Hi, and welcome to my building-in-public blog. The past week hasn’t been as productive as my inner critic keeps peddling, but I’ve managed to work on all the next steps I set out in my previous post.
Next steps from last week
✅ Find common promising themes across brainstorming notes: expanding on that in the next section
✔️ Write about the top 5 ideas I’m considering to moving to the next phase (validation) - hard to give myself a full checkmark for this one, as it’s really only one idea. But that’s fine
✅ Move the blog to GitHub - I set up the domain, website code and hosting. Took me one day to do it, but it was great learning and feels great to have an actual work product
✅ Write about my approach to validation
👁️ Promising themes
To find some common threads, I went to my brainstorming notes and reflected back on conversations with friends. I keep going back to the following topics: team/employee experience & engagement, mental health, collaboration & productivity, artificial intelligence.
My evidence for the below is anecdotal. That means they are starting hypotheses, to be refined.
Team/employee experience & engagement
I’ve been an long time complainer about managers, company dynamics, team dynamics and so on. In a team, when things go well, there’s little incentive to reflect, be vulnerable (to get to the root of issues) or do much more than “job tasks”. However, things aren’t always going as well as it seems on the surface.
Remote work took away a lot of the self-regulation mechanisms that being in the same room or building provide. Some examples that come to mind: guessing how your team mate feels when you see them in the coffee room; learning & adapting to someone’s style by working next to each other. We flatten people down into Slack handles, email addresses and blurry faces in conference calls. I’m not surprised that people keep leaving their jobs, and one of the big reasons for this they don’t feel leaders and colleagues care for them or their growth (McKinsey).
The problem: In a distributed work environment, growing and maintaining employee experience & engagement requires tools that most managers are not equipped with, and structure that most teams can’t/won’t build on their own.
Mental health
I’ve also been a long time mental health enthusiast. Coming from a curiosity about how people think & feel, my own struggles with depression, anxiety & relationships, and a constant need to understand analyze, it’s hard for me not to ideate on mental health topics. Also, I’m crazy 🤪.
Two problems:
- Access to mental health care in Europe is difficult enough, because there are not enough practitioners, and getting insurers to cover expenses is difficult if not impossible. Even when insurers will pay, they’ll only do it for practitioners licensed in the country you live in. That makes it almost impossible for expats to get care.
- Most mental health workers don’t (have time to?) treat their practice as a real business, aside from the bare minimal. There seems to be room to professionalize the operations behind e.g. therapists practices. Think scheduling, customer relationship management, billing, record keeping, etc.
Collaboration & productivity
If collaboration and productivity solutions were an animal, I think they would be an ant 🐜. There are too many of them, they divide labor to solve complex problems, and each individual ant is totally replaceable, except the queen (MS Excel in this metaphor).
Two productivity/collaboration problems I’ve encountered over and over:
- Following up on people for things is frustrating, necessary and easy to let slip through the cracks. I’ve come across this every time I needed someone else’s output on a deadline (especially when they have a different boss), and found myself writing those cringe “Just following up on this..” mails/slacks.
- Companies make decisions all the time, but with endless meetings and debates, many seem to get lost. Sometimes these are important decisions that end up being a company’s strategy. I have yet to see decisions being documented and communicated through something more than email and slides.
❔What to focus on
Team/employee experience & engagement is really the topic that I can’t stop thinking about at the moment. I’ve spent much of the past week reading about existing companies in the space, and keep thinking “I wish I had built this”. Some companies that seem to have made it in this space are CultureAmp, Leapsome, Lattice and 15Five (used and loved this one in a previous job). There are many others.
There is a set of behaviors and tools that I learned in consulting, that I think helps improve engagement, and that I don’t think is used (well) enough in most companies. The companies I mentioned above tackle at least one of:
- Regularly taking the team’s pulse, learning how they feel about things that matter to them, talking about it and making changes
- Having structured 1-on-1 conversations, both on harder (content, work process) and softer (relationship, wellbeing) topics
- Getting and giving (frequent)
- Appreciation
- Actionable feedback
- Explicitly learning about each other’s working & communication styles, routines, preferences, strengths and aspirations
- Structuring a proper onboarding and offboarding for new hires and exits both at company and team level
Aside from my passion for these problems and how excited I get about these tools, here are a three other reasons why I plan to further explore this topic:
- Some of the issues seem big enough to have an impact on engagement, but small enough for a one-man-team (me) to build a bootstrapped solution around
- They’re a great fit for building something within an existing, growing communication platform that enables add-ons, such as Slack, Teams, Zoom, etc. This means there’s an existing distribution channel, and higher chances of people discovering my solution
- There’s some connection to mental health, and I hope to flesh it out
➡️ Next steps: Validation
Validation is a smart-sounding word, but it can mean different things for different people at different stages of a company. For me, this will be about making the below problem more concrete.
In a distributed work environment, growing and maintaining employee experience & engagement requires tools that most managers are not equipped with, and structure that most teams can’t/won’t build on their own.
The questions that I hope to answer:
❓Does the problem really exist?
❓What are the root causes?
❓What is really hard or painful about it?
❓How are people solving it?
❓What works and doesn’t work with existing solutions?
This will mean that I’ll be working on a few things in parallel:
- Find potential customers and talk to them, starting with people managers and HR professionals in my network
- Build an MVP. TBD how functional it’s going to be (could be some mockups, a landing page, an actual add-on with basic functionality). The idea is to have something people can react to
- Understand existing solutions, and what could be a unique angle of attack