their definitions for success. The next step is to pull everything together into one framework that you will share with the new hire during their first week.
For this framework to be most effective, you should use it as the basis of ongoing conversation throughout an employee’s first year. Set aside time with your new hire during their first week to review each expectation and the definition of success you have outlined. During that first-week conversation, invite the
employee to contribute their thoughts and engage in open discussion with you about their understanding of each line item. Make sure they understand what’s being asked of them. From there, you can work with the employee to determine their “degree of mastery” for each expectation across a 1-10 rating scale. This exercise will help you and the employee understand which areas they need the most development in.
In the example to the left, you can see that this employee needs the most development in “actively promoting and using code quality, organization, automation, and testing.”
Step 4: Continue to Check In
The ideal outcome after implementing this framework is that your employee has a clear, actionable path to be successful at your company and you have a tool to help guide them there. We recommend reviewing this with your employee at the 30-60-90-day check-ins and then quarterly after that. You should take the time to fill out the “degree of mastery” that you see being demonstrated before each meeting and then let your employee talk through those points with you during the check-in. Doing this allows you to remain aligned on expectations and progress towards their goals. As a guide for each check-in, we recommend the following:
● Discuss success definitions and provide chance to clarify this is an opportunity to review and re-clarify how success is being defined at each contribution or technical depth skill.
● Review “Degree of Mastery”: Discuss where you are aligned vs. not and give the employee room to express their perspective. Explore the areas where you are well aligned and how to leverage that success going forward.
● Review All-Star “Contributions”: Ask the employee what they are most proud of and share which contributions you think they are excelling at. Show them how their contributions are making an impact.
● Review Trends: There is a section at the bottom of the framework for “trends,” this is a place where you can record how their growth is progressing and what their focus should be for the next month. Help them identify one change they can work on that will make a positive impact on their growth and performance.
● Set Expectations: Are there things that need to change or are you having concerns about their ability to be successful? This is the time to tell them! Be clear about your expectations and plan.
● Ask for Feedback: What does your employee need from you to be successful? What can you do differently or better to increase their success?