There's
an old saying that cobbler's children go unshod. The idea--and the
dilemma--is that cobblers are too busy mending others' soles to worry
about the heels under their own roof.
So if your startup sells software helping companies create
happy employees, well--you know the rest: You better make sure your own employees are happy too.
For David Niu, serial entrepreneur and founder of
TINYhr,
avoiding the cobbler's dilemma should not be a problem. For one thing,
the two-year-old Seattle-based startup has just 10 employees. Yes, they
use their own software, but at this point Niu can keep tabs the
old-fashioned way: By walking around, asking questions, and listening.
Still, the software helps. From it, he once learned that his employees
didn't like the brand of pretzels he kept in the kitchen. So he changed
it.
Crunchy and innocuous as it may seem, pretzel-gate epitomizes much of
what Niu has learned at the helm of TINYhr. You can automate the
surveying and processing of employee dislikes, but the human
touch--listening, empathizing, reacting--is usually required to effect
real change, once employees tell you the truth about what's bugging
them.
The Power of Bite-Sized Anonymity
Empathy means "the ability to understand and share the feelings
of another," but leaders struggle with it for one obvious reason:
They've lost touch with the quotidien pain points of non-leaders. Topics
seemingly unconnected to bottom-line goals--say, delays in
reimbursement for pricey flights or a dearth of gluten-free snacks in
the kitchen--can create resentments. Those resentments blossom into
dissatisfaction when leaders proclaim empathy yet behave with
indifference.
This problem is easy to identify but hard to solve. As authors Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha and Chris Yeh point out in
The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age, employees are typically abashed about sharing gripes.
Vulnerability
is a two-way street. The last thing any employee wants to do is
complain to a boss who might call him a complainer. "Historically
employees feel they have to be very guarded around their manager and the
company in general," Yeh told me.
For Niu, 40, the solution was an uncompromising promise of anonymity.
If employees could vent without fear of being judged, employers could
get closer to assessing and improving employee happiness. So Niu
designed TINYpulse, the company's inaugural product, to anonymously
ask employees one question at a time, once a week, through an
email with a unique link. The piecemeal approach means employers aren't
overwhelmed with feedback. Each week brings a subject-specific morsel to
act on.
Niu embraces this piecemeal approach for several reasons. The first
is from his own history. Before becoming an entrepreneur, he worked as a
consultant in Andersen Consulting's Strategy Group. There, he advised
Fortune 500 clients on strategy and implementation. So he got a
firsthand sense of how difficult it can be to implement changes of
varying scopes and sizes. And at the end of each year, in what he
calls an "antiquated approach," he had to answer 50 online survey
questions about his happiness as an Andersen employee. "You hit submit,"
he says, "and you never know what happens to it."
The Careercation of a Lifetime
That was his first inkling that a piecemeal approach--one question,
weekly, rather than a boatload of questions, annually--might be more
fruitful for both employees and employers. Another inkling came about
three years ago. Burned out from the entrepreneurial life, he sold most
of his belongings, crammed his remaining possessions into a storage
facility, and bought one-way tickets to New Zealand for his wife and
then-10-month-old daughter.
You can take the entrepreneur out of his environment, but you can't
stop him from thinking about business ideas. Though he was feeling
things for the first time, as a father and untethered global traveler,
Niu's thoughts were rarely far from best practices. He found himself
interviewing entrepreneurs of all stripes, hoping to discover their pain
points.
There was the winemaker in New Zealand. At another stop, there was
the fruit trader in Shanghai. Later, there was the financial
services entrepreneur in Seoul. Niu listened to their problems like
someone who had all the time in the world. He made tons of what he calls
"mental sticky notes." He felt as if they opened up to him more because
he was listening as an interested person, not (necessarily) as an idea
monger.
The longer the "careercation" lasted, the better he got at listening.
"I could see regardless of where a company was located or its size, the
most common complaint was when an employee would say, 'Here's my two
week's notice,' out of the blue," he says. The entrepreneurs wondered:
Why didn't I see it coming? Then there was the secondary shock: The
problem of filling the role, by finding someone new or training someone
in-house.
Turning Down "Tier One" VCs
Niu's careercation lessons inspired the launch of TINYhr. They also
became the basis for one of his company's most persuasive pieces of
content, a free e-book called
Careercation.
TINYhr is constantly finding smart ways to package and market its
insights on employee engagement. Next week, it's releasing The Advanced
Guide to Employee Surveys, based on the 250,000 surveys the company has
conducted so far.
Currently TINYhr has more than 500 customers--mostly small and
midsized businesses--in a variety of verticals. A second product called
CLIENTpulse grew
out of what Niu learned from his initial batch of customers. They loved
TINYpulse, and wanted something just like it that could efficiently
gather customer feedback, in the same way TINYpulse gathered employee
feedback. From such client-pleasing pivots, growth companies are
born.
Venture capitalists have noticed the traction of TINYhr's two
products. Niu says that "tier one" VCs have asked to meet with him. So
far, he's turned them down. His mentees in
Seattle's TechStars program
often ask him why. His main reason is that fundraising is a time drain.
He is also far from desperate for the cash. With more than 500
customers, he can support the company through recurring monthly
revenues. Sure, he might eventually welcome investors, but it will be on
his terms and timetable.
What he tells VCs, when they ask him to meet, is something like this:
"I’m humbled by your interest, but [every minute I spend talking to you
or thinking about terms is] one minute I'm not delighting my
customers."
Niu says about half of the VCs who approach him appreciate that
response. The other half are indignant. He keeps track of it all in his
own black book. "If I do raise money," he says, then the indignant type
is "not somoene I’m going to talk to."
Fatherhood, VCs, and Animals
Turning down VC money is one advantage Niu has as a serial
entrepreneur. He has founded companies before. He doesn't need the
validation. He is a husband and a father. His self-identity hardly
requires the prestige of prospective investors. And beyond all that,
he's just being honest when he says he lacks the time to focus on
fundraising. "It's a major time commitment, with all the hidden costs,"
he says, recalling previous sleepness nights obsessing over pitch
decks.
That sense of security about who he is and what he's doing sometimes
manifests itself in some suprising ways. Once, a client called him in
disbelief that about one of TinyPulse's weekly questions: "If your
organization was an animal, what would it be and why?" Such a soft,
touchie-feelie question could've seemed embarrassing. It was the type of
question that could make a client wonder: "Wait, we're paying for
this?" But Niu knew the question would work and told the client to trust
the process.
Sure enough, one week later, the client was thrilled. Employees were
debating the question with vigor at the water cooler, making their cases
for this animal or that one. Was the organization a lion, or a lion
cub? Or was it an octopus, which is smart and crafty yet hides and doesn't have to be in the spotlight?
Here's the key takeaway: You can learn a lot about employee happiness
from seemingly frivolous (but incredibly potent) questions.
The key is asking regularly, and acting on what you learn. Even if it just means changing the pretzels.
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