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Why do good employees quit?
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Losing a star employee can feel devastating (no matter the size and scale of your company). So it’s not surprising there’s a plethora of research on why good employees quit their job and how to mitigate that outcome. Many say that people don’t quit a job, they quit a boss, but as I dug further into the research, I found it’s a lot more complicated than that…

In particular, Facebook’s internal research about why good employees quit their job at that company, recently published in Harvard Business Review, tells a really interesting story about how to lose, and keep, great employees.

Some key takeaways on why good employees quit Facebook:

Good employees quit their job at Facebook for a few main reasons:

  • The employee no longer enjoyed their job
  • Their strengths weren’t being used
  • They weren’t growing in their career

On the flip side, this means that managers can retain great employees by customizing experiences for their people, including:

  • Enabling team members to do the work they enjoy most
  • Helping team members play to their strengths
  • Carving a path for career development that accommodates personal priorities

What does this look like in the day to day?

It’s things like making sure you know whether a top individual performer on your team actually wants to become a manager, and if they don’t, thinking through how their role and responsibilities can grow in other ways.

I’ll close by noting that that most of the research about why good employees quit – or employee turnover in general – has focused on the United States and Europe. However, at Shortlist, we recently conducted a survey with almost 6,000 Kenyan jobseekers which touched on these topics.

We found that the two most important things jobseekers are looking for in a new opportunity are (1) career growth (69.2% of respondents) and (2) alignment with company mission (14.4% of respondents). When you contrast this with those who stated the most important things were salary (only 8.5% of respondents) and stability (only 4.2% of respondents) — clearly, jobseekers are looking for a lot more than your standard 9-to-5!

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Related: Happier Workplaces: Four Essential Ingredients for Building Them

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One Team: A Fifth Shortlist Value Enters the World
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By Paul Breloff, Simon Desjardins & Matt Schnuck

Our Kenya team, happy about our fifth value (or so we choose to believe).

A year ago, we wrote a blog about how Shortlist defined our values. It’s been fun to see the engagement with that blog, which has interestingly been our most popular one ever. We interpret this to mean that people really like stories about team culture & values — or people just happened to be Googling the term “swashbuckle” and stumbled on us.

So we thought we’d share an exciting development: We’ve added to our values!

Values, and the culture they help define, are living breathing things. Just as our team continues to grow, expand, change, move around… well, we wanted to create some space to revisit some of our basic building blocks and see if they’re keeping up.

And when we considered that, we decided: mostly, yes… but they were missing something.

Specifically, we wanted to call out the importance of team and collaboration a little more directly. We loved our existing values — but with a critical eye, we realized they came across as more individualistic than we’d like.. Own it; Act with intention; Find the adventure; Be a whole person. These are all things you can do just as well on your own, with or without a team.

In the time since we defined our values, we’ve seen how crucial it is to us to emphasize a team-centric spirit. We strive for the “we” rather than “I” in most things. We want people to act and believe that when the team wins, each individual wins.

This was brought home for us when we acquired Spire last year. While we brought the legal entities and office space together, we went through a parallel process of merging our team cultures and work-styles (see below white board). We realized how the values of both teams were more similar than different, and as a team we connected each team’s distinct values to a set of shared underlying principles and behaviors we could all get behind. With one exception: one of Spire’s value was “Generosity,” which was reinforced through mantras like “feedback is a gift” and practices like gratuitous fist bumping, which represented a generous burst of personal connection amidst otherwise busy days and personal agendas. We really liked that, and we wanted a little bit of that in our global Shortlist culture.

Epic work session merging Shortlist and Spire values…

To make the change, we learned a little bit from our last process: we made sure we pulled ideas from everyone, but ultimately took it upon ourselves as co-founders to define the actual words. We held three brainstorms across our offices in Nairobi, Mumbai and Hyderabad, collecting examples of what great team moments look like, what behaviors embody the teammates we want to be, and what sort of practices we want to avoid. We also collected different phrases or words or ideas that were particularly resonant for the team, and got lots of great ideas.

