Hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.

I say this as, next week, I’ll be contributing to the greatest productivity crisis this world has ever seen (if the media is to be believed).

→ GTA VI is being released

So yep, next week I’m taking Thursday/Friday off to revel in all of the video game glory. Me and as much as 1% of the whole world (again, if the media is to be believed), will be logging in on the 19th, and enjoying the fruits of 13 years (and $2 billion) of labour.

TBH it’s felt like one of the first times that video games have felt mainstream. Which is crazy, because it’s a bigger industry than movies and music combined.

Although GTA VI is apparently now such a big deal, it’s spawning whole jobs around it.

So if you’re among the 99% that are working on the 19th, expect a quieter work day. Or, just do what many are expected to do and chuck a sickie*.

Enjoy this week’s edition ✌️

Matt

*For my international audience, ‘chucking a sickie’ is an Australian term for taking a sick day when you’re not really sick (a famous Australian pastime).

In case you’re new here (or just missed it) here’s the past three editions of the FNDN Series:

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Know a startup Head of People looking for answers 🙋 why not forward this to them for some instant karma? ✨

This edition is based on the latest episode of the FNDN Series podcast, with Nadia Vatalidis, Head of People at Todoist.

As Todoist’s Head of People, Nadia shapes global people strategy for a 100+ person distributed team supporting 45 million users. With 10+ years in remote-first leadership, she scales SaaS companies profoundly.

There's a belief in most businesses that performance management is something you're just meant to hate. Managers chase late reviews while people scramble to remember what their colleagues did six months ago, and everyone accepts it as the cost of having a process.

Todoist used to make a pretty good case for the status quo. Only 5% of the company engaged with its first feedback system.

Fast forward to today, and every self, peer and manager review gets completed, and the People team doesn't chase anyone to get there. (In a profession famous for herding people through a process they dread, it's a rare accomplishment.)

I spoke to Nadia Vatalidis, Head of People at Todoist, about how they got there. Nadia scaled People at GitLab and Remote before joining Todoist, a 108-person company coming up on its 20th birthday, and that had never had a performance system. Until now.

People don't hate feedback. They hate reviews. Todoist did four things to pull the two apart, and reviews got easier once feedback started happening outside them.

The old system was an off-the-shelf tool that never rolled out company-wide. In Nadia's words, it was "sort of a pilot that just kept piloting".

Plenty of reviews were started and never finished, and the feedback that did get written was warm and vague (like: “so-and-so is nice”. Ok to receive, but nothing of any substance).

What replaced it runs every six months:

With 108 people, Nadia could meet every person in her first three months, and she did. One theme kept coming up: nobody was sharing feedback with each other.

She planted seeds early. She told people what she was working on and why, and demoed early versions to get their reactions.

"You're literally creating a whole bunch of allies," she told me. "By the time we launched it, everyone knew that it was coming."

A scrappy first version needs a way to keep improving, so Nadia set up an iteration board in Todoist's own product. Anyone can flag a problem with the performance system, and the People team triages it the way engineers triage tickets:

Between the first and second review cycles, the system changed 17 times. Some changes were as small as swapping a word people didn't like, but each one showed the team the system was theirs to shape.

It took the pressure off the People team, too. They could launch something closer to an MVP than a finished product, knowing it would keep evolving with the people using it.

If you can't meet everyone, Nadia's advice is to pilot with a small group that includes every level, from individual contributors through to heads of.

Nadia shares Todoist's Feedback Compass with the team, well ahead of the first review. It's a short guide to giving and receiving feedback.

She also added a thanks channel to Todoist's internal comms, organised around the company's values.

Positive feedback caught on fast. 

Constructive feedback took more work, and it lives one-on-one in Todoist's HRIS, where it goes to both the person and their manager by default. If it only went to the individual, Nadia said, "it kind of dies" there.

The first review cycle still came back almost entirely positive, so Nadia sat with heads and leads one at a time. If a review had no developmental feedback in it, she'd ask, "So this person is perfect?" There was usually one thing, and Nadia would ask why they hadn't shared it.

What shifted the culture, though, was the heads themselves. They started screenshotting constructive feedback they'd received and posting it in the thanks channel with a thank you.

Seeing the most senior people receive critical feedback (and be grateful for it) made it far easier for everyone else.

And when people picked friends they didn't work with as peer reviewers, the People team asked which project they'd worked on together.

Before this system, performance at Todoist wasn't linked to reward. Now it is, and people who meet the expectations of their level get rewarded accordingly.

With 108 people, Todoist can't promote everyone into a lead or head role, so it rewards impact at every level instead. Ratings sit on a four-point scale that runs from "not enough impact" to "transformational impact", and what each level expects is written down for everyone to see.

Todoist is now moving peer feedback out of the review cycle and into the six months between, with each person asking two people a month for their top three points. 

Nadia is candid that it's an experiment ("I don't know how it's gonna go"), but her reasoning stands, that feedback that waits six months gets watered down. (I've been guilty of this. I'd let a small thing slide because it only happened once, and by the third time it felt too late to raise.)

Todoist got to 100% by:

Nadia is clear you can't copy her system one-to-one. But the order she did things in can be.

Here's a question for you: if your last review cycle hit 100% completion (firstly, give yourself a pat on the back), how much of the feedback in it would anyone use? 

Hit reply and tell me: which part of your feedback system is working and which part is stuck.

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A roundup of the most interesting stuff from the week:

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