📚️ Recent Editions

If you’re new round here, not yet a subscriber or you straight up missed it, you can read all previous editions here.

💭 This Week’s People Problem

POV: People Leader balancing how much to reward results or behaviours

🖤 Our Take On How You Solve

If your performance reviews are tilted too heavily toward results, you risk rewarding “brilliant jerks” and burning trust. If you over-index on behaviours, you risk losing clarity on whether the business is actually hitting goals.

The art is in the balance. Here’s how we think about it.

1. Anchor in your purpose of performance

Before tweaking weightings or rating systems, zoom out…

• To drive clarity on expectations?

• To support growth and development?

• To influence promotions, reward, exits?

The answer will shape the balance you need. For example, if performance reviews are tightly tied to comp, you’ll likely need clearer rules around weighting. If they’re focused on growth, you can lean more flexibly into behaviours.

Ness and the people team at Gorilla do this super well.

2. Build on three pillars, not one

Reviews shouldn’t just ask what someone delivered. They also need to cover how they delivered it, and whether they role-modelled the expected standards.

Our go-to structure is:

From our newest playbook, shipping on Tuesday to content passholders 🎉 

• Results → Did they hit the goals?

• Execution → Did they deliver with the expected level of competence?

• Behaviours → Did they role-model the values we expect here?

Miss one, and your reviews will always feel incomplete.

3. Get explicit about weighting

Don’t leave managers guessing how much each pillar matters.

Our rule of thumb:

• Results and Behaviours must both be met for progression.

• Execution helps spot when someone is ready for the next level.

• Behaviours are the non-negotiable. Regardless of results, if someone consistently fails here, they’re not promotable.

Document this clearly in your performance handbook so it’s not open to interpretation.

4. Embed the balance into your rituals

Even the clearest framework won’t stick if your rituals don’t back it up. A few tips:

• Run calibrations to ensure consistency across managers.

• Make “how” part of every 1:1, not just the annual review.

• Recognise people publicly for both results and behaviours (e.g. “Shoutout for hitting the quarterly target and supporting two teammates through a crunch week”).

• Hold leaders accountable to the same standard.

5. Use simple, lightweight ratings

We like a simple traffic light system across the three pillars:

From our newest playbook, shipping on Tuesday to content passholders 🎉 

It keeps reviews simple, consistent, and focused on clarity over complexity.

The bottom line

Balancing results vs behaviours is about defining, up front:

• What we assess → Results, Execution, Behaviours

• How we weight them → Behaviours as non-negotiable

• How we embed them → In 1:1s, calibrations, recognition, and leadership accountability

Do this well, and you’ll build a system that drives performance and protects culture.

GandalfAI Resource Recommendations

We asked GandalfAI (available to content pass holders) for the best resources on this subject from the Open Org codex. Here’s 3/19 recommendations.

• Learnerbly’s Performance Hub

• Open Org’s Performance Template

• Claire Lowry-Hubball’s Trust vs Team Performance Matrix

Want To Go Deeper? Next Week On Tuesday 19th August We’re Launching Our Latest Playbook 🎉 

How to Build, Launch & Embed Your Org’s First Performance Framework will be available to everyone who has our Content Pass.

Grab The Content Pass and get access to ALL of our tried and tested people and culture playbooks, £30k+ in HR Tech & partner discounts as well as unlimited access to Gandalf–Open Org’s AI search and coaching agent trained on our whole knowledge codex.

openorg.fyi

🎁 Use code OWORKSFRIENDS10 for 10% off year one as a thank you from us for reading this newsletter.

🤓 Psst! Want to Get Your Current “People Problem” Featured?

No need to be struggs. Share your challenge!

We’re here for the trickiest challenges you’ve got. Hit reply to this email, and let us know what’s keeping you up at night, and we’ll feature next time anonymously!

With 🧊 & 🔥 

Adam & John

👉️ Know someone who’d love this newsletter? Forward it their way so they don’t miss out, and make our day whilst you’re at it! 🙂 

📚️ Recent Editions

If you’re new round here, not yet a subscriber or you straight up missed it, you can read all previous editions here.

💭 This Week’s People Problem

POV: your people team trying to say no, but not having anything to back it up with

🖤 Our Take On How You Solve

If your People team is overwhelmed, reactive, saying yes to too many things…or quietly doing 79% of the organisation’s invisible work… you likely don’t have a resourcing problem. You have a boundaries problem.

Here’s how to fix that.

1. Clarify the scope of your role

You can’t expect your team to hold boundaries if you don’t have them yourself. That clarity needs to exist between you and the founder/CEO before it can exist anywhere else.

Use your next check-in with them to:

• Align on your top accountabilities

• Sense-check your current priorities vs theirs

• Gut-check your focus pie

Write it down. Even if it’s rough. If you’re not clear on where your energy should go, neither is your team.

2. Build shared clarity with your team

This is the game-changer. You need to show your team what they’re allowed to protect.

Here’s a good rhythm:

• Async: Share your priorities and draft pie chart. Ask each person to self-assess their current week.

• 1:1s: Spot the leaks. What are they saying yes to that they shouldn’t be? What requests are draining time but adding no real value?

• Team meeting: Build a simple alignment doc together:

  • Here’s what we own

  • Here’s our primary and secondary focus

  • Here’s what we are not doing

  • Here’s how we want to work

This creates permission to say no.

openorg.fyi

3. Make it visible across the org

Now the hard part. You’ve got internal clarity. Time to externalise it.

Create a one-pager or team profile:

• What your team does

• Where your energy is focused

• How other teams can get support (and what they shouldn’t expect)

• Your key metrics and roadmap

Drop it in your Notion, link it in Slack, point people to it when they bypass process or start fire-hosing your team and use available comms opportunities to share your people and culture roadmap, what you’re working on, what you’re not and why.

This isn’t being difficult. This is being transparent.

Posthog example

4. Check in regularly

Don’t set and forget.

• Use 1:1s to ask: “Are you able to focus on what we said matters?”

• Look back at real calendars. What actually happened?

• Step in when a pattern starts forming (same team, same chaos, every sprint)

📌 Use the data to address issues with repeat offender stakeholders. 

GandalfAI Resource Recommendations

We asked GandalfAI (available to content pass holders) for the best resources on this subject from the Open Org codex.

• Posthog’s People Team Profile and Goals

• Maker vs Manager Schedule

• Team Charter Template

Want To Go Deeper? Check Out Our Boundaries Playbook Included In The Content Pass

This approach comes straight from our Setting Effective Boundaries playbook available with our Content Pass.

Grab The Content Pass and get access to ALL of our tried and tested people and culture playbooks, £30k+ in HR Tech & partner discounts as well as unlimited access to Gandalf–Open Org’s AI search and coaching agent trained on our whole knowledge codex.

openorg.fyi

You’ll get:

• Templates for your own scope doc and team profile

• Workshop guide to run your alignment session

• Miro boards, facilitation tips and example outputs

🎁 Use code OWORKSFRIENDS10 for 10% off year one.

🤓 Psst! Want to Get Your Current “People Problem” Featured?

Don’t struggle alone in Mordor. Share your challenge!

We’re here for the trickiest challenges you’ve got. Hit reply to this email, and let us know what’s keeping you up at night, and we’ll feature next time anonymously!

With 🧊 & 🔥 

Adam & John

👉️ Know someone who’d love this newsletter? Forward it their way so they don’t miss out, and make our day whilst you’re at it! 🙂 

📚️ Recent Editions

If you’re new round here, not yet a subscriber or you straight up missed it, you can read all previous editions here.

💭 This Week’s People Problem

People Leaders stretching for career stability in a world of chaos.

🖤 Our Take On How You Solve

I don’t know what the future holds. It is a wild time.

Some people think: smaller companies, less people, less need for people people.

I don’t know about that. Personally, I struggle to imagine a world and an economy that works if the median company size is capped at <10 people.

What I do know is that the difference between a People Leader who has developed craft in leveraging AI vs one who hasn’t is dramatic.

I’ve always been a fan of the ethos of “control what you can control” and in this instance the thing that's in your control is your craft. Your skills.

Here’s 3 areas to build

1. Build automation fluency

Start by removing yourself from low-leverage work: onboarding docs, survey summaries, policy drafts. Know the tools. Know what’s worth automating. Free yourself up to focus on harder, human problems.

▪️ Here’s a simple framework i built to think about this:

openorg.fyi 

2. Learn how to write for machines

Prompt writing is now a core skill. The best prompts unlock sharper thinking, faster iteration, and stronger comms. If you can guide AI clearly, you can move faster than the teams around you.

My fave 2 resources to level up here are:

▪️ Schumer’s Prompt Library

▪️ Prompt Cowboy.

3. Lead the AI curve for your team

Companies need someone to bring AI in without breaking trust or culture. Be the person who experiments, shares, and helps others increase fluency. That’s leadership now.

Something that stand out for me here that often gets overlooked:

▪️ Know Kotter well enough to be able to see through the corporate language to the (golden) principles at heart and be able to remix it to fit your org, like this.

Extract from our AI Playbook.

Check Out Our AI Playbook Included In The Content Pass

We’ve written a deep dive playbook on how to leverage AI for your team, yourself and your org. Available only on The Content Pass. Here’s a 10% discount on year 1 as a thank you from us. Use code: OWORKSFRIENDS10 at checkout.

openorg.fyi/content-pass

Grab The Content Pass and get access to ALL of our tried and tested people and culture playbooks, £30k+ in HR Tech & partner discounts as well as unlimited access to Gandalf–Open Org’s AI search and coaching agent trained on our whole knowledge codex.

🤓 Psst! Want to Get Your Current “People Problem” Featured?

No need to feel this way. Share your challenge!

We’re here for the trickiest challenges you’ve got. Hit reply to this email, and let us know what’s keeping you up at night, and we’ll feature next time anonymously!

With 🧊 & 🔥 

Adam & John

👉️ Know someone who’d love this newsletter? Forward it their way so they don’t miss out, and make our day whilst you’re at it! 🙂 

Welcome to Open Works. Every edition we solve a ‘people and culture’ problem crowd-sourced from the Open Org Community of 480+ Startup and Scale-up People Leaders.

This edition is sponsored by peoplemetrics.fyi–the benchmarking platform for scale-up people leaders.

Get instant access to verified data from 600+ startups and scale-ups across 18 x people and talent metrics. Gain the insights to make smarter decisions and give stakeholders the context they crave.

📚️ Recent Editions

If you’re new round here, not yet a subscriber or you straight up missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🧭 Edition 39: How To Diagnose And Fix Workload Issues In Your Org

🧑‍🎨 Edition 38: How To Build An Innovation Engine - a change agent’s guide to borrowing good stuff from other disciplines…

🎯 Edition 37: Rolling Out KPIs in Product & Tech Without Causing A Mutiny - a practical guide.

💭 This Week’s People Problem

POV: when the CEO runs the away day and it gets….weird

Newly formed leadership team. Not just the founders anymore. There is agreement that you need *waves hands in the air* “alignment” or some such like, and big surprise…the job has fallen to you to make it so via an exceptionally crafted offsite. Next week if you please. Sound familiar? 🙂 

🖤 Our Take On How You Solve

TL;DR:

Simple is beautiful. Go with an agenda that flows down from: Vision → Strategy → Team and use facilitation structures that focus on inclusivity without falling into word-smithing doom spirals!

Let’s get into it! 👇️ 

The Macro Flow For A Solid First Leadership Team Offsite

Vision → Strategy → Us, The Leadership Team

1. Vision → What are we building and why does it matter?

2. Strategy → What choices are we making to focus our direction of travel?

3. Team Ways of Working → What’s our job as SLT, how are we going to operate as a unit? what do we expect of each other and how will we do our best work together?

💡 If you have more than one day, then great places you cango next are:

• Company-wide culture – Where do we see the opportunities in our ways of working? Where is it currently off?

• Problem solving – Tackle 1-2 wicked problems in small groups using tools like “How Might We…” or pre-mortems.

• Org design and priorities – Map out how your structure and goals need to evolve to support strategy.

• Capability bets – What people, tools or systems are we missing to get where we want to go?

📌 Thinking: The best away days don’t decide everything. They create shared language and momentum—so people leave with more trust, clarity and energy than they came in with.

Part 1: Vision

Start with the future you are trying to build aka direction. Everyone’s got ideas in their head about “where we’re going”, this is a great opportunity to help surface those ideas and turn them into a shared narrative.

📍 This part depends a lot on the kind of CEO you have. Some will want to lead out on this, others will want more co-creation with the rest of the leadership team. If it's the former, they should own this part of the day.

My favourite way to run this bit:

1. Use a 1-2-4-All to gather input on what success looks like 3 years from now.

2. Prompt: “If we were wildly successful, what would our product/company have changed for customers?”

3. Start wide, then converge into a rough single statement.

1-2-4-all Liberating Structure. Source

What’s a good vision statement look like?

Plenty of different opinions on this, but i think good principles are: clear, memorable and evocative. In practice, i think that looks like:

Part 2: Strategy

Strategy is about choices.

This is typically where I spend the heart of the day.

• Break the team into pairs or trios. Have a discussion and use magic whiteboard and sticky notes to complete:

  • “To win in the next 12 months, we must…”

  • “We are not doing…”

  • “We will prioritise [X] even over [Y]”

• Regroup and synthesise live

• Use a quadrant to plot tangibles*.

*You can do simple buckets of:

🟢 Must do | 🔴 Must not do | 🟡 Nice to do | ⚫ Distractions

But, any Impact x Value style prioritisation framework will work here e.g:

A note on Even/Over Statements if you’ve not come across them

An Even/Over statement is a phrase containing two positive things, where the former is prioritised over the latter.

These are super useful in this setting because they force you to make hard choices. So if your strategy session ends up with 20 massive initiatives in the “WE MUST DO” bucket. Use Even Over statements to force focus and make hard choices.

📌 Bonus read: how to create your first people strategy

Part 3: Team Ways of Working

User Guide To Me

Before the day:

• Get each SLT member to create a “User Guide to Me” or “Personal User Manual” (how I do my best work, what you’ll notice if i’m in conflict, how I like feedback).

• Share them with the rest of the team beforehand, to absorb

Slide template here from Steph Smith

joincandor.com personal readme

💡Creating a user manual allows you to reflect and be self-aware, while also being proactive about letting others know how you work best.During the day:

On the day

• Share personal user manuals in small groups → Discuss surprises, overlaps, tensions.

• Co-create a Team Charter:

  • Purpose of the SLT

  • Decision-making rules

  • Communication norms

  • Conflict expectations

💡If a team charter doesn't feel like you. A simple retrospective on how you've been working together is also a great activity here. Try to create some safe space to reflect inwards and come out the other side with a new agreement. 

Role cards (bonus)

Adam and I consider ourselves quite fortunate in that we get to see how a lot of very different leadership teams operate.

A pattern that we see often is: even experienced teams have fuzzy or conflicting ideas about what each other’s jobs really are!

Specifically:

• What am I actually accountable for?

• What are you actually accountable for?

It’s not always because people are unclear or too afraid to challenge this, it’s sometimes because the org has changed, and the old expectations no longer fit. Other times, there’s been no space to name and align on it explicitly. And sometimes, it’s just because no one ever wrote it down.

So if that sounds like you, one thing you might consider is a simple alignment session on each other’s top 3-5 accountabilities in the form of a Role Card.

Accountability Role Cards

🛠️ Quick Facilitation Format

Solo (5–10 min): Each leader writes down their top 3–5 accountabilities: what they believe they own.

Pair + Share (15 min): Take turns presenting to the group. Invite clarifying questions only.

Group Align (15–20 min): Discuss overlaps, gaps, and surprises. Where do assumptions diverge? What needs updating?

If You Only Have One Day...

Here’s how your one-day agenda might look:

Things That I’ve Learned Work

• Decisions Not Discussions → End each block with: “What did we just decide?”

• Clarity Check → Ask: “On a scale of 1–10, how clear are we on this now?”

• Documentation = Power → Snap pics, take notes, and remember to ship a 1-pager after the session to the wider team. “This is what we did, this is what we decided, this is why, this is what’s next”

📚️ Good reads and resources...

📔 1-2-4-All Liberating Structure [Miro Template]

⚒️ Creating a team charter [WantToWorkThere.com]

⚒️ The Team Canvas

🐟️ Fearless Culture’s article on even/over statements

🤓 Want to Get Your Current “People Problem” Featured?

Don’t sweat in silence. Hit me up with your latest challenge :)

We’re here for the trickiest challenges you’ve got. Hit reply to this email, and let us know what’s keeping you up at night, and we’ll feature next time anonymously!

🖤 Psst! Did You Know We Are Launching An Exclusive Annual Content Membership For People People On June 3rd Next Week?!

New shiny content platform dropping on Tuesday 3rd June 2025!

Well my friend, now you do.

TL;DR- it’s all our past/current/future playbooks we’ve written for People People bundled up into an affordable yearly subscription (£120) as well as thousands of pounds of HR tech and services discounts we’ve curated and shortlisted for you.

Folks on the waitlist get 25% off year one when we launch on Tues. If that sounds fun…and a good use of your L&D Budget, get your name on the waitlist here 👇️ 

With 🧊 & 🔥 

John & Adam

👉️ Know someone who’d love this newsletter? Forward it their way so they don’t miss out, and make my day whilst you’re at it! 🙂 

Welcome to Open Works. Every edition we solve a ‘people and culture’ problem crowd-sourced from the Open Org Community of 480+ Startup and Scale-up People Leaders.

This edition is sponsored by peoplemetrics.fyi–the benchmarking platform for scale-up people leaders.

Get instant access to verified data from 600+ startups and scale-ups across 18 x people and talent metrics. Gain the insights to make smarter decisions and give stakeholders the context they crave.

📚️ Recent Editions

If you’re new round here, not yet a subscriber or you straight up missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🧑‍🎨 Edition 38: How To Build An Innovation Engine - a change agent’s guide to borrowing good stuff from other disciplines…

🎯 Edition 37: Rolling Out KPIs in Product & Tech Without Causing A Mutiny - a practical guide.

💰️ Edition 36: How To Think About Executive Compensation - a mental model and stage by stage guide to approach it.

💭 This Week’s People Problem

POV: your team when they realise that the 3 new hires promised all need hiring, onboarding and training…

🖤 Our Take On How You Solve

TL;DR:

The Root Cause Might Not Be Load

You’ve added people and improved systems, but “workload” is still the dominant signal in your 1-2-1s, listening tours and pulse surveys.

You’ve looked at the obvious stuff (headcount, tools, meeting hygiene, even async practices) but the noise isn’t shifting. Why? Because it’s probably not just about volume. It’s about perception, priority chaos, and the invisible work nobody’s tracking:

• Perception gaps - Teams don’t understand each other's load or impact

• Priority sprawl - No clear sense of what matters most

• Output blindness - Everyone’s working hard, but unclear what’s working

Let’s dive in with a few ideas on things to try

Step 1: Show Where the New Capacity Went

That feeling is real and if people can’t see the impact of new hires, resentment grows.

Run a Before/After Capacity Review

1. List key functions or teams

2. Show headcount then vs. now

3. Map what that extra capacity is enabling

Examples:

• “We added 2 engineers to reduce tech debt. Here’s the backlog change.”

• “We added a CS hire to triage tickets. Response time went from 36h → 10h.”

📌 Tip: Work with the leaders of each function (this is their story to own). Keep it concrete. Don’t say “more strategic work” instead, say “launched X, improved Y, cleared Z.”

Make Sure Hiring Was to Balance

One of the most common failure modes here: you hired to ease pressure, but targets quietly scaled too aggressively alongside headcount. So no one feels relief, just more expectations, more OKRs, more stress. That’s scope creep. If you want the team to feel the benefit of new hires, you’ve got to show where the pressure came off not where it got re-routed.

Step 2: Make the Work Visible

One of my all time favorite ideas is this concept of:

No matter what kind of problem you are facing, this is such a valuable starting point. Grab a whiteboard, story-map on a miro board, re-arrange some sticks and stones whilst out walking! Visualising the work helps you see the shape and size of the problem.

For something like workload, i’d remix a bit from the Lean toolkit and work with the team to do a bit of a calendar audit mixed with ‘Week in the Life Of Analysis’ so i can get some tangible data and start to hone in on whether this is a people problem, a process problem, a capacity problem or all of the above.

Workload Analysis

Map what people are actually doing to understand and improve how time is being spent.

Workload Analysis

Sample Column Definitions

Work Types:

• Reactive – Interrupt-driven (tickets, escalations)

• Deep – Problem-solving, coding, writing, design

• Coordination – Meetings, alignment, handoffs

• Creative – Strategy, planning, innovation

• Admin – Reporting, tooling, hygiene

• Comms – Slack, email, updates, decks

💡 Tip: You can colour-code your Google Calendar using this same key VA, NVAU, NVAA—to visualise where time goes in a week/month. 

Value Category:

• VA – Value-Added: directly creates customer or business value

• NVAU – Non-Value-Added but Unavoidable: admin, ops, compliance

• NVAA – Non-Value-Added and Avoidable: waste, duplicative work

  

  Coding up calendar with VA / NVAU / NVAA*

How to Do This With Everyone?

1. Prepare:

• Pick a timeframe (1 week)

• Share the template and explain tagging

• Reinforce honesty > polish

2. Self Diagnostic:

• Individuals reflect on last {4 weeks} and complete

• Tag with VA / NVAU / NVAA

3. Analyse:

• Review in 1:1s or team huddles

• Spot friction, duplication, or drift

• Categorise NVA:

  • NVAU → can we improve it?

  • NVAA → can we eliminate or redesign?

4. Act:

• Share insights together as a whole org.

• Crowdsource ideas for reducing low-value work

• Escalate system issues to leadership

📌 This activity also has the added benefit of being a great way to identify candidates for AI and automation  

Step 3: Surface Resentment, Without Creating Drama

Classic.

Both not got much visibility into each other’s worlds.

Both have aggressive goals.

Both feel misunderstood.

Both probably are misunderstood!

In my experience, you don’t fix this with facilitated empathy-building workshops or shadowing sessions. Good in theory but trying to get buy-in to spend time on that sort of thing if the entire system is under strain = tres hard.

So what can you do? Well you can work with the leader of each function and work hard to surface the right amount of context, fast and (my favorite…) make the tradeoffs transparent. This looks like:

Inject Lightweight Cross-Team Exposure

Instead of asking people to “walk in each other’s shoes” or have campfire style workshops…

Make sure everyone is clear on how each other adds value, how they work and what their goals are.

Posthog do this super well in their team profiles:

Source: https://posthog.com/teams

Get Functional Leaders to share with each other in public this kind of update.

• What we’re trying to get done

• What’s blocking us

• What tradeoff we had to make this week

• What win or what learn

This transparency is low lift, good practice anyway for leadership and helps everyone see the headlines of each team.

ENG might say things like:

GTM might say:

📌 Do this enough, and teams will start to build a better snapshot understanding of what other teams are carrying. 

Final Thoughts

When people say “others have it easier,” they’re often saying:

• “I don’t feel seen.”

• “I’m not sure this is fair.”

• “I don’t understand what’s changed.”

The answer isn’t always less work.
It’s visible work, shared tradeoffs, and system-wide clarity on what’s worth it.

• Show where the effort’s going.

• Expose invisible strain.

• Clear space with intention, not panic.

When you do that, teams stop side-eyeing each other.

📚️ Good reads and resources...

📔 Team profiles [Posthog]

📖 How to fix change fatigue [Open Org]

📖 How to fix cross-functional conflict [Open Org

📖 How to fix feuding teams [Open Org]

🤓 Want to Get Your Current “People Problem” Featured?

You don’t have to feel like this. Get a second opinion on your problem and hit reply 🙂 

We’re here for the trickiest challenges you’ve got. Hit reply to this email, and let us know what’s keeping you up at night, and we’ll feature next time anonymously!

🖤 Psst! Did You Know We Are Launching An Exclusive Annual Content Membership For People People?!

Well my friend, now you do.

👉️ Adam wrote words about this here. 

TL;DR- it’s all our past/current/future playbooks we’ve written for People People bundled up into an affordable yearly subscription (£120) as well as thousands of pounds of HR tech discounts and some other free stuff.

Early bird discount of 25% off for year 1. If that sounds fun and a good use of your L&D Budget, get your name on the list here 👇️ 

With 🧊 & 🔥 

John & Adam

👉️ Know someone who’d love this newsletter? Forward it their way so they don’t miss out, and make my day whilst you’re at it! 🙂 

Welcome to Open Works. Every edition we solve a ‘people and culture’ problem crowd-sourced from the Open Org Community of 480+ Startup and Scale-up People Leaders.

This edition is sponsored by peoplemetrics.fyi–the benchmarking platform for scale-up people leaders.

Get instant access to verified data from 600+ startups and scale-ups across 18 x people and talent metrics. Gain the insights to make smarter decisions and give stakeholders the context they crave.

📚️ Recent Editions

If you’re new round here, not yet a subscriber or you straight up missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🎯 Edition 37: Rolling Out KPIs in Product & Tech Without Causing A Mutiny - a practical guide.

💰️ Edition 36: How To Think About Executive Compensation - a mental model and stage by stage guide to approach it.

🔋 Edition 35: How to Manage Change Fatigue - diagnostic, approach and framework for dealing with a real threat.

💭 This Week’s People Problem

POV: Startup People team heroically complete basic career framework…

CEO: “can we innovate more?”

🖤 Our Take On How You Solve

TL;DR:

Products need constant iteration.

Your people product is no different.

But innovation isn’t just about churning out endless ideas (that is exhausting!). It’s about building a repeatable engine that consistently surfaces, tests, and scales what actually works.

Innovation = input + testing + feedback.

But before you build the engine, make sure it’s pointed at the right problem. Align it with what your company stage actually needs.

The Real Problem

“Innovate more” is often thrown at People teams without any clarity on what that innovation is for.

And without that context, you can end up spinning:

👉 testing a flashy new onboarding flow when what you really need is to fix payroll
👉 launching a mentorship pilot when what your exec team wants is cost-per-hire savings
👉 adding more stuff when your team needs better basics

Before you build a system for innovation, figure out what kind of innovation matters right now.

JooBee to the rescue with a super handy mental model (i think):

Our friend JooBee made this elegant “HR Hierarchy of Needs” framework this. Source

So…

• If you’re in RUN, innovation focus = eliminating pain points + building reliability

• If you’re in DRIVE, innovation focus = aligning people processes to business goals

• If you’re in GROW, innovation focus = custom solutions that unlock performance

• If you’re in SCALE, innovation focus = big bets and 10x plays

⚠️ Innovation without this context leads to noise. With it, you start solving the right problems at the right time.

So... How Do You Actually Build a Repeatable Innovation Engine?

You need three ingredients:

1. Input → ideas, signals, frustrations

2. Testing → fast, low-stakes experiments

3. Feedback → learning loops and metrics

🧠 Build the System, Not Just the Idea

Here’s a simple innovation loop you can run monthly:

1. Live Pain Tracker

   • Slack form or Google Form or Miro board. Anyone can log friction points across people experience.

   • Categorise monthly. Prioritise by frequency + impact.

2. Monthly Innovation Sprint

   • Pick a theme (onboarding, feedback, L&D, etc.)

   • Assign an owner. 2 weeks to test one change.

   • Low stakes. High learning.

3. Steal & Adapt Time

   • Every quarter, go to your community, learn something new that someone else is trying...

   • Force-fit one into a test.

4. Test & Kill Quickly

   • If it works, scale it. If it doesn’t, kill it fast and capture what you learned.

💡Some of my favourite but simplest success metrics:
 - # of experiments/month
 - Time from idea → live test
 - % of experiments that scale

🛠 Remix Catalogue: Practices Worth Poaching

Got a basic loop in place and looking for ideas? I love borrowing from other disciplines here. Examples from some of my favourite below:

🔁 From Lean Startup & Agile

♻️ From Continuous Improvement / Kaizen

🎨 From Design Thinking & Innovation

Next Steps

• Pick next month’s innovation sprint theme + assign an owner.

• Run a “steal and adapt” session. What’s one practice from outside you can trial?

• Track your innovation/experiment backlog like a product team. If you don’t know how, go ask them.

📚️ Good reads and resources...

📔 Lean UX Canvas (Miro template)

📔 Lean Canvas by Ash Maurya

📔 Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres

📔 IDEO Design Kit: Methods

📔 Stanford Design Thinking Playbook

📔 Google Ventures Design Sprint

🤓 Want to Get Your Current “People Problem” Featured?

Need an internet hug? Hit reply, share your challenge!

We’re here for the trickiest challenges you’ve got. Hit reply to this email, and let us know what’s keeping you up at night, and we’ll feature next time anonymously!

🖤 Psst! Did You Know We Are Launching An Exclusive Annual Content Membership For People People?!

Well my friend, now you do.

👉️ Adam wrote words about this here. 

TL;DR- it’s all our past/current/future playbooks we’ve written for People People bundled up into an affordable yearly subscription (£120) as well as thousands of pounds of HR tech discounts and some other free stuff.

Early bird discount of 25% off for year 1. If that sounds fun, get your name on the list here 👇️ 

With 🧊 & 🔥 

John & Adam

👉️ Know someone who’d love this newsletter? Forward it their way so they don’t miss out, and make my day whilst you’re at it! 🙂 

Welcome to Open Works. Every edition we solve a ‘people and culture’ problem crowd-sourced from the Open Org Community of 480+ Startup and Scale-up People Leaders.

This edition is sponsored by peoplemetrics.fyi–the benchmarking platform for scale-up people leaders.

Get instant access to verified data from 600+ startups and scale-ups across 18 x people and talent metrics. Gain the insights to make smarter decisions and give stakeholders the context they crave.

📚️ Recent Editions

If you’re new round here, not yet a subscriber or you straight up missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

💰️ Edition 36: How To Think About Executive Compensation - a mental model and stage by stage guide to approach it.

🔋 Edition 35: How to Manage Change Fatigue - diagnostic, approach and framework for dealing with a real threat.

💻️ Edition 34: Tech Hiring SOS! How To Increase Candidate Quality – practical sourcing tactics and hidden gems.

💭 This Week’s People Problem

POV: You dared to suggest KPIs to Engineering

🖤 Our Take On How You Solve

🏃 TL;DR:

• Start with the why and if you’ve not got a good one, don’t start at all.

• Frame KPIs as health signals, not scorecards.

• Use a metaphor to frame it. People remember stories more than slides.

• Introduce metrics they already trust (hi, DORA 👋).

• Co-create not mandate.

• Avoid the big three: top-down orders, vanity metrics, and KPI overload.

⚡️ The Problem

^ That’s how a KPI rollout can land if it’s not done carefully in Product and Tech.

The issue isn’t resistance to measurement, it’s that most KPI systems are rolled out without real input from the teams they affect and become a reporting time sink.

They often feel disconnected from how work actually gets done, misaligned with how decisions are made, and overly focused on top-down visibility. And where does that leave us? A bad place. Low trust, poor adoption, and metrics that don’t drive meaningful action.

Bleurgh.

Here’s how to avoid that 👇️ 

💡 Step 1: Nail Your WHY

Before you talk about what you’re rolling out, get clear on why. And if you haven’t got one. Go next.

Bad WHY: “To help us measure success.”

(bad because this is a vague generic textbook reason for wanting to do KPIs)

Good WHY: “To help us see where delivery risk is building up.”

(good because it’s a very specific org pain)

Great WHY: “Remember that major launch last year that shipped with 13 bugs and took us 3 months to recover from whilst we built a mountain of tech debt we are still trying to tackle? This is how we avoid that happening again.”

(great because it’s a very specific pain org pain that can translate to Product and Eng feeling it themselves.)

💡Tip: Make the pain you’re solving real. The moment teams feel it, you’ve got buy-in.

📡 Step 2: Use a Metaphor People Can Actually Understand

Tackle this one with a simple metaphor. My favourite:

🚦 Sat Nav vs. Dashboard.

Image Source: perdoo.com

• OKRs = Sat Nav. They show where you’re going, and adapt along the way.

• KPIs = Dashboard Gauges. They tell you how the engine’s running. Fuel, speed, engine temp. You’re not driving toward them—but if one’s blinking red, you should probably pull over.

It shifts the conversation from “What are we being measured on?” to “What should we be paying attention to so we don’t crash?”

Shout out to my friends at Stellafai for teaching me this one 🙏 

🔧 Step 3: Start with KPIs They Already Trust

For Engineering, don’t invent new metrics. Use ones they already respect.

Enter: DORA Metrics (📦 DevOps Research and Assessment)

1. Deployment Frequency – how often do we ship?

2. Lead Time for Changes – how long from code to production?

3. Mean Time to Recovery – how quickly can we fix failures?

4. Change Failure Rate – how often do we break things?

These are trusted in the DevOps community because they correlate with real business performance, and they reinforce a culture of fast, safe delivery not micromanagement.

🛠 Step 4: Run Workshops, But Let Them Drive

Don’t show up with a finished dashboard and a lecture.

Instead, turn workshops into co-creation sessions. Ask questions like:

• “What would help you know earlier if something’s going off-track?”

• “Where are we currently flying blind?”

• “How could we use data to protect our focus and flow?”

Let teams sketch their own starter KPIs. Help Heads of to facilitate not dictate.

🚫 Pitfalls to Avoid

Rolling out KPIs with no shared WHY. 

Resistance is guaranteed.

Tracking too many things. 

Stick to 3–5 metrics max. You’re not building Google Analytics for delivery teams.

Doing nothing when a KPI tanks. 

If there’s no follow-up, you lose trust fast.

Using story points or velocity as KPIs. 

These are game-able, subjective, and almost universally loathed as a KPI by teams.

📚️ Good reads and resources...

📔 Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren – where DORA metrics were born.

📈 DORA Metrics 101 – if you’re new to them, start here.

📔 Measuring Product Velocity - Laura Tacho (via Lenny’s newsletter)

🤓 Want to Get Your Current “People Problem” Featured?

Solution to your problem eluding you like this cursed ethereal bone? No worries. Hit reply, tell me about it 🙂 

We’re here for the trickiest challenges you’ve got. Hit reply to this email, and let us know what’s keeping you up at night, and we’ll feature next time anonymously!

🖤 Psst! Did You Know We Are Launching An Exclusive Annual Content Membership For People People?!

Well my friend, now you do.

👉️ Adam wrote words about this here. 

TL;DR- it’s all our past/current/future playbooks we’ve written for People People bundled up into an affordable yearly subscription (£120) as well as thousands of pounds of HR tech discounts and some other free stuff.

Early bird discount of 25% off for year 1. If that sounds fun, get your name on the list here 👇️ 

With 🧊 & 🔥 

John & Adam

👉️ Know someone who’d love this newsletter? Forward it their way so they don’t miss out, and make my day whilst you’re at it! 🙂 

Welcome to Open Works. Every edition we solve a ‘people and culture’ problem crowd-sourced from the Open Org Community of 480+ Startup and Scale-up People Leaders.

This edition is sponsored by peoplemetrics.fyi–the benchmarking platform for scale-up people leaders.

Get instant access to verified data from 600+ startups and scale-ups across 18 x people and talent metrics. Gain the insights to make smarter decisions and give stakeholders the context they crave.

📚️ Recent Editions

If you’re new round here, not yet a subscriber or you straight up missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🔋 Edition 35: How to Manage Change Fatigue - diagnostic, approach and framework for dealing with a real threat.

💻️ Edition 34: Tech Hiring SOS! How To Increase Candidate Quality – practical sourcing tactics and hidden gems.

🤖 Edition 32: Make My Company AI Fluent, Bye – practical ways you can increase your team and organisation’s AI chops.

💭 This Week’s People Problem

POV: Founder watching their Head of People explain equity dilution and cap table impact in 17 seconds (without getting a nosebleed)

🖤 Our Take On How You Solve It

🏃‍♀️ TL;DR:

• Base. Bonus. Equity. These are your three building blocks.

• Match your comp model to your stage, risk appetite, and cash position.

• Design for alignment and retention (the two are not the same).

• Start simple. Don’t over-engineer before you scale.

⚡️ The Problem

Designing exec comp at growth stage is a balancing act.

Too cash-heavy? You burn runway and limit flexibility. Too equity-heavy? You attract risk-hungry folks who may not stay for the grind. Too generous? You’ll hate your past self at Series D. Too stingy? You’ll lose candidates to companies that look more grown-up.

You need to build trust and alignment and keep the cap table as clean as possible. So how do you do that?

Let’s break it down 👇

🧩 The Core Components of Executive Comp

Whether it’s your first VP of Product or your fifth exec hire, most comp plans are made up of three elements:

Base Salary

Provides financial stability and competitiveness.

➡ Example: VP Eng @ Series B might earn $180K–$220K base.

Bonus / Short Term Incentive

Tied to near-term outcomes like revenue or OKRs.

➡ Typical: 25–50% of base (sometimes more at CEO level).

Equity / Long Term Incentive

Aligns execs with long-term value and retention.

➡ Vesting: 4 years w/ 1-year cliff. Instruments: ISOs, RSUs, performance shares.

🔧 Patterns We See by Stage

Comp isn’t one-size-fits-all. It evolves. Here's how most of the companies we’ve worked with do it:

Seed : Series A (Cash-Light / Equity-Heavy)

Profile: Founders + early believers

Base: Light

Bonus: Minimal or none

Equity: Big slices (2–5% for first execs)

 💡 Why? Save cash, reward risk

Series B : C (Balanced)

Profile: Scaling VPs, seasoned operators

Base: Market-competitive

Bonus: 20–40% of base

Equity: 0.2–1%, depending on scope

💡 Why: Balance risk/reward. Attract the “been-there-done-that” crowd.

Series D+ (Cash-Heavy / Equity-Light)

Profile: Exit-prep execs, ex-public company leaders

Base: 75–90th percentile

Bonus: 40–60%+

Equity: RSUs or lower % options, higher $ value

💡 Why: Predictability and reward over upside

🪜 Optional Layers to Add Later

Once you’ve got your base comp structure working, you have available a couple of big strategic levers you can layer in to solve specific problems, especially around performance alignment and long-term retention.

Performance-Based Equity

➡ Great for CRevO/CFO or any highly-leveraged roles where outcomes are clear and measurable.

➡ Typically 10-25% of the total grant is tied to hitting key company milestones (e.g. revenue targets, margin improvements, funding events).

➡ Can be a powerful signal to the board (and to candidates) that you’re serious about value creation.

💡 Just be thoughtful: over-complicating equity splits too early can confuse more than it motivates.

Retention Refreshers

➡ Most equity grants front-load retention value, then drop off after 24 months just when you most need continuity.

➡ Pre-scheduled refreshers (granted in Year 2 or 3) help maintain engagement, especially post-Series C when burn risk from attrition increases.

➡ Think of these as a hedge: they attempt to buy loyalty in the critical “build-to-scale” years without requiring immediate liquidity.

🎯 Design Principles Worth Bearing In Mind For Exec Comp

Stage-Market Fit

Match comp model to company maturity.

Role Specificity

Generalising here, but GTM roles may need more cash; Product/Eng can lean equity.

Geographic Fairness

Don’t forget regional variances.

Dilution Awareness

Model everything.

Liquidity Options

Later-stage? Think secondaries

👀 These principles won’t give you a perfect comp plan (does it exist!?) but they’ll keep you out of the most common traps.

Hope this is useful to you!

📚 Useful Resources

📊 Pave’s Exec Comp Report

📈 Carta H1 2024 Startup Compensation

🛠️ Al Frasers Exec Pay Calculator

📖 OpenComp’s Compensation Guides

🧠 CEO/CFO Pay Study (CAP)

🤓 Want to Get Your Current “People Problem” Featured?

Work-life getting you down? Share your challenge and we’ll do our best to cover it in the next edition!

We’re here for the trickiest challenges you’ve got. Hit reply to this email, and let us know what’s keeping you up at night, and we’ll feature next week anonymously!

🖤 Psst! Did You Know We Are Launching An Exclusive Annual Content Membership For People People?!

We certainly are!

👉️ Adam wrote some words about this here. 

TL;DR- it’s all our past/current/future playbooks we’ve written for People People bundled up into an affordable yearly subscription (£120) as well as thousands of pounds of HR tech discounts and some other free stuff.

Early bird discount of 25% off for year 1. If that sounds fun, get your name on the list here 👇️ 

With 🧊 & 🔥 

John & Adam

👉️ Know someone who’d love this newsletter? Forward it their way so they don’t miss out, and make my day whilst you’re at it! 🙂 

Welcome to Open Works. Every edition we solve a ‘people and culture’ problem crowd-sourced from the Open Org Community of 480+ Startup and Scale-up People Leaders.

This edition is sponsored by peoplemetrics.fyi–the benchmarking platform for scale-up people leaders.

Get instant access to verified data from 600+ startups and scale-ups across 18 x people and talent metrics. Gain the insights to make smarter decisions and give stakeholders the context they crave.

📚️ Recent Editions

If you’re new round here, not yet a subscriber or you straight up missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

💻️ Edition 34: Tech Hiring SOS! How To Increase Candidate Quality – practical sourcing tactics and hidden gems.

🤖 Edition 32: Make My Company AI Fluent, Bye – practical ways you can increase your team and organisation’s AI chops.

🤦 Edition 31: When Performance Feels Like A Process Not A Practice – a framework to iterate on your performance product.

💭 This Week’s People Problem

POV: Team members when you communicate the latest ‘exciting’ new change

🖤 What Be Going On?

If you reduce this right down it’s a system under strain.

Some people are overloaded and burning out.

Some are stuck in change fatigue, overwhelmed by too many pivots and not enough clarity.

Others? Well they’ve probably just emotionally exited. Checked out. Gone.

This is a signal your org design, operating pace, and change habits need a reset.

Let’s dive in.

🧭 3 Distinct Signals. One Systemic Issue

Based on a few community conversations we’ve had on this recently, I think it’s quite common to conflate Burnout, Change Fatigue and Disengagement.

I think about each like this:

📌 Important: These signals aren’t personality traits or performance issues. They’re adaptive responses to a broken environment.

Burnout is what happens when people care too much for too long without relief.

Change fatigue is about feeling like “I can’t absorb another shift without a break.”

Disengagement is the final break point: checking out when you lose purpose, trust or agency.

🔧 Our Take On How To Approach The Design Problem

I don’t think this is about about launching an “anti-burnout initiative” because that’d be falling into the trap of “treating the symptom not the cause”.

So instead:

1. Codify How You Roll Out Change (It’ll Reduce Half the Noise)

Right now, change = chaos. You need to create consistency in how change shows up, even if the content is volatile.

4WS: Introduce a simple, shared change pattern:

Every change, every re-org, every new strategy pivot, every shift in OKRs gets 4 Ws from leadership:

• What’s changing?

• What’s not changing?

• Why this change now?

• What are you expected to do differently?

My personal favourite way to do this:

1. CXO Video + Wiki memo + slack message (4WS)

2. Leadership AMA (Townhall sli.do)

3. Team level AMA (CXO goes team by team and pairs with team lead)

2. Reduce Stress with Built-In Recovery Windows

I don’t mean relying on managers to “encourage rest”, but rather about baking in defaults instead:

• 48-hour cooldowns after major pushes - no meetings, just deep work or recovery

• Mid-quarter “debt days” with protected space to sort process/tech debt, reset focus

• Post-fundraise deep work weeks - no strategy shifts, just breathing room

• “Nothing net-new” Fridays once a month

📌 If you can’t afford this? IMO You’re over-scoping or under-prioritising. Recovery is a strategy cost, not a perk.

3. Lock in Some Stability at the Edges

When everything changes, teams, goals, managers, direction…people lose their grip.
To stay fast and stable, try and:

• Keep manager—>report lines consistent wherever possible

• Don’t kill rituals under pressure. Stand-ups, retros demos and 1:1s are mental anchors. Protect them.

📌 If you must change structure, give teams agency in how they adapt. Ownership through #co-creation creates stability even in chaos.

4. Use Managers as Signal Amplifiers, Not Shock Absorbers

Frontline managers/team leads will see the cracks first.

Give them a shared, low-stakes check-in pattern:

• “How’s your team’s energy this week, 1–10?”

• “What feels unclear, chaotic, or unnecessary?”

• “What’s the one thing we should pause next sprint?”

Use this in retros, 1:1s, weekly team syncs, whatever already exists. Don’t add overhead, just repurpose what’s already live.

📌 Track this. Silence ≠ health.

🧯 When Someone’s Checked Out

Re-engagement starts with diagnosis, not motivation tactics. Remember this one… :-)

Never this.

Ask:

• “What’s changed in how this work feels?”

• “Is there a mismatch between what you’re doing and what matters to you?”

• “What would make this feel like your work again?”

If they’ve drifted because of fit, not fatigue…offer a scoped transition, a new problem to own, or an off-ramp with dignity.

📌 Change is hard enough, you cannot afford people who feel like passengers or worse: saboteurs.

🛠️ Next Steps

1️⃣ Run a focused listening tour. Ask:

• “I feel energised by my work.”

• “I understand recent changes and why they happened.”

• “I feel connected to our mission.”

2️⃣ Map recent change volume

• Track team-level changes in structure, manager, mission, and KPIs over the past 3-6 months. Look for patterns.

3️⃣ Coach managers to spot early signs Equip them with questions like:

• “What feels unclear or too much right now?”

• “How’s your energy this week, 1-10?”

4️⃣ Create a ‘recovery rhythm’

• Introduce short rest periods post-sprint or post-change. Protect stable rituals (stand-ups, retros, etc.) and reporting lines.

5️⃣ Audit and simplify priorities

• De-scope low-impact work.

• Focus on fewer, clearer goals that give people direction and purpose.

📚 Good Reads

📖 Burnout Risk Factors Audit - Bex Spiller

📖 Thriving in change presentation - Tibi Gonzalez

🤓 Want to Get Your Current “People Problem” Featured?

This is unnecessary. Stop. Send your problem in

We’re here for the trickiest challenges you’ve got. Hit reply to this email, and let us know what’s keeping you up at night, and we’ll feature next week anonymously!

🖤 John & Adam

🖤 Psst! Are You Part Of The Open Org Community Yet?

Well goodness my friend, you should be! 😉 

Join 480+ startup and scale-up People & Talent leaders in Slack, and get exclusive access to twice-monthly live events (roundtables and guest firesides), quarterly hackathons, and direct support from Adam and me.

With 🧊 & 🔥 

John & Adam

👉️ Know someone who’d love this newsletter? Forward it their way so they don’t miss out, and make my day whilst you’re at it! 🙂 

Welcome to Open Works. Every edition we solve a ‘people and culture’ problem crowd-sourced from the Open Org Community of 480+ Startup and Scale-up People Leaders.

This edition is sponsored by peoplemetrics.fyi–the benchmarking platform for scale-up people leaders.

Get instant access to verified data from 600+ startups and scale-ups across 18 x people and talent metrics. Gain the insights to make smarter decisions and give stakeholders the context they crave.

📚️ Recent Editions

If you’re new round here, not yet a subscriber or you straight up missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🤖 Edition 32: Make My Company AI Fluent, Bye – practical ways you can increase your team and organisation’s AI chops.

🤦 Edition 31: When Performance Feels Like A Process Not A Practice – a framework to iterate on your performance product.

🎯 Edition 30: Culture Means Different Things To My CEO and I, How Do I Get Us On The Same Page – a guide to making culture tangible af.

💭 This Week’s People Problem

POV: U r about to review the 4983 applications to the Linkedin ad you posted yest

You’re hiring engineers. Applications are rolling in

But most candidates aren’t even close to what you’re looking for.

High volume ≠ high quality. So what actually works?

🖤 Our Take on How You Solve

🏃 TL;DR

• Rethink where and how you show up—less broadcast, more signal

• Introduce a few low-effort, high-leverage sourcing channels

• Set up hiring to attract candidates who already care about what you’re building

⚡️ Why This Happens

When you post to big, generic job boards, you reach a wide pool—but not always a relevant one. Especially in engineering, where the best candidates aren’t actively applying, or are looking for more context than “fast-growing startup seeks full-stack dev to build the next rocket ship.” 🤦 

You need higher intent, higher-context talent. That often means:

• More niche

• More cracked

• More personal

💡 Tactics That Actually Work

Here’s a mix of what we’ve seen work across the Open Org community.

✅ 1. Use GitHub stars and contributors as a signal

If your product is open-source or you have any public repos, check who’s starred or contributed to them. These folks already know your product and might be open to a conversation. 👑 PostHog are kings at this.

✅ 2. Post to Hacker News’ "Who is hiring?" thread

Old-school, but still effective. High-quality devs browse it monthly. It’s free. Be clear, short, and link directly to a role or problem you’re hiring for. Here’s where it lives.

HN Who is hiring thread

✅ 3. Tap into niche tech communities

Great developers hang out in smaller, focused communities—not on generic job boards.
Examples:

• Discords (e.g. Reactiflux for React)

• Slack groups (e.g. LeadDev)

• Reddit subs like r/forhire

• Test what 1–2 hours per week engaging here, sharing updates, or posting roles does.

👌 Pro tip: Search the hive index for relevant communities to you: https://thehiveindex.com/ 

✅ 4. Introduce a small paid async challenge

Inspired by what Cal.com does – Offer a paid scoped challenge. Frame it as a way for them to learn about your work before committing time to interviews. Helps reduce false positives early.

Cal.com feature bounty wall. Source: https://cal.com/jobs

✅ 5. Make referrals worth it (and easy)

Referrals are still one of the most effective ways to hire skilled engineers—especially at early-stage.

But they only work if your team knows exactly who you’re looking for and feels motivated to refer.

Try this:

• Be specific about the role (“Backend engineer with Python/Postgres experience, ideally someone who’s worked in a startup before”)

• Set a clear incentive (e.g. $1500 per successful hire to the referrer)

• Make it easy to share (pre-written message + job link)

🧠 How to Keep Improving Hiring Without Reinventing It

You don’t need to build a fully bespoke hiring engine to get results.
Start with:

1. Pick one experiment (e.g. GitHub outreach, Community #jobs posts)

2. Run it for a sprint (e.g. 2 weeks)

3. Measure quality (interview-to-offer rate, time to screen)

4. Keep or kill

Make small experiments part of your normal hiring rhythm—not something you do after process breaks.

🛠️ Next Steps

1. Identify one niche or high-signal sourcing channel you’re not using yet (GitHub, Discord, HN, etc.)

2. Tighten your JD to increase relevance and clarity. Check out our template on this for inspo ✨ 

3. Reach out to your current team for 1–2 warm referrals, with a clear brief

Need help with messaging or candidate prompts? Happy to send examples.

📚 Good Reads

👀 The Open Job Ad [Open Org Template]

🦔 PostHog – 43 things we’ve learned about hiring

⭐️ Cal.com’s Feature Bounty Wall

🤓 Hacker News “Who is hiring?” thread

🤓 Want to Get Your Current “People Problem” Featured?

This doesn’t have to be you.

We’re here for the trickiest challenges you’ve got. Hit reply to this email, and let us know what’s keeping you up at night, and we’ll feature next week anonymously!

🖤 John & Adam

🖤 Psst! Are You Part Of The Open Org Community Yet?

Well goodness my friend, you should be! 😉 

Join 480+ startup and scale-up People & Talent leaders in Slack, and get exclusive access to twice-monthly live events (roundtables and guest firesides), quarterly hackathons, and direct support from Adam and me.

With 🧊 & 🔥 

John & Adam

👉️ Know someone who’d love this newsletter? Forward it their way so they don’t miss out, and make my day whilst you’re at it! 🙂 

Welcome to Open Works. Every edition we solve a ‘people and culture’ problem crowd-sourced from the Open Org Community of 480+ Startup and Scale-up People Leaders.

This edition is sponsored by peoplemetrics.fyi–the benchmarking platform for scale-up people leaders.

Get instant access to verified data from 600+ startups and scale-ups across 18 x people and talent metrics. Gain the insights to make smarter decisions and give stakeholders the context they crave.

📚️ Recent Editions

If you’re new round here, not yet a subscriber or you straight up missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🤦 Edition 30: When Performance Feels Like A Process Not A Practice – a framework to revive and our favourite examples from other Open Orgs.

🎯 Edition 29: Increasing Manager Proactivity—With Extreme Clarity – a principle driven framework to design and embed target behaviours.

🚥 Edition 28: How To Scale Your People Team As Your Company Grows – a framework for thinking about this and industry benchmarks

💭 This Week’s People Problem

When you ask the CEO to explain exactly what “AI adoption” looks like?

🖤 Our Take On How You Solve It

🏃 TL;DR:

• Don’t try to own AI—focus on enabling AI readiness.

• Shift from vague “adoption” to clear “exploration”.

• Help teams find ‘jobs to be done’ where AI can help.

• Build safety, visibility, and lightweight structure.

⚡️ The Problem

When leadership says “let’s adopt AI,” everyone hears something different. For some it’s exciting. For others? Existential dread. Cue analysis paralysis.

Most teams either want to explore AI or are leveraging it under the radar anyway. They just don’t know:

• What’s allowed?

• What’s expected?

• Where do we even start?

And meanwhile, your People team is running at 120%. You don’t have time to run a company-wide AI transformation project. And you shouldn’t have to.

💡 The Shift: From “Adoption” to “Usefulness”

Instead of asking teams to use AI, help them get clearer on:

This changes the conversation from tech-first to outcome-first—and makes it easier for teams to engage without fear.

🧠 A Light-Touch People Team Playbook

1. Start With: Where is the friction?

Frame AI exploration as a hunt for friction, not tools. Encourage teams to ask:

• What tasks drain time, energy, or attention?

• Where are we copy/pasting the same thing, over and over?

• Where do we hit decision bottlenecks, or repeat internal comms?

These are great Jobs to Be Done candidates for AI augmentation. Think:

• Drafting job descriptions → [Custom JD generator]

• Synthesising survey comments → [GPT-powered theme summariser]

• Responding to inbound support emails → [Auto triage assistant]

• Prepping interview feedback → [Scorecard-to-summary GPT]

🛠️ Framework: 3 Filters for Good AI Use Cases

If you tick 2 of 3, these are prime ‘custom GPT’ candidates ✅

Custom GPT Creation

2. Run an AI Themed Hackathon

Create a Miro board that teams can use to self-discover AI opportunities.

Suggested sections:

• ✅ What processes take the most time?

• 🌀 Where are we seeing context switching or repetition?

• 💭 What manual tasks could be improved with smart automation?

• 🤔 What are we curious to try AI for?

Host this as a 24 hour asynchronous jam. Invite folks to spend 30mins or so whenever they want during the 24 hours to contribute to the board

You’ll get some great insights—and probably identify some surprising quick wins. 🎉 

3. Document and Communicate Practical Guidelines On AI Usage

This is a good moment to collaborate with Tech/Security.

Also a great moment to not write a 224-page policy.

Start lightweight: what’s 🟢 Green, 🟠 Yellow, 🔴 Red?

🟢 Green = safe to explore → internal task helpers (e.g. summaries, drafts, prep work)

🟠 Yellow = handle with care, aka needs more “human-in-the-loop” → anything external-facing or making decisions

🔴 Red = do not use → customer data, personal info, financials in public models

Make it a simple notion 1 pager. Share it. Pin it. Loom it. Take stock in a month and see if it still holds.

4. Build AI Confidence Into Culture Rituals

• Monthly “AI Demos + Donuts” = show what’s working (10 mins)

• Async “GPTs We Made” channel in Slack

• 🎉 “GPT MVP of the Month” for the most helpful internal agent

It’s about #visibility, #safety and #momentum.

🔥 Bonus: Quick Win Ideas to Kick Things Off

Here are 5 places we’ve seen startups get instant traction with AI:

Sometimes the best way to accelerate adoption is to just show what's possible.

✨ Final Thought:

AI adoption shouldn’t feel like another top-down initiative.
It should feel like an invitation to work smarter, with tools you shape around your workflow.

✅ Next Steps:

• Run a low-lift “AI Opportunity Hackathon”

• Share the “3 Filters” for AI use cases across the org.

• Launch a “GPTs We’ve Built” Slack thread or wall of fame.

• Create your one-pager of green/yellow/red AI use zones.

📚️ Good resources from openverse.fyi 

🤖 Sazzle Survey Analyser GPT (Open Org)

🤖 Vi Competency Path Designer GPT (Open Org)

📔 AI Data Protection Playbook, by Vanessa Gilardi

📕 Generative AI Policy [Template], by Sarah Woods

📖 AI Policy, by HiBob

🤓 Want to Get Your Current “People Problem” Featured?

No need to be kitty in a tree mes amis! Share your problem and we’ll cover it next time :)

We’re here for the trickiest challenges you’ve got. Hit reply to this email, and let us know what’s keeping you up at night, and we’ll feature next week anonymously!

🖤 John & Adam

🖤 Psst! Are You Part Of The Open Org Community Yet?

Well goodness my friend, you should be! 😉 

Join 480+ startup and scale-up People & Talent leaders in Slack, and get exclusive access to twice-monthly live events (roundtables and guest firesides), quarterly hackathons, and direct support from Adam and me.

With 🧊 & 🔥 

John & Adam

👉️ Know someone who’d love this newsletter? Forward it their way so they don’t miss out, and make my day whilst you’re at it! 🙂 

Welcome to Open Works. Every edition we solve a ‘people and culture’ problem crowd-sourced from the Open Org Community of 470+ Startup and Scale-up People Leaders.

📚️ Recent Editions

If you’re new round here, not yet a subscriber or you straight up missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🎯 Edition 29: Increasing Manager Proactivity—With Extreme Clarity – a principle driven framework to design and embed target behaviours.

🚥 Edition 28: How To Scale Your People Team As Your Company Grows – a framework for thinking about this and industry benchmarks

🎉 Edition 27: When Leadership’s Decision-Making Is The Problem – a guide to getting unstuck dealing with this challenging culture component

💭 This Week’s People Problem

Performance Process be like…

🖤 Our Take On How You Solve

TL;DR

• You probably don’t need to burn it down—you need to iterate.

• Focus on simplifying the experience, clarifying expectations, and aligning manager execution.

• Treat performance as a product: improve based on feedback, not just intentions.

⚡️ The Problem

Your process has structure. You’ve got monthly 1:1s. Clear documentation. A calibration process. A slightly dated but “okayish” competency framework.

But the experience is bumpy.

You are hearing:

Sound familiar? It all adds up. And if your people don’t trust the system, they’ll disengage from it.

🧠 A Step-by-Step Plan to Improve Performance (Without Starting From Scratch)

This is a 4-step iteration model to evolve your performance product in a practical, measurable way.

Step 1: Map the Current Experience

🎯 Objective: Understand what’s really happening—not just what’s written down.

🔧 Tool: Run a 60-minute Experience Retro with your managers and recent review cycle participants.

Prompt questions:

• What’s working well in our performance cycle?

• Where are people confused, frustrated or disengaged?

• What feels like busy work vs. what drives clarity?

• What are the high-trust managers doing differently?

🧠 Format: Use a Miro board. Affinity cluster themes. Use sticky notes to group pain points and wins.

✅ Output: A map of experience gaps. This gives you your problem set—not a generic one.

Step 2: Simplify the Core Tools

🎯 Objective: Reduce friction in the most-used parts of the system. Start with 1:1s and manager guidance.

🔧 Tool: The "1:1 Lite" Template
Replace heavy forms with a simple three-prompt structure as a shared (e.g Notion) document private to each people manager and team member to help structure pre-1:1 thoughts…

Async (Team Member):

1. What’s going well?

2. What do you need support with?

3. What’s your main priority for the next month?

💡 Add a free notes field—but make it optional.

Personally i like simple and blunt here, and drew much inspiration from Netflix

Aync (Manager)

1. Share Performance snapshot 🚥 or in plain english: “how are you doing?”

Exactly how you think about this will differ company to company. I had a previous manager who borrowed Roy’s traffic lights. You might not vibe with the language (I didn’t much tbh) but i LOVED the transparency.

In practice It meant, I rarely went longer than 2 weeks and never went longer than 4 weeks without knowing categorically where my performance was at from my manager’s pov. That is a pretty powerful principle I think.👇️ 

–Roy Rapoport. Source: Deprecated, Welcome to Netflix & Me

Sync 1:1 (Manager x Team Member)

1. Discuss the document notes and co-create action plan.

💬 Facilitation Tip: Run a 45-minute session with managers to show how to facilitate this and ensure team members are crystal clear on how they are performing.

📌 Pro tip: Start with 3-5 pilot managers. Get feedback, then roll out org-wide.

Step 3: Reset Expectations With Your Managers

Objective: Align on what performance and development actually mean in your context—and how to facilitate it fairly.

📄 Tool: Performance Philosophy:

• What does our company mean when we say “performance”?

Performance Philosophy Example.

✏️ Tool: Manager Handbook

• What’s expected from a manager before, during, and after reviews?

The Open People Manager Handbook. Source: Open Org Community Notion

Step 4: Make the Process Transparent (Org-Wide)

🎯 Objective: Build trust by helping your people see how performance decisions happen.

📄 Tool: Performance & Reward Playbook (1-pager)

Include:

• The performance cycle timeline

• What inputs go into reviews (1:1s, OKRs, manager feedback, peer input?)

• How promotion or salary decisions are made

• Where to go if they want more clarity

💬 Comms Format:

• Share it as a simple Notion (or equivalent) doc

• Host a Q&A session post-cycle to walk through the process and share learnings

• Offer office hours for anyone with questions

🧠 Transparency ≠ oversharing. But vague = vulnerable. Let people see the full picture.

🔥 Juro do a great job here

Juro’s Performance Framework

👣 Not Sure Where to Start?

Here’s a simple “2 Week Plan”:

By the end of two weeks, you’ll have:

• Clarity on your friction points

• A lightweight 1:1 experience

• Aligned managers

• A transparent playbook

All without rebuilding your system from scratch.

📚️ Good resources relating to this problem…

✂️ People Manager Handbook 

📖 Juro’s performance framework

📔 High Performance Culture & Teammate Development (Sourcegraph)

📔 Quantum Light Capital – Performance Playbook

📔 Performance & Compensation: Two Households, Both Alike in Dignity – Jessica Zwaan

🤓 Want to Get Your Current “People Problem” Featured?

This doesn’t have to be you. Hit reply, share your problem and we’ll cover it next time :)

We’re here for the trickiest challenges you’ve got. Hit reply to this email, and let us know what’s keeping you up at night, and we’ll feature next week anonymously!

🖤 John & Adam

🖤 Psst! Are You Part Of The Open Org Community Yet?

Well goodness my friend, you should be! 😉 

Join 470+ startup and scale-up People & Talent leaders in Slack, and get exclusive access to twice-monthly live events (roundtables and guest firesides), quarterly hackathons, and direct support from Adam and me.

With 🧊 & 🔥 

John & Adam

👉️ Know someone who’d love this newsletter? Forward it their way so they don’t miss out, and make my day whilst you’re at it! 🙂 

Welcome to Open Works. Every edition we solve a ‘people and culture’ problem crowd-sourced from the Open Org Community of 470+ Startup and Scale-up People Leaders.

📚️ Recent Editions

If you’re new round here, not yet a subscriber or you straight up missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🎯 Edition 26: How to co-create values so they don’t just end up as “words on a wall” – a principle driven framework to design and embed target behaviours.

🚥 Edition 19: Building a culture integration roadmap for your next merger – a tangible diagnostic, guided tour and framework to support you.

🎉 Edition 20: Everything we built in 2024 – our top open source resources for people leaders, downloaded 800k+.

💭 This Week’s People Problem

People Leader gently reminding the rest of C-suite that culture doesn’t mean vibes.

🖤 Our Take On How You Solve

🏃 TL;DR:

• Culture isn’t vibes—it’s HOW people work.

• Align around culture as a multiplier for execution, not a “feel-good” initiative.

• Diagnose where culture accelerates or blocks business performance.

• Build a culture roadmap that leadership actually cares about.

⚡️ The Problem

You say “culture,” but the CEO hears “team building” (or worse…vibes). 🤦 I hear you, friend. And look, I have nothing against team building. But if you’re bringing it up in the same conversation where other execs are talking about growth, efficiency, and profitability, you’re in for a rough ride.

So,

how do you get them on the same page?

how do you get leadership to take culture seriously?

🚀 1. Start with a clear, no-BS definition

We adapted a golden oldie from Deal and Kennedy:

👉️ Action: get CEO/leadership together and address the fact that when you say culture you mean this:

Open Org’s CultureOS

If you do this, you reframe the conversation. Culture becomes a multiplier for execution.
It stops being “fluffy” and starts looking like operational excellence.

✅ Good operational excellence = faster decisions, better retention, higher performance
❌ Bad operational excellence = misalignment, wasted time, high attrition

Start illustrating the cost of bad culture with specifics:

• “We lost 18 top candidates because our hiring process is 30% slower than peers.”

• “Delays on Product Launch X cost us £450K.”

• “We waste £256,999 a year on meetings that should be async.”

And when you’re still hitting resistance? This one never fails 👇

💡Pro Tip: for some CXO's the word culture will cause an allergic reaction and there's nothing you can do about it. If so, try just using the phrase "operational excellence" instead. This has worked for me. CMD + F (replace "Culture") - not kidding. 😂 

🔍 2. Diagnose Where Culture Helps or Hurts Execution

Instead of debating “what culture is,” measure how your ways of working impact business performance.

Use "How We..." statements to make culture tangible:

🚦 Culture Health Check – Score these areas:

• How we make and communicate decisions

• How we onboard and develop talent

• How we handle failure and feedback

• How we reinforce good/bad behavior

• How we align on priorities

• How we…

Sort them into:

✅ What’s working? (Protect these)
⚠️ What’s causing friction? (Fix these)
🔥 What’s actively blocking execution? (Change or bin these)
💰️ What cost saving/productivity multiplier can we attribute? (Priorities)

👉️ Action: Run a quick leadership diagnostic to align on priorities or run an org-wide hackathon to leverage everyone’s insights. Both included here:

🛠 3. Build a Culture Roadmap Your CEO Cares About

Once you’ve identified opportunities to improve how work actually gets done, build a culture roadmap that directly supports business goals. Focus on operational excellence shifts that remove friction, increase speed, and drive alignment.

✅ Short-term (1-3 months):

Fix decision-making → Clarify ownership, speed up execution, and reduce decision bottlenecks.

Streamline onboarding → Reduce ramp-up time so new hires contribute faster.

✅ Mid-term (3-6 months):

Scale leadership behaviours → Define what “great leadership” looks like in your culture and coach for it.

Tighten feedback loops → Ensure teams get real-time input so they can iterate and sustain high performance.

 ✅ Long-term (6-12 months):

Reinforce accountability & incentives → Align recognition and rewards with how you expect people to work.

Break down silos → Improve cross-functional collaboration to reduce friction and increase team velocity.

📣 4. Manage Culture Like It’s Your Other Product.

• Measure success: Track each change you make to a “how we…” component of your culture like an experiment.

• Make it visible: Share progress org wide and report it at leadership level. Transparency drives accountability.

💡 Pro tip: Show leadership that changing nothing is the real risk.

Take your priority “how we…” statements and show on this chart.

📚️ Good resources relating to this problem…

✂️ Open Org Culture Design Toolkit [miro]

🚥 Open Org CultureOS Heat-map [notion]

📊 ROI Calculator for People Projects [notion]

🤓 Want to Get Your Current “People Problem” Featured?

This doesn’t have to be you. Hit reply, share your problem and we’ll cover it next time :)

We’re here for the trickiest challenges you’ve got. Hit reply to this email, and let us know what’s keeping you up at night, and we’ll feature next week anonymously!

🖤 John & Adam

🖤 Psst! Are You Part Of The Open Org Community Yet?

Well goodness my friend, you should be! 😉 

Join 450+ startup and scale-up People & Talent leaders in Slack, and get exclusive access to twice-monthly live events (roundtables and guest firesides), quarterly hackathons, and direct support from Adam and me.

With 🧊 & 🔥 

John & Adam

👉️ Know someone who’d love this newsletter? Forward it their way so they don’t miss out, and make my day whilst you’re at it! 🙂 

Welcome to Open Works. Every edition we solve a ‘people and culture’ problem crowd-sourced from the Open Org Community of 450+ Startup and Scale-up People Leaders.

📚️ Recent Editions

If you’re new round here, not yet a subscriber or you straight up missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🎯 Edition 26: How to co-create values so they don’t just end up as “words on a wall” – a principle driven framework to design and embed target behaviours.

🚥 Edition 19: Building a culture integration roadmap for your next merger – a tangible diagnostic, guided tour and framework to support you.

🎉 Edition 20: Everything we built in 2024 – our top open source resources for people leaders, downloaded 800k+.

💭 This Week’s People Problem

Managers be like…

🖤 Our Take On How You Solve

🏃 TL;DR:

• Define exactly what ‘good management’ looks like for your company—no room for ambiguity. If you cannot get the exec to agree on this, do not pass go.

• Build a data source and a feedback loop—something that managers can use to drive action and track the impact they are having on team performance.

• Drive action through structured working practices—no ad-hoc interventions.

• Report on it at the highest level—transparency drives accountability and sustains change.

⚡️ The Problem

Your managers are not raising issues and solving problems early enough. This means problems escalate, slow teams down, and make your People team stuck in reactive mode–firefighting issues that could have been nipped in the bud months earlier.

Why is this happening? A few possibilities:

1. They don’t know their role. What does “good” look like? When should they step in? When should they escalate?

2. Their boss doesn’t care about their role. Exec misalignment on people management responsibilities means they won’t support or prioritise time spent ‘doing the role’.

3. They don’t have a data source to work with and measure the impact of their role. No clear signals on team health → no action taken.

4. There’s no accountability loop way. They aren’t being held accountable for problem-solving or improving the system of work.

Instead of layering on more process (forums, surveys, etc.), first anchor everything in extreme clarity.

🔑 The Approach: Clarity → Data → Action → Accountability

To build a successful management capability we need some fundamentals in place and a structured solution. Here’s how we tackle this:

1. Extreme manager role clarity + measures of success (for managers)

2. A data source and collection method that links directly to those measures of success

3. Working practices that drive improvements against that data source

4. A transparent reporting loop that places weight on this and drives accountability.  

1️⃣ Role Clarity: What Does a Manager At Your Company Actually Do?

Most “proactivity” problems aren’t process problems—they’re expectation problems. Fix that first.

💡 [Example] Manager Accountability - Aligning On Principle Accountabilities Of The Role

📌 Action: Update the Manager Playbook to explicitly outline how and when Managers should surface, solve, and escalate issues. If you cannot get leadership team support on this definition, then focus on that battle first and only that battle. Shout if that's you, happy to soundboard 🙏  

2️⃣ Data: Measuring Manager Impact on Team Performance

Instead of just tracking manager activity, give them a way to measure their impact.

📊 Key metrics to track:

A survey-less example of a team health check.

📌 Action: Co-create a team health check retro or survey with your manager community. Use the data to flag red spots → Guide manager interventions based on those.

3️⃣ Structured Working Practices: Driving Improvement

Once we have clear expectations and a data source, then we can talk working practices. What ‘problem-solving support system’ do managers need to improve their capability?

💡 Our favourite lite version blueprint:

🚀 Why this works:

• Community of practice forums = shared knowledge & accountability.

• 1:1s = personalised support.

• Retros = continuous learning loop.

📌 Action: Ensure every forum includes a problem-solving exercise → Not just discussion, but action.

✅ Do This:

Do This

🙅‍♀️ Don’t Do This:

Don’t do this.

4️⃣ Transparency & Accountability: Making This Stick

If you want managers, their managers and other stakeholders to take their role seriously, make their impact visible.

📊 Transparent reporting structure:

🔎 How this drives change:

• Managers see their own progress & gaps → They know where to improve.

• Leadership sees where teams are struggling → No surprises, just solutions.

• Problem-solving is a core performance metric → Not just an expectation, but a measured outcome.

🛠️ The Pragmatic Takeaway

To drive real proactivity:
✔️ Get explicit about what’s expected (Role clarity).
✔️ Measure manager impact, not just activity (Data).
✔️ Give managers structured ways to improve (Working practices).
✔️ Make it transparent & accountable (Reporting loop).

💡 Big picture: If you want managers to own problem-solving, it has to