97th Floor CEO and Founder Chris Bennett did an interview with Employee Experience 2020, presented by Zenefits. These are the takeaways.

  • We're really worried about clocking in and clocking out when things aren't seeming to work. We just throw more policies on top of policies instead of going back to the beginning and seeing how we can fix things [2:30].
  • We're monitoring more and throwing more tools, more instant access to things just see what the employee is doing. And it's turning us into micromanagers [3:20].
  • This mentality is suffocating to your employees and it's also a huge time waster (and morale buster) on both sides. Both the employee and the executive [4:10].
  • You want to inspire and you want to make sure that you're not robbing them of their energy and their passion for the work [5:42].
  • How do we even jump in and get things started? Start with what’s wrong and work backwards, like Tesla [7:55].
  • Start with the company's core values that the overarching company focused and work backwards. If you're not familiar with the Netflix culture deck, please go read those. It's one of the best things on the internet regarding culture [8:41].
  • You really want to have the employee have a lot of say in [creating KPIs] as well. You want them to have buy off [10:20].
  • When you mess up as management on your results, don't make justifications as to why you didn't get done. If KPIs are clear, they should be clear to those you're reporting to and the teams that are reporting to you [15:56].
  • The data you're now tracking and looking at isn't how often your employees watches YouTube videos or Facebook The data, you’re tracking and looking at the most should be the work related data, the results. That data tells the true story and if those aren't working out, that's what really matters; that's the employee that should be let go [16:53].
  • There's going to be a lot of hiccups in the beginning, but a lot of those are going to come from not being clear enough but it's really not going to be near as bad as you might be worried it may be [23:24].

Find out more about Zenefits or Employee Experience 2020