MANAGING PEOPLE & TEAMS
Don’t Hire “Brilliant Jerks”: A Practical Guide for Actually Beneficial Performance Reviews
A Look at How an Australian Tech Giant is Stepping Up Their Culture Fit Game
You’re never going to get a cup of coffee at the tech behemoth’s Sydney office, but you’d find hot, fresh breakfast and lunch provided for free.
Just this April, the two Atlassian co-founders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar dressed up in Elvis costumes to perform a variation of ‘Viva Las Vegas’ at the Mandalay Bay convention center in Las Vegas. The twist? They changed the lyrics to ‘Jira Las Vegas’, referencing to their best-known software product, Jira. This just an extension of their culture—Atlassian is one of the best tech companies to work for with a rating of 4.3 on Glassdoor.
The CEO approval rating on Glassdoor? 93%.
Atlassian’s work culture is phenomenally transparent and effective. ‘Open company, no bullshit’, ‘Build with hear and balance’, ‘Don’t f**k the customer’. These are actual values that the Australian tech giant embodies.
Which goes back to the cup of coffee. Atlassian wants you to leave the building and have a stroll, according to Atlassian futurist Dom Price. Price removed the free coffee to initiate walking meetings. He wanted to make the office less of a ‘sticky place’.
With Sotheby’s, ANZ, Airbnb, and Netflix amongst the 150K customers that Atlassian is serving today, their execution of a solid corporate and work culture forms one of the biggest contributing factors to their success; their commitment to ensuring a culture fit over job performance has been publicly displayed since 2015.
Let’s face it: ‘culture’ is quite a buzzword in the corporate world. Yet, the data is clear: companies who succeed in creating an engaging, inclusive and positive culture are companies who succeed in every single metric they are tracking—with a direct correlation to company revenue.
What’s in a company culture?
It is the personality of the organization from the employee perspective. What does he think when he comes to work? What does he feel when he sits in the office? What are the emotions tagged to saying “I work for Company X”?
Be it written or not, culture determines the company’s environment and how the employees will adapt and settle in. It is a combination of values, beliefs, taboos and even myths that companies develop all the time. This blend is highly intricate and significant: yet, many organizations are not prioritizing building culture, which directly impacts their hiring, engagement, and retaining capabilities.
Here’s the data: having a great culture reduces the probability of job turnover over 3 times, from 48.4% to 13.9%, according to a Columbia University study. Having turnover means having replacement costs, which can be 6–9 months of their salary. Undeniably, different studies show great variations in the exact numbers. Nevertheless, the correlation is clear: companies with weak and disengaging cultures are going to struggle.
It is clear that employee engagement translates directly to the success, financial and otherwise, of the business. Engaged employees are employees who actually care about the company.
“Screw the coffee, I’m going to get shit done!” That’s what engaged employees generally think. Without expecting rewards, they are willing to make the extra effort. They believe that the company’s success is related to their own. They have personal vested interests.
The fact is, 900 million employees are not engaged in their workplace, according to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace. 340 million employees are actively disengaged around the world. Only 13% of employees in the 142-country report are actually engaged in their work.
So, rather than thinking about ditching the coffee, most employees are thinking about ditching their work instead and it is a heavy price to pay for the company: low-level engagement within companies results in a 33% drop in operating income, according to the Harvard Business Review. Compared to their high-level engagement counterparts, they don’t get to enjoy the 19% increase in operating income.
Hence, rather than think of culture as an “HR” problem, leaders and managers need to look at it as a business problem.
Performance Reviews Suck—Atlassian Made Them Not
Often called a necessary evil of corporate life, performance reviews seem to exist as ambushes: it is that time of the year where the manager, seemingly out of nowhere, decides to unleash every single criticism (sugarcoated or not) he has on the employee, oftentimes quoting numbers, citing examples and talking about ‘his impression’ and ‘what he feels’.
Performance reviews suck: not because of its existence, but due to its execution; performance reviews are opportunities for managers to do holistic, objective reviews on how the employees are contributing to the company’s success.
How are they able to improve? What are the growth opportunities for them in the coming year? What resources will there be for them to tap on?
Yet, performance reviews still hold a bad name.
Oftentimes, it leaves people with bitter feelings. Why did he say this? How could he say that? I did so much work, yet this is all I get? Maybe I’m really that bad. Am I not cut out for this job? Maybe everyone else is ganging up on me.
As a leader, you need to ensure that your performance reviews are fair and biased. Your role is to communicate with neutrality or positivity: your aim is to guide your employees in being self-aware. You want them to grow on their own as well but with more clarity.
