Looptail: How one company changed the world by reinventing business by Bruce Poon Tip

Author:Bruce Poon Tip [Tip, Bruce Poon]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780733632891
Publisher: Hachette Australia
Published: 2013-09-23T14:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

The Death of HR

The next thing I needed to change was how we managed our people. As far as I was concerned, we were doing a lot of things wrong. You can’t just treat human beings as though they were administrative files. I needed to develop a better understanding of what we were doing in this area, and, by the end of 2008, I knew I had to blow it all up and start over if we were going to create a cultural revolution. I told everyone working in the human resources side of the business at the time that I would have to reevaluate everything, which likely meant I was going to hire new people.

When I started to really dig into how we managed people, I was stunned by what I found. Our practices weren’t at all in line with our core values. We managed everyone to the lowest common denominator—making decisions that applied to the whole workforce based on the behavior of a few bad apples and, as a result, punishing everyone in the organization.

Our Facebook policy was a crystal-clear example of this. One day we learned that a few people were on Facebook for four and five hours every day. Our head of human resources (HR) responded in a way that made perfect sense, from an HR perspective—she came to me and asked for approval to lock everyone out of Facebook. And I gave it. At the time, it seemed like the easiest thing to do; I had so many other things on my plate, it seemed like a good solution. Today, though, I realize that this was a classic example of managing to the lowest common denominator. We were limiting the freedom of the entire company—most of whom weren’t abusing Facebook—in order to punish a few offenders.

We also didn’t manage or get rid of people who weren’t contributing beyond the bare minimum. A large percentage of the people who worked for the company at the time chose to be there because of the lifestyle it afforded them. We had a young, vibrant, fun culture that attracted great people, with varying degrees of how they contributed to the success of our business and company culture. At the extreme end of the spectrum were what I call Culture Vultures—people who were huge culture promoters, but that didn’t mean they were necessarily that good at their jobs.

I’m a firm believer in the importance of company culture, but I also know that you can’t run a company by focusing only on having happy people and a fun work environment. Performance matters.

So, if you think about it in terms of the Looptail, along with creating passion and purpose and paying it forward, you also have to nurture an environment that demands excellence and celebrates achievement. It’s not glamorous; even with a great culture, we still sometimes have to fire people or restructure departments. Ultimately, though, it’s part of being a fast-growing company. There’s no way around it.

To start the process

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