Hey Jean-Charles,
If you’ve come back from a long summer holiday and had a big old think about whether your role is the right one for you anymore, you’re probably not alone.
Some startups welcome that kind of reflection though — and actively encourage employees to ‘rotate’ into different departments to learn new skills, share insights and stick around at the company for longer.
One such is London-based Bulb, which puts hundreds of employees on ‘rotation’ every year. We find out more about how exactly that works in practice today.
Enjoy!
|
|
\How to
Set up a rotation programme
Every year, hundreds of Bulb’s employees take up short-term posts — ‘rotations’ — in other departments to learn new skills and share knowledge. (206 people went on rotation last year.) Tom Fraine is chief people officer at Bulb, the UK-based green energy startup. Eleanor Shorrock is a partnerships and business ops manager at Bulb — and a veteran ‘rotatee’. Here, they explain the benefits of the scheme and share tips for other startups looking to set one up.
TF: Cross pollinate knowledge across your company. We believe that our product and tech teams will build much better products if they’re really connected to the experience our members are having. So we started asking how we could embed people with experience of our customers into those teams — but for them not to stay forever in those jobs, because then their knowledge would go dry. Instead, we wanted them to go back [to their original team] with all the knowledge they’d learned of how that other team worked. That’s how we developed the concept of rotations.
ES: It’s a great way to discover what you enjoy — and what you’re not so good at. I love the opportunity to learn lots of skills, even if you don’t necessarily get in-depth skills. At a company like Bulb, things can move quickly. By doing a lot of things, you can understand what you want to do and that can help with career plans.
TF: Run a competitive — and clearly advertised — application process. Be clear on the length of rotation: we go for six months, primarily. Avoid extending rotations if you have someone you like, as then it can start to feel more like their permanent job. Give people as much support at the end to integrate back into their old team, as at the start of a rotation in a new team. Offer a balance of permanent and rotating opportunities.
TF: Make it admin-light. Make sure it’s clear how someone starts and finishes a rotation. Create clear templates and guides for running a quick recruitment process. Remind people that they need to manage people on rotation slightly differently from other team members, as you need to be thinking about what’s next for them.
ES: If you want to try out a different role in your company, spend time networking. Build relationships, so you really understand what the rest of the company is doing, how teams function and what the day-to-day looks like in different teams. Spend the time asking questions. Even if you’re not ready right now, go and have those conversations.
|
|
\A message from our sponsor OVHcloud
OVHcloud’s Startup Programme helps startups scale by providing technical and business support, tailored to individual needs, wherever you are on your journey.
Find out more and join here.
|
|
\On the Subject of...
Rotating departments
|
|
|
📚 LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman is a big fan of the ‘tour of duty’. “By recasting careers at your company as a series of successive tours of duty, you can better attract and retain entrepreneurial employees,” he wrote in his book The Alliance. Here’s an extract from it.
🎡 Rotations or tours of duty are great ways to retain employees. “The problem with most employee retention programs is that they have a fuzzy goal (retain 'good' employees) and a fuzzy time frame (indefinitely). Both types of fuzziness destroy trust: The company is asking an employee to commit to it but makes no commitment in return. In contrast, a tour of duty serves as a personalised retention plan that gives a valued employee concrete, compelling reasons to finish her tour and that establishes a clear time frame for discussing the future of the relationship.” Read the full argument in HBR.
🤩 Rotating roles. Spending a decent amount of time within different departments promotes learning, creates better empathy and helps retain talent.
👉 Entry level rotation. So we know it’s good for learning, but who actually offers it? Here’s a list of company programmes for entry level product managers.
|
|
\Sifted Talks
Find out which common CX mistakes could be hindering your startup — and its sales — from experts including Checkout.com's head of commercial, Antoine Nougué, in today's Sifted Talk.
Join the discussion at 12.30pm BST!
|
|
\People Moves
Hopin has its first — and extremely impressive — COO. Wei Gao, who has spent a career at Amazon and was previously an advisor to Jeff Bezos, will join the super fast-growing hybrid events platform towards the end of September.
Chris Evans, former technical director at Monzo, has started his own thing. After three years at the digital bank, he’s launched Incident: ‘Create, manage and resolve incidents directly in Slack.’
|
|
|
Got any people intel you'd like to share with us? We'd love to hear it... 😉
|
|
\Smart Reads
1) Riding Unicorns Podcast, with none other than our own Amy Lewin chatting all things speedy grocery deliveries, the power of PR and diversity and inclusion.
2) Series Zzz. The impact of your team getting enough sleep could be comparable to an injection of venture capital.
3) Impact talks. Impact tech focused non-profit, Norrsken Foundation, held a conference with some tough and thought provoking ideas around socially led companies and ideas. You can watch the recording here and check out the agenda here to jump to the bit you’re most interested in.
4) Housing issues halting Stockholm’s growth. Stockholm has some big tech success stories, but for the next generation of the city’s startups to attract global talent, it needs to sort out its shortage of affordable accommodation.
5) How social media is trending. This report by customer experience platform Emplifi looks at ad spend, what a good performing post looks like and the role of influencers in the second quarter of 2021.
|
|
|
Read something you think everyone else should too? Send it on over to Anisah.
|
|
Forwarded this newsletter?
|
|
\Podcast of the Week
The Dark Web
I’m a bit late to the party with this one but I recently found myself down an Audible rabbit hole (it’s just released a bunch of new stuff for subscribers) and discovered The Dark Web, an Audible original series from 2018 featuring tech journalist Geoff White. It delves into what the dark web is, how to use it, why it exists and what lives on there. Here are some things I learned from the first episode:
1) The dark web is hidden. It’s a part of the world wide web that can only be accessed via specific anonymising browsers. Unlike the standard web where we can Google our way anywhere, on the dark web you need to know a specific domain name. The ability to browse invisibly is its USP.
2) Anonymity only works if offered to all. The dark web was created by the US Navy — but they had to enable everyone else to ‘hide’ in it too, to disguise the fact a government agent was using it. The first users were government and then civil liberty groups who used it to get around oppressive regime web censorship.
3) The dark web is open source. Its transparency is the reason it's trusted. The general public can check the code base and ensure there are no back doors or code changes added to it.
4) Sites can’t be shut down. On the standard web (‘the clear web’), a website operating illegally can be shut down by the domain registrar that it is registered with. The dark web has no registrars so each site builder has ownership of their own space.
You can listen to the full 10-part series here.
— Anisah
|
|
|
|