Most importantly, you want your employee to fit your values and form the culture that the organization should have.
You want your employee to fit your values and form the culture that the organisation should have.
On the contrary, many organizations focus on the delivery of results and emphasize it over behaviors that can cause problems for the team and company culture—hence, giving rise to ‘brilliant jerks’. As a leader, your aim is to understand whether your employee is conforming to the culture and values that the organization embodies and not over-emphasize on one aspect.
Hence, at Atlassian, they made a simple conclusion from their research: if a team understands the purpose of their work and are well-connected with one another, they are happier and more effective.
In this case, the performance system is adjusted to look at three aspects:
- Expectation of Role—what are the literal duties and responsibilities of his/her job position? Has the employee done well on this part? Where else can he improve? Where else does he need to focus a lot on?
- Contribution to the Team — how much work has the employee actually done that contributes to the team? Has he eased workload? Has she garnered results from the social media campaign? Have they built the bot that they were intending to use next year?
- Demonstration of Company Values—for Atlassian, it is how well they conform to the values. Each value holds different significance (e.g. ‘Open company, no bullshit’ refers to transparent communication, accountability and assuming positive intent).
As a leader, your role is to ensure that your employees understand how far they are from contributing to upholding the values of the organization. By allowing room for self-awareness, employees can also self-reflect: how can I improve, and what can I do?
The Practical Guide to Doing Performance Review
Performance reviews have their place: it is your opportunity as a leader to build rapport and forge a direction towards attitudinal and skillset growth. Yet, many organizations—even if they are in the same industry—are unique in their own ways. How can you do a performance review in a way that fits your organization yet also making it a great one that can positively impact your employee for long-term?
Dig Deep into Your Organisation’s Values
The values of the organization are deep-rooted and mean way more than what the word, phrase or sentence says. ‘Having kindness’ does not refer to being kind in general, but directly targeting at being kind to colleagues, customers and themselves. ‘Embracing adventure’ is not a signal for employees to go skydiving, but a signal to experiment and to step out of their comfort zone constantly.
As a leader, you need to look in between the lines and reconcile with the organization’s mission and vision. How are these values able to help the organization reach its goals? How are they able to hit their business goals with those values? What kind of change will there be in the organization if 100% of the employees embody those values from 8–5?
Take a hard look at those values and sieve out the most important ones. Top three, or top five, those values must be directly related to the business goals and the culture goals.
Your objective is to measure how well the employee is actually doing in embodying those values. Through those measurements, form actionable plans and guide their mindsets for the future.
Are they a “Brilliant Jerk”?
The reason why Atlassian’s change in a performance review could actually garner media mentions on Quartz, Yahoo Finance, Australian News and Business Insider is that it simply makes sense.
Every company has rockstar employees but as a leader, you need to do a strict audit: are they building the culture up, or are they tearing people around them down? Is their stellar result at the expense of others? Are they creating toxic environments in the workplace?
Rather than having one rockstar employee, it is infinitely better to have a team of ‘average joes’ that simply gel well with one another. Would it be better to have a team of well-functioning employees who operate in a healthy, comfortable environment? Is this rockstar employee causing dips in the performance of other employees?
All it needs is just one rock within a river stream to disrupt the water flow. Are you going to remove the rock or are you going to let the water erode it one day? Either way, having an employee that does not build the culture at the workplace will ultimately burn themselves, which reflects poorly on you as a leader.
How much did they contribute?
Based on their role, how much did they contribute? Did they go beyond their role or did they fall behind? As a leader, you need to identify the factors that are affecting their performance. What are the internal and external factors?
Draw a clear line: do you want them to contribute more? If you want to, then your role is to set an example. Get your hands dirty and be willing to do the grunt work. Go beyond your ‘management’ role. Your employees will understand your expectations in no time.
Executing a great performance review can be a dealbreaker for employees: it is a sign of effective and empathetic leadership, which many employees are most receptive to. When leaders fail at being fair and unbiased in their performance review, it is clear that such leaders are ineffective and lacking clarity in their thought. Till today, women who exhibit leadership qualities are considered ‘bossy’ as compared to their male counterparts who do the same.
Underrepresented minorities are also at a disadvantage: black employees have been told to tone down on some parts of their personality to come off as being ‘less aggressive’.
Your role as a leader is rid reviews and the workplace of such stereotypes and cognitive biases: treat every employee as equal. That way, you are able to display empathetic and fair leadership, which could easily be equated to the fundamentals of any leader in today’s world.