Prosperity Project Lunch Panel (Public)

Menlo’s employee feedback and promotion process is run by the team, reinforcing the company’s cultural intentions of joy, collaboration, and collective ownership. Menlonians decide who gets hired, promoted or fired. As a team, it is our responsibility to evaluate the “appropriate level” for each team member, give them actionable feedback on how to grow and help them along on this journey.

In the last 18 months, two problems have emerged: one, when we switched to remote work, away from our open office environment, it became more difficult to observe team members’ performance. And two, determining the right pay level for an employee -- a challenge pre-pandemic/remote work -- became amplified. Not only did the expectations change for performance, but this less defined process was difficult to follow when we were remote.

Several attempts have been made at improving our level evaluations and feedback process over the years. This time, we looked to our well-understood Menlo systems, and we created an internal project called “Prosperity” to tackle these problems. Using our Project Management process, the Prosperity 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 our High-Tech Anthropology® (HTA) synthesis to this process as well, giving Menlonians a chance to learn or practice this skill even if they are not an HTA.

We have so far run level reviews for over a half dozen team members using the Prosperity process. The results have been wonderful so far. Even though not recommended for a level change at this time, Menlonian Mitch still had this to say about the process:

"I feel like I know what to do… Also, the investment Menlo made to do this -- team member time and cost -- makes me feel valued" - MZOL

Join us for a free lunch panel with members of the Prosperity team. We’ll talk about the origination of the name "Prosperity," provide an overview of the system experiment, and open the floor to your questions.