One of the brainstorms about being a great (and less great) team…

Then, the three of us co-founders combined individual journaling and co-drafting (hey, it worked last time!) to come up with the “new value.” We went back and forth, discussing what different words and phrases meant to us, and what behaviors we most wanted to enshrine and discourage. Ultimately we settled on the following:

One team. Teammates come first. Mood is infectious. Listen loudly. Feedback is a gift. “We” instead of “I”. When the team wins, we all win.

This captures so many different meanings for us. The idea that we’re “one team,” united by a vision, mission, and passion for unlocking professional potential, despite a variety of backgrounds, offices spanning three locations on two continents, and the dozens of individual life trajectories that have converged on the shared Shortlist adventure. These ideas orient us towards the credit-sharing “we” and away from the credit-hoarding “I.” They remind us that in our company (which we try to keep as flat and nonpolitical as possible), the best way to win individually is to help the team win. And they encourage us to think about feedback not as a critique, but as a gift from your colleague, who is giving it in the hopes of mutual growth.

Will this be the last change we make? Who knows, but probably not! But that’s all part of the adventure.

P.S. Curious to see the whole set of values? Search no more!

Own it. Be your best, even when no one is looking. High standards are contagious. Generate discipline. Drive for results. See the needful and do it.

Act with intention. Do the work to get clear. Buck convention. Big goals start with small steps; step with purpose.

Find the adventure. Changing the world should be fun. Inject romance into the everyday. Be bold. Dream loud. Swashbuckle.

Be a whole person. We’re more than our work. Seek balance and health. Learn from differences. Unlock your potential.

One team. Teammates come first. Mood is infectious. Listen loudly. Feedback is a gift. “We” instead of “I”. When the team wins, we all win.

 

 

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The Power of Swashbuckle: How Shortlist Decided What’s Important
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By Paul Breloff, Simon Desjardins, Matt Schnuck (Shortlist Co-Founders)

At Shortlist, we pride ourselves on being a values-driven company and we love working with values-driven employers. To that end, we’re hosting (with our friends at Spire) what we expect to be a really cool breakfast gathering next Thursday June 8 in Nairobi — Defining and Living Your Company Culture. Check it out.

This event has caused us to reflect on our own values, where they came from and why they are important to us. The Shortlist values are:

Own it: Own yourself and your work. Don’t wait; see the needful and do it. Generate discipline. Drive for results.

Act with intention: Do the work to get clear. Buck convention. Big goals start with small steps; step with purpose.

Find the adventure: Changing the world should be fun. Inject spirit into the everyday. Be bold. Dream loud. Swashbuckle.

Be a whole person: We’re more than our work. Seek balance and health. Learn from differences. Unlock your potential.

(Side note: every time we write these, we kind of get the chills. We love our values.)

So where did these come from and what do they mean to us?

We followed a very deliberate process, and engaged in a series of open-ended brainstorms among our senior team, with the prompt, “What is important to us and what kind of company do we want to be?” Needless to say, a lot came up. We attempted, as a group, to give some form to the mush, organizing different ideas into thematic buckets and teasing out which ideas felt like personal preferences and which ideas felt core and embodied our aspirations for a durable cultural foundation.

At their best, company values are inspirational but must also be “real,” not simply aspirational. Company values should already exist within the team, and should be discovered more than invented. Values help us answer “Who are you at your best?,” not “Who do you want to be like when you grow up?” We believe our growing team would see right through any value we couldn’t embody (or at least try to) in real life on a day to day basis.

We co-founders believe that values must bubble up from the team, but ultimately be defined, lived, and breathed by our leadership, whose actions and decisions are often most visible and set the tone for the whole organization. As such, we did not try to settle on values statements through a polite process of lowest-common denominator appeasement among a broad leadership group. Instead, we took all the feedback away to come up with something opinionated on our own. Specifically, we headed off for a head-clearing weekend perched on a cliff above the ocean in Varkala, Kerala. (It was less fancy than it may seem, but not less awesome.)

