7y
Thank you for your open and honest feedback, and my apologies for a delayed response. I recognize that, as we have continued to grow as a company in the last few years our organizational structure, culture, and processes have been shifting. We’ve spent a lot of time since spring of this year working to clarify our org structure so that the right team members are accountable for the right tasks. This work has also led us to individual and cross-functional team meetings that are helping us to break down the silos that we had formed unintentionally. I hope you’re starting to see the fruit of those efforts as a current employee.
You are correct that we are believers in the importance of process here, and I believe that it is our process that frees us to be creative in the areas that will make the most impact for our clients. It is our checklists, workflows, and attention to budgets that ensure we’re attending to the important details, so we and our clients can focus on making those areas of client delight really shine — be they the design of a particular web page, animations in an annual report, our client strategy decks, or something else. This also ensures the health of the company and our ability to continue to offer competitive wages and benefits. Particularly given our primary client base is credit unions, which are heavily regulated entities, attending to the details is important.
I understand your perspective about the turnover in the last year. It has been a bit higher, and I have also seen over the years that people will naturally come and go in waves as they move onto the next chapter in their life. While we seek to keep team retention high by continuously focusing on our culture, the team’s work satisfaction, our compensation approach, and our benefits package, sometimes an employee making a professional change can be the healthiest for everyone. At the end of the day, life is too short to be in a job that does not fulfill you. This is why we work so hard at our Journeys of Transformation and other feedback efforts with our team.
Anonymous feedback is a really difficult topic. I have read a fair bit about this topic trying to wrap my head around it. It can be a good way to gather feedback that otherwise is not encouraged, but it can also encourage a culture of gossip and backstabbing, and I believe that safety is a two-way street where everyone should have the right to face their accuser. We have worked hard to create a culture where people have training and support to have authentic and open conversations about the difficulties they face, and I also have seen this to be one of the most difficult skills to align teams around because we all have such diverse backgrounds and perspectives on conflict — it is not an easy journey, and I suspect it never will be. This provides additional motivation to keep working on this very important skill. If you’re open to it, I’d appreciate the chance to talk with you more about how we can continue to get better.
Sincerely,
Cameron
CEO and co-founder