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Podcast Interview with Ripple Analytics

Do you dread conducting annual employee reviews?

Ripple is a platform for providing quick, anonymous team member evaluations. By rating colleagues based on the Big 5 Personality Traits, Ripple turns objective feedback into actionable information.

CEO, Noah L. Pusey, brings a unique perspective to growing Ripple, drawn from nearly two decades of experience establishing and building law firms in New York City.  He has counseled and advised individual and corporate clients in various practice areas including business development, growth strategy and general transactional matters.

Noah has firsthand knowledge of the flawed employee review systems used by many companies – having participated in hundreds of annual evaluations over the years, so he has set out to change they way they’re done!

Listen to this podcast to learn more: https://truecomparepeo.com/2021/05/06/noah-pusey/

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Feedback is the key to Engagement

We live and work in an age where feedback is necessary to secure employee engagement.  Study after study demonstrate up to 68% of the American workforce is disengaged.  Approximately 50% are unengaged and an incredible 17% are actively disengaged.[1]   Yikes.

Disengagement means lower levels of productivity, less revenue and higher incidents of weaker culture.  As noted by Gallup: Organizations with higher rates of “…engagement realize substantially better customer engagement, higher productivity, better retention, fewer accidents, and 21% higher profitability.”[2]

Disengagement is an illness that spreads rapidly when tolerated or left unaddressed. 

Why?  Several reasons:

1.   People that “pick up the slack” and generate the work product compensating for the lack of production by the disengaged feel underappreciated.  These employees are, essentially, punished for others being disengaged.  Employees who make up for the productivity of their disengaged colleagues eventually get frustrated and, not altogether unsurprisingly, tend to leave their employer.  Losing disengaged people is one thing, losing hard-working, go-getters is unacceptable for any organization;

2.   Disengaged employees are permitted to continue such disengagement – thus, repeating a vicious cycle where such behavior is encouraged if not altogether promoted.  Obviously, no organization wants to see this happen and yet it does. (As discussed above, such behavior requires the engaged workforce to over-work and drives up rates of attrition); and

3.   Management and ownership experience increasing levels of frustration, anxiety and concern over lower productivity, less revenue and higher levels of attrition.  81% of companies report turnover is a “costly problem” and 63% say retaining employees is actually more difficult than hiring people.[3]

How can ownership stem the tide?  How does an organization encourage and develop engagement?

One, simple word.

Feedback.  Gather feedback.  Analyze feedback.  Appreciate feedback.  Employ feedback to make more effective and objective decisions.

Feedback falls into three general categories – positive, negative and somewhere in between (often referred to as “constructive criticism”).  Management and ownership might not like all the feedback (especially the negative) received, but the process of gathering, analyzing and utilizing feedback helps strengthen culture within the workplace and improve rates of engagement.

A word of caution – if an organization is going through the valuable exercise of gathering meaningful feedback from their people, the organization must use it.  It is also important to gather enough feedback to make it statistically relevant (no need to act immediately after first gathering feedback).  When trends are identified in a given employee’s conduct and interaction with, or net impact on, others on a team or organization-wide level, action must be taken by management.

For an organization to preach the importance of feedback, stress participation in gathering feedback and then do nothing with the data collected can be more damaging than not caring about feedback at all.

Gathering and using feedback effectively can change the face of any organization.  Ripple Analytics Inc. is a cloud-based platform that empowers companies to gather and analyze feedback from their people.  Check us out at www.ripplecrew.com.  Give us a try!

 

Why we are qualified to write the blog:   Noah L. Pusey – [email protected] – is the President & CEO of Ripple Analytics Inc.   For over twenty (20) years, Noah has been building teams and developing employees at various companies.  As a result, he has participated in corporate America’s flawed annual review process and has set out to fix it.  He knows what works, what doesn’t and why.  See more about Ripple at www.ripplecrew.com.

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Employee Retention in the Age of Feedback

When an organization loses a key employee there is often a palpable sense of betrayal. How could she leave after everything the organization had done for her? Where’s the loyalty?

Employee retention is an ever-present concern for most organizations. The tangible costs (i.e. recruiter fees, delays/missed opportunities, higher salaries and benefits) as well as intangible risks (will the new employee work well with existing employees, how can you be certain the new hire has the skill-sets delineated within her resume) associated with replacing employees have increased exponentially over the years.

What actions can organizations take to keep employees from searching and eventually taking new jobs?  After all, if another organization is willing to pay more, budget constraints often prohibit negotiating with the departing employee. Even if this constraint does not exist, rewarding the threat of leaving with a higher rate of pay sends a horrible message to other, loyal employees, right? Pointing higher pay at other organizations, however, is no longer a viable explanation for the vast majority of people who leave their current employer for a different position. More and more, employees are leaving for non-financial reasons. Gallup studies indicate that 78% of people who leave their job for a new position outside of an organization, do not leave for an increase in salary[i].

Management should place their focus on retention on those 78% of the workforce that leave for greener pastures based on non-financial reasons. There are various reasons why these employees decide to leave; those reasons are generally tied to dissatisfaction with the work environment, lack of appreciation from management for their career goals, and little, if any, exchange of actionable feedback. Simply put, employees want to be appreciated, told how they are performing and what sort of impact they are having on the organization. Typically, any feedback given to an employee is offered during a brief meeting during the employee’s annual evaluation/appraisal/assessment/review (collectively referred to herein as the “annual review”). Twenty-thirty minutes of feedback for an entire year of work. That is simply nonsensical.

Everywhere you turn, there’s another publication confirming the level of disdain both management and employees have for the annual review. To name a few, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, and Forbes have all published articles condemning this traditional approach and begging for a new way of doing things. Harvard Business Review reported that 58% of companies believe their performance evaluation mechanism simply does not work[ii].

By giving your employees feedback, you will help them develop themselves and pursue their career goals. In return, you will have happy, engaged, efficient and even more loyal employees. The encapsulated, once-every-12-months review is a thing of the past. Offer your employees an outlet to exchange on-going, open and honest perceptions and information. Help them become the success stories they really want to be. When employees receive open and honest feedback, they are empowered to take the steps to showcase and share their strengths; and develop solutions to address their weaknesses. The result will be higher rates of retention and avoidance of the on-going headache of replacing key employees for reasons that could (and should) have been avoided altogether. And, oh yeah, the organization will likely perform better as a whole.

Tags: Employee Retention, Leadership and Planning, Business Change, Incorporating Feedback,data, Employee Engagement Ideas, Corporate Culture

Guest Blogger: Noah L. Pusey

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Noah L. Pusey is the President and CEO of Ripple Analytics Inc., an anonymous team member assessment technology firm. For over 20 years, Noah has participated in building teams and developing talent at various companies. Creating strong and dynamic culture within any organization is critical. That’s why Noah co-founded Ripple, a company bent on disrupting the way organizations approach employee assessment, development, and appreciation. Email him at: [email protected]; visit https://www.ripplecrew.com/
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The Cumulative Impact of a Departing Employee

When an organization loses a key employee, the bleeding typically does not stop there. What about the teammates that the departing employee leaves behind? How are they impacted?

Simply put, when an employee leaves an organization, you could lose a lot more than the departing employee.

Employee retention is one of the biggest issues currently facing HR. However, when an employee leaves (and some will inevitably leave), there is an impact that is often lost on HR, management and the owners/executives within the organization. The impact is three (3) fold:

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By Noah L. Pusey 

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