Creating a High Performance Culture - PART1
How the top companies in the world create a High Performance Culture
A Gift to say ‘Thank you’
Right now Exploratorium counts 194 passionate people from some of the best companies in the world.
Many of you supported us from the beginning with feedbacks and advices, so we wanted to send premium subscribers a little gift.
We organized for you a private conference call with Luca Prasso from Google. Luca among other spectacular things, was in the PDI Dreamworks team that created Shrek (winning oscars!). He then joined Google involved in all the Extended Reality experimental applications.
He defines himself a ‘Reverse ARchaeologist‘, every week at Google he has the mission to dig into the future, creating wonderful prototypes facing technology, motivational and inspirational struggles like all of us.
If you have an Exploratorium premium subscription click here and reserve yourself one of the 30 spots available (we want to be able to discuss and talk together) on Tuesday July 21st at 17.30 GMT+2 (Rome time), or 08.30 PDT
This week main takeaways:
Company culture largely determines a company's growth patterns (section 1)
How can you win the ‘happy employee’ game? Needs (and their understanding) are the basis (section 2).
How can you measure employees needs and, therefore, happiness? Try Beaconforce App (section 3)
The problem with an app interface, or a form, could be that it is not a natural language. One way to increase the employee engagement is a conversational chatbot - and we have built one this week to test this assumption (section 4)
Next week we will share with you how we designed the chatbot conversations, how we developed it and the answers to these questions (section 5)
Some good bonus contents at the end of the page (section 6)
1. How to compete with the top companies in the world
There is a long list of Silicon Valley's top companies that not only recognize that employee's wellbeing translates directly into a higher performing company, these companies regularly invest $10's and even $100's of millions into creating environments that breed the highest possible performance through wellbeing, positive mentality and self sufficiency.
Wellbeing is seen as being directly and indirectly responsible for even concrete company performance measurements such as:
attracting the best employees
retaining the best employees
creating positive collaborative work culture
creating work efficiency to compete with the top companies in the world
Employee mentality is being recognized as the foundation of many possibilities that follow, meaning that company culture largely determines a company's growth patterns.
Sam Altman, famous partner at legendary Y Combinator, which has funded over 1,000 start-ups (including the likes of Aribnb and Dropbox) now worth a combined total of over $100 billion, recently published in his blog, “How To Be Successful,"
“To be willful, you have to be optimistic. I have never met a very successful pessimistic person."
"A big secret is that you can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage of the time—most people don’t even try, and just accept that things are the way that they are. A combination of self-doubt, giving up too early, and not pushing hard enough prevents most people from ever reaching anywhere near their potential."
Tim Brown, another legend as long time head of Silicon Valley's innovation darling IDEO, writes about creativity and innovation starting with creating a mentality that enables it. His recipe for world class performance starts with facing fears using prototyping as growth hacking, "Fail early, fail often," to discover the best path forward. For people who feel uncomfortable with failure he adds, “don't think of it as failure, think about designing experiments through which you are going to learn.”
2. OK. How can I make my employees happy?
Is it true that people are manageable?
For example: an employee asks for a salary increase. What is the need behind this request? Greater self-esteem or greater economic security?
How can you win this game? Making clear needs and expectations: needs (and their understanding) are the basis.
The experts at Inner shared with us their precious tools and secretes to better manage people and their expectations. You can read all their tips and tricks here
The big deal is: how to measure these needs and expectations at scale?
3. Measuring Expectations & Implementing Company Culture
Silicon Valley has been for over a century, a place that promises an extraordinary American lifestyle along with a culture that is not only a safe harbour for wild creativity, technological exploration and innovation, but a place that amplifies, accelerates and connects non-traditional talents and personalities. A place that defies some cultures that are simply too steeped in other traditions to embrace accelerated change and wild ideas. By the late 1980’s Silicon Valley cemented its magnetism as one of the most attractive places to be if you are the best and the brightest of engineering and design the world over.
Following that thinking, the companies there have eagerly sought to not only align but amplify this way of life in their own company cultures.
Beaconforce has created a personalized tool that facilitates immediate growth by driving positive change with actionable insights for employees.
The Beacon Force platform integrates machine learning, actionable solutions, and data visualisation for all stakeholders who seek ongoing improvement, collaboration, and an environment powered by intrinsic motivation.
Their tool measures 7 "pillars" (figure) that they say must be present in one's work environment to foster “Intrinsic Motivation.” This idea is deeply rooted in all things Californian, ie. self motivation, passionately attached to a blur between life and work with ideals around creating a meaningful existence through that balance.
We will be looking at what might be a vehicle that brings to a company a language that is mutually understood between all stakeholders that raises the consciousness of the subjects around “wellness” producing a measurable higher employee performance. This is based on the statistic that at good companies, employees really do want to make a positive impact on the company. Leaving the question how can they best stay aligned with the company?
4. The Challenge
The problem with an app, or a form, is that it is not a natural interface.
One way to increase the emotional engagement is a conversational chatbot.What’s the real difference between a GUI and a Chatbot?
A chatbot can change tone of voice, mood and interaction sentences during time, and users can answer questions with their own words, giving us the chance to run sentiment analysis to gather even more data from the employees.
This week we have set out to begin testing a chatbot that has the right brand culture, personality and problem/solution responses for its environment here at UQIDO and we will get back to you with the results next week.
What is a chatbot?
A chatbot is a software application designed to simulate human conversations over the internet.
All you need to know about chatbots
Make your chatbot smarter
10 most innovative chatbots on the web
15 chatbot examples
5. What will you find in PART2 next week
This week we developed a chatbot and we will use it during next week measuring the engagement.
We will face 2 mayor challenges:
how to measure in the long run if a chatbot increases the employees engagement during the usual boring internal periodic data submissions
how differently employees interact with a chatbot compared to a management software
Next week we will share with you how we designed the chatbot conversations, how we developed it and the answers to these questions
6. BONUS CONTENTS
How to bootstrap your Digital Product. This is one of the best and super simple analysis you can find out there. Follow the thread to read the 10 useful tips
We’ve built a little Glossary for those of you not so practical with all the technical terms of Exploratorium. You can find it here