At Menlo, it's the team's responsibility to evaluate the “appropriate level” for each Menlonian, give them actionable feedback on how to grow, and help them along on that journey with opportunities to showcase improvement. In the unfortunate case that our company needs to let someone go, that decision is on the team as well. As a philosophy, this team-run way of handling HR reinforces Menlo's cultural mainstays of joy, collaboration, and collective ownership.
While we've long had the Levels Board to communicate every employee's level (which also reflects their exact pay, regardless of role) to the team, the pandemic highlighted two key issues that led to the creation of the so-called Prosperity Project. For one, when we switched to remote work (and later hybrid) and away from our open office environment, it became more difficult to observe the performance of team members someone didn't intentionally interact with directly. Second, the already difficult challenge of determining the right pay level for each employee became amplified due to changing expectations and a process that had only been loosely defined pre-pandemic.
As it had been a while since we had attempted to improve our Levels evaluations and formalized feedback process, we took the opportunity to run a new experiment. This time, we looked to our well-understood Menlo systems and created an internal project to tackle the problems we were seeing from a familiar lens. Using our Project Management process, the Prosperity Project team created a standard set of story cards that map out the steps that should be used when conducting a Level review. We also applied elements of our High-Tech Anthropology® (HTA) practice to help us understand the collective needs and wants of the team for a process like this, which had the added benefit of giving Menlonians of all roles a chance to learn or practice this skill.
With dozens of our team members having received reviews through the Prosperity process to date, we're pleased to share that so far the results have overall been extremely positive. Join us for free over our lunch hour to hear members of our team talk about the origin of the name "Prosperity," provide an overview of the feedback process, and run through a real example of the kinds of feedback that end up given to our team members. Plus, we'll open the floor to any and all of your questions- really, ask us anything at all!
Some feedback about the Prosperity Process:
