Team Transparency Drives Prosperity

Focus on strengths and talents to determine areas of growth.

Guest host Donny Shimamoto talks to Menlo Innovations representatives in this episode of Transformation Talks. The topic? Employee reviews.

Staff and employee annual reviews help assess where teams need additional help, guidance, and development. If only they weren’t so painful…

However, Menlo Innovations, an IT consulting firm and custom software development firm, appears to have found a way to analyze team performance better and deliver constructive feedback. Dan Roman and Andy Burns discuss Menlo Innovation’s Prosperity Project, an innovative employee-driven performance review process.

“In a previous job I had, we did the classic annual review cycle where you get the list of objectives handed down by your manager or the whole department, and you figure out, okay, how does that relate to me? What measurable metrics can we come in and figure out? And then a year would go around, you’d sit down with your manager and realize that none of these objectives were met. And you made up some funny numbers to try to argue for a raise. It was very much a managerial-driven process that didn’t really trickle down in the way that they really hoped for, for it to be effective.” ~Dan Roman, Menlo Innovations

They explained that the Prosperity Project allows team members to grow professionally, depending upon how they participate within their teams. Additionally, they talked about the transparency of pay, a concept that has many employers and HR teams nervous. However, it’s proven to be effective.

“That experiment has been running at least as long as I’ve been at Menlo, which is four years,” Roman said. “And I think it definitely predates me a little bit.”

Key Takeaways 

1. Team transparency drives prosperity.
2. Ditch evaluation processes that don’t truly encourage and enable growth.
3. Organic conversations and employee-driven evaluations are more authentic than formal processes and are usually more accepted forms of feedback.  
4. Pay transparency is not only better for team morale, but it could also soon be the law in your state.
5. Even if the parallels are unclear, always keep an open mind to how other professional practices could be implemented to improve your own (i.e., IT : accounting).

Learn more about Menlo Innovation’s Prosperity Project and how it could improve accounting firms of all sizes at CPA Trendlines.

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