Matt, Paul and Simon standing on the cliffs of Varkala, after our values brainstorm

While there, the three of us reflected on what’s important to us as individuals, what we heard from the team, and what we wanted to champion and enshrine for the future. We crafted ideas and words through a few rounds of solo journaling followed by group discussion, openly discussing what we liked and didn’t like about each other’s ideas.

We strove for boldness in articulation, and took blandness as the enemy. With each value, we framed it in a way that we could actually imagine a company with an opposing point of view. We’ve all been at companies with conventional values like “respect” and “integrity” — but really, who would ever not value those things?

For example, with “Own it,” we were responding to the fact that we did not want to foster a culture of obedience, hierarchy and blind rules-following. We wanted anyone on our team to feel empowered to see an opportunity and go for it. As leaders, we try hard to own our words, our actions, our personal and professional development. This also extends to apologizing and trying to improve when we screw up.

With “Act with intention,” we were responding in part to the Facebook ethos to “move fast and break things” — we would rather build a company that is thoughtful and intentional about the products we build, the employer/candidate relationships we cultivate, and the way we treat each other, even if there are occasional speed sacrifices.

With “Be a whole person,” we were responding to the intense, work-obsessed culture at SpaceX described by Ashlee Vance’s Elon Musk biography (which all three of us happened to read that same weekend in Kerala), and other unhealthy work styles that can sometimes consume hardworking, disciplined individuals. Instead, we want to build a culture that acknowledges differences, encourages employees to find physical health and spiritual balance, and respects family and personal lives. We encourage team members to treat exercise classes as valid appointments on their calendars, to take a daily walk to clear their heads, or to work from home occasionally, believing these to be happier, healthier, and more productive ways to work.

We were particularly excited to use the word “swashbuckle” somewhere in these values, which we believe is one of the great yet under-used words in the English language, and rarely seen in its imperative verb form. The word prompted Matt to leave mid-brainstorm at one point and return sporting a new Indiana Jones-style fedora, purchased from a beach vendor, to make that particular “adventure” value real.

Matt (in his adventure fedora) and Simon in the middle of values-drafting

Once we returned to the office, we shared these values with the leadership team and then shortly after that with the full team in one of our monthly Town Halls. Our values are displayed as inspirational posters in our Bombay office (yes, the cliché “poster on the wall”) but we believe culture has to exist beyond motivational decorations, and instead define the way we run meetings, tackle new projects, support employers, and interact with each other every day. We also try to make the Shortlist values real and encourage their embodiment by calling people out in Town Hall “high fives” with value references, linking company decisions and priorities back to our values, and generally modeling them and keeping them top of mind across the team.

By no means do we have all the answers, and we continue to make this up as we go along. To that end, we’re eager to learn how other companies have thought about and approached this, and can’t wait to engage with you around this topic on June 8 in Nairobi!

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Our team, out for a stroll in Lonavala, in wigs.
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Building Great Teams – Focus on the Meta-Culture
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At Shortlist, we’re driven by a passion to bring the best tools and tech on Earth to help companies in Africa and India succeed at building great teams. We’re active readers of blogs and books on hiring, culture, talent development, and building effective teams. So it’s particularly exciting when a book can break through the noise and provide a compelling answer to a simple, huge question like: why are some teams great, and others aren’t?

Enter The Culture Code, by Daniel Coyle. I don’t know Daniel Coyle (though I wish I did), and he’s not paying us to write this (though I wish he would). I just personally found this to be a great book and I wish every manager and leader would read it.

In the book, Coyle goes through the steps leaders can follow to create environments that enable building great teams  — as well as highlighting some of the common ways leaders and their teams muck things up. His steps are: One, Build Safety; two, Share Vulnerability; three, Establish Purpose. Okay, granted, standing by themselves, they don’t mean much. If you want to learn more, just read the book.

