How Openmind Networks Supports People Excellence

1. Don’t Assume Everyone Wants to be CEO

“A lot of our team members are senior software engineers who have no interest in being managers. But then some of the people we've hired since the pandemic are really wondering, ‘What's my next step?’ We’ve been careful not to take a one-size-fits-all approach to employee development. So I put together a special 1:1 template in Frankli for what we’re calling ‘progression conversations’.”

2. Make Employee Wellbeing a Priority

“There's a really genuine respect for work-life balance here. And that comes from the top. Our CEO went on holiday last summer and he said, ‘I'm not looking at my email for 2 weeks’, and I had never worked in a company before where the CEO had done that. I worked for a company where my boss was always emailing me on her vacation. Then I'd feel a bit sheepish about asking for my own vacation time. There's none of that here.”

3. Choose People-Focused Software Tools

“One of the reasons I liked Frankli was that nobody was confused by how it worked. You can figure it out yourself, it's very straightforward. I think our team members genuinely like using Frankli, and that drives them to use it. I was doing stay interviews with people recently and a number of them made a point of saying, ‘I really like Frankli’. People find it easy to use, which is half the battle.”

4. Invest in Support for Remote and Hybrid Workers

“It’s a lot harder to engage, retain and motivate people when it's all online. Frankli helps us there in terms of 1:1 meetings and OKRs, and seeing the bigger picture. If you're in operations, you can see how your work links in with what they're doing in engineering, for example.”

5. Make Performance Reviews Stress-Free

“I've been working in HR for a long time and usually you get a bit of pushback from managers around performance reviews and there’s been none of that with Frankli. I really think that was worth its weight in gold.”

6. Use HR Automation to Save your Teams Time

“I've been in HR since 2010 and usually you're chasing people up to complete their performance reviews and it's a bit frustrating. When we ran performance reviews in Frankli, I literally didn't have to send one email and every manager completed them. And I got feedback from the managers that they found Frankli very useful.”

7. Use Surveys to Track Manager Performance

“I recently asked everyone in the company to fill out a short feedback survey on their manager. And we're going to have them do it again in a couple of months, after a period of manager training, to see whether the scores go up. I will say that the scores were really high to begin with, which was great. But the survey actually did surface an issue that a particular employee was having with their manager. So that was another huge benefit.”