How does Facebook keep its employees happy? Feedback. Lots and lots of feedback.
Facebook is already rated one of the most satisfying tech companies to work for, and top management want to make sure that distinction sticks. For several months they have been testing a service calledRypple, a website that deluges workers with feedback. It allows colleagues to swap thanks, track goals in real time and solicit input from their co-workers whenever they feel they need it.
After a nine-month pilot project inside Facebook, Rypple on Monday is releasing the product, called Loops, to the market. “Workplace productivity has been stuck to a 50-year-old, paper-based performance-review cycle,” says Daniel Debow, Rypple’s co-founder and co-CEO. “Now there can be rapid, continuous learning and feedback. We can capture social interactions and turn them into data, into real useful feedback.”
Rypple, whose investors include PayPal founder Peter Thiel, is part of a new crop of startups that put intensive feedback loops to work using simple technologies — in this case, the web — to gather data and play it back to users, with the goal of improving behavior — in this case, employee productivity and satisfaction.
With Rypple, feedback comes through four feeds: input from coworkers, either anonymous or identified; “thanks” messages from coworkers; tracking progress towards work goals; and coaching from supervisors. The Loops product, which the company will sell for $9 per employee per month, gathers these four feeds into one channel for a rich, robust, continuous performance review. The company also offers a freemium product that offers some basic feedback tools.
“Our company has always been built around feedback loops,” says Facebook engineering director Bob Trahan, who counts himself as employee 45. “Everything we do in engineering is reviewed: Engineer A reviews what Engineer B does. We have design reviews twice a week. We track performance metrics for code, in terms of speed and time. So Rypple fits with our culture very well.”
Rypple also allows flexibility in departments that don’t require — or want — intense, always-on feedback. Adam Ward, the company’s head of university recruiting, uses the product with his team of 27 recruiters to do check-ins every two weeks rather than the typical once-a-year review. “It gives people a sense of the unknown: Where do I stand? People love that. It really resonates,” says Ward. Once a year isn’t enough? “If we want to avoid becoming too big and bureaucratic – basically to avoid being a company that rhymes with Google or that ends in “-soft” – we think that real time, ongoing feedback helps us move fast and avoid too much bureaucracy,” says Ward.
The whole process of managing employee performance and providing feedback has been in need of an overhaul for some time. The 360-degree review was popularized in the 1990s, with the notion that soliciting comments from many people who work with an individual, rather than from just an immediate supervisor, provides a more thorough and valid insight into an employee’s performance and potential. But these “three-sixties” have many limitations, the biggest of which is that they typically happen only once a year.
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