This book served as a bit of a touchstone at a recent Shortlist team offsite. Last week, our leadership team retreated to Lonavala (two hours outside Mumbai) for a few days of strategizing, aligning, and bonding. We cooked together, we exercised together, we had looong sessions on topics related to our values, new product lines, and market prioritization. Wigs may have been involved.

We kicked off the retreat with a powerful book club over dinner (guacamole made a rare Maharashtra appearance) where we discussed The Culture Code, what it means for our work and our team, and how we can help instill some of the principles and ideas into our partners as well.

Guacamole. Yum.

This was not your typical “culture” book. We are living in a moment, at least the moment as defined by a certain kind of Silicon Valley blogger, in which company culture is held up as the answer to all woes. Uber is falling apart? It’s their bad culture. Zappos reigns supreme for their ethos of customer happiness? It’s their awesome culture. Amazon has employees crying under desks? Salesforce has risen to the top of Fortune’s list of best places to work? Culture! Culture!

A discussion of culture often starts with values, and the observable behaviors that express those values. That’s certainly where we started, when we set up to define our core values and culture at Shortlist. Read how we did that here (warning: more wigs). This has been so useful for us, and every company should do this! And surely, too few do.

But what Daniel Coyle outlines is a whole dimension of culture and “team” that sits above, below, and around a defined set of core values. A dimension of building great teams that extends these values, or perhaps better put, let’s whatever values you’ve set come to life. We might call this dimension “meta-culture”: the stew of behaviors, practices, modes of communicating, relationships and more in which culture lives and teams find their potential, or don’t. (We can’t call it Uber-culture, because that’s probably trademarked and isn’t, um, what we’re aspiring to.)

Some of the elements of this meta-culture include practices of healthy communication (profuse amounts of eye contact, short bursts of communication rather than speeches, laughter, equally shared speaking time); building social connections through belonging cues signaling we are safe, we share a future; creating opportunities to solve hard problems together and connect activities to a higher purpose; physical proximity in a workspace; shared language and stories around simple priorities; and so much more.

For me personally, this unlocked a dimension of leadership that I associate more actively with athletics than industry. It’s the practices of a close-knit sports team more than a group of managers. And it makes me wonder if everything I ever needed to know about leadership, I might have learned through high school basketball.

Being a coach or team captain in basketball was rarely about articulating a brilliant 90-day strategy or white-boarding core values. Rather, effective coaching involved facilitating a constellation of interactions or (as Daniel Coyle might say) “micro-events” that define a sense of shared purpose and safety to go out and work together and make great things happen.

I remember the way an early basketball coach (Coach Russell, who I’m sure is an avid reader of this blog) would barrage us with sprints and slide drills as a way to hammer home the priority of team and the importance of effort over outcome. One eruption occurred because of a failure of the team to slide over to support on “help side defense,” leading to painful dozens of wall touches. Another time, we were up by 20 points on a team at halftime, and feeling good about ourselves. Coach Russell came in spitting fire and fury, maybe even threw a clipboard (memory is a funny thing), because he could tell we were loafing and stopped playing hard. Even though we were up 20!

Coach Russell was most proud of us in narrow defeats in which we left everything on the floor and played our best, even though the outcome didn’t go our way. Coach Russell would sometimes position himself as our shared enemy, when we needed a shared enemy, and other times step up as a close friend, looking us in the eyes and letting us know that things would be okay. This basketball team, in the ninth grade, was one of the highest functioning, greatest examples of whole-greater-than-sum-of-parts that I’ve been a part of.

This exposed a dimension of leadership that’s been dormant within my own understanding of “Being A Leader.” It’s the dimension that’s less about never-say-die optimism, bold vision statements and well-articulated values (all important in their own right), and more about the way you make people feel, the way you listen and care, the way you create togetherness and belonging. I wonder if modern theory has over-indexed the importance of one set of skills and under-appreciated the value of other dimensions.

For Shortlist, we walked away from book club and the retreat with a rejuvenated sense of team togetherness, shared purpose, and hopefully a deeper comfort letting down our hair around each other (even if the hair’s synthetic and purchased on Amazon). We went another step deeper defining the observable behaviors related to our core values, but we also spent time brainstorming how to barrage our team with “belonging cues,” how to more actively create “vulnerability loops,” how to capitalize on “threshold moments” like when new teammates join our team. And we left with a desire to share some of these lessons on leadership and building great teams with our colleagues and partners, hoping these ideas can helpfully supplement everything else the world thinks it knows about company culture.

More wigs. Why not.
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Shortlister Spotlight: Meet Tilak, Software Engineer
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Meet Tilak!

At Shortlist, we love building our team almost as much as we love building yours! We have some pretty amazing people across our three offices who have a real passion for what they do and for the Shortlist mission.

The second installment of Shortlister Spotlights (a Q&A series to get to know some of our team members) stars Tilak, a Software Engineer in our Hyderabad office!

Tell us about what you do at Shortlist:

I’m a Software Engineer on our tech team. We are building an awesome platform for job-seekers to find their dream jobs and employers to help build their dream teams. In my job I do everything from fixing bugs on the website to developing a cool new feature or product.

When you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up?

I always wanted to be an F1 racer 🏁🚗 or dancer💃🏾.

So what led you to a career in technology, and what were you looking for in your next career step when you found Shortlist?

To be honest, I was taught from childhood be an engineer or a doctor. I knew that medicine is not my cup of coffee, so I went with engineering and did a Bachelors in Technology. I had heard a lot about startups — how you can learn a lot, be a part of great ideas and do a variety of projects instead of the same mundane tasks every day. I was looking for a startup which does its own product for a meaningful purpose and found Shortlist. I joined this family in August 2016.

What’s your favorite Shortlist memory?

I actually have a few favorite memories: One is when we launched the webportal for the first time back in October 2016, it was crazy time, and another is when we all pulled together in early 2017 for our biggest contract yet — hiring for a big four accounting firm.

A few months ago, four members of our team went on an adventure trip, where we did a motorcycle ride, rafting, hilltops, waterfalls and had an awesome time together.

Teams that play together stay together

What would you say is your professional superpower?

I am good with communications, be it professional or personal. I’m a good listener as well, ping me if you want to share something!

What are three words or phrases you would use to describe Team Shortlist?

“Cool,” “Rocks,” and “Explore Yourself.”

Tech team selfie 📷

Why is the Shortlist mission important to you?

When I was a job seeker before joining Shortlist, something that constantly bugged me and my friends is that employers might reject us based on a verbal interview or less, even before testing what abilities we have. We used to think, “Give us a problem and a chance and show if we can solve it or not… “Luckily our mission is to do this, taking employers from traditional resume search to competency based hiring.

What do you like to do outside of work?

I watch a lot of movies and series, play PC games, and hang out with friends and close ones.

What’s your favorite Shortlist value? (Learn more about our values here!)

OWN IT!!! I strongly believe in it personally.

We like to give high fives to recognize when our team members do something awesome. Now is your chance to make a public high five to a fellow Shortlister:

I have high-fives for two people: One is our CTO Sudheer, a true leader, always backing us and standing as wall in front of us. Second one is for Niranjan, “ROCKSTAR” for guiding me through every step I take (you could call him my guru).

What are you currently reading, watching, or listening to?

As a Game Of Thrones fan, I’m currently waiting for Season 8, and I’m also listening a lot to Linkin Park’s album “One More LIght.”

How is Shortlist different than other companies?

The tech team is a big surprise compared to other companies, the team here is so innovative and constantly staying ahead of new technologies and using them in our products.

Any final words?

CHALO KEEP ROCKING m/

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