In this installment of Transform Your Workplace, host Brandon Laws sits down with Josh Merrill, the CEO and Founder of Confirm, a people platform that leverages Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) for performance reviews. Join the conversation to uncover insights about understanding the distribution of talent within your organization, eradicating bias in performance reviews, and using ONA to gain valuable insights into your company’s top talent.
GUEST AT A GLANCE
Josh Merrill, formerly the Chief Product Officer at Carta, is the CEO and Founder of Confirm, an innovative people platform that uses Organizational Network Analysis for performance reviews.
A QUICK GLIMPSE INTO OUR PODCAST
🔊 Podcast: Transform Your Workplace, sponsored by Xenium HR
🎙️ Host: Brandon Laws
📋 In his own words: “The Transform Your Workplace podcast is your go-to source for the latest workplace trends, big ideas, and time-tested methods straight from the mouths of industry experts and respected thought-leaders.”
A NEW WAY TO REVIEW
In 2017, the founders of Confirm stumbled upon Organizational Network Analysis (ONA), a methodology brought to their attention by a board member. After conducting an ONA study on Carta, they discovered influential workplace players who weren’t previously recognized within the organization. Later, upon launching Confirm, the founders revisited the idea and harnessed ONA to revolutionize performance reviews.
Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) has become the cornerstone of Confirm’s reinvented performance reviews. Unveiling the intricate flow of decisions and information within an organization, ONA shifts the focus from individual achievements to network dynamics. By asking questions like who individuals turn to for guidance or who energizes them at work, the performance review process takes a collaborative turn. In the era of Slack and Zoom, where networks play a pivotal role in productivity, this approach resonates with the modern way of conducting business, offering a more insightful and meaningful evaluation of an individual’s contributions.
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
The Truth about Talent
“When you do a performance review, you get a bell curve of manager ratings — we like to think of this idea of the average employee, and then there’s some people below average and some people above average. But the reality of how talent distributes is that it really follows a power law. I mean, there are a few employees in every organization who create a disproportionate impact. And that message doesn’t usually land really well with HR, but it lands really well with the CEO because the CEO always knows that out of the 8 people or 10 people who report to them, there are like 1 or 2 of them who are so amazing that they just wish they could clone them. Leaders understand that.”
Eliminating Bias
“All of the research says that 60% of a manager’s rating is attributable to the idiosyncrasies, the bias, of the manager. If you rate me ‘meets expectations,’ it actually says more about you, the manager, than it does about me, the employee. And that’s crazy. It’s so clear that we need a new system, not just better questions. […] Like we need a totally new system to understand the impact that people are making at work and to really cut through the bias.”
The Power of Sample Size
“There are so many decisions that are being made suboptimally. The way that ONA, Organizational Network Analysis, solves for that is through sample size. […] I’ll just give you one example. We just closed out a performance cycle with one of our customers. When we asked the question, ‘Who do you go to for help and advice?’ we found that 77 people went to the same senior engineer for help and advice. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s a great employee in every way or you should promote him, but it’s very clear, right? He is a go-to resource. And if he weren’t there, those 77 people would be missing somebody who’s important to them. And the power of sample size means that one of those people may go to this person all the time, and one of them may only go infrequently, but when you actually add all of that up together, you get a really, really clear picture of who’s creating impact.”
A Good Analogy
“The analogy I like to use is if you’ve ever been to a county fair, and they have like a giant gumball machine, and they ask people to guess how many gumballs are in it, any one individual guess is gonna be wrong. But when you actually look at the average of those guesses, the sort of the wisdom of the crowd, it’s scarily accurate to the number of gumballs in that machine, and that’s a little bit of how ONA works.”
It’s Got to Go
“If you’re asking people to rate other people or you’re gonna use this data to make promotion decisions and things like that, that’s where all the perverse incentives come in. So if I know that my advancement or my compensation is gonna be determined by this process, and you ask me who I want to review me, what kind of incentive does that create? Obviously, […] I’m clearly incentivized to pick people who will say good things, and if I don’t do that, I’m disadvantaged relative to all the other people who are picking their peers.”
Talent Hygiene
“On some kind of a periodic basis, we should be doing an exercise to really understand who’s driving impact — not just who the managers think is driving impact, but who the organization believes is driving impact, and also who the organization believes is creating concern. And you know, I’ll throw out a couple of stats. When we run performance cycles using Organizational Network Analysis, what we find on average is that in every organization, about 15% of employees will create about 50% of the impact, and about 5% of employees will create about 50% of the problems. So the key is probably identifying those people right away and either elevating them or getting rid of them.”
“And by the way, everybody knows who they are. It’s leadership that’s the last to know, right? The challenge is actually how you collect those points of view and put them in the hands of people who need to actually make some decisions with that data. But what talent hygiene really means is, on a periodic basis, we are understanding with really high resolution who those people are, and then we’re taking action.”
LEARN MORE
Dive deeper into the ins and outs of Organizational Network Analysis by heading over to confirm.com or reach out to Josh Merrill directly at josh@confirm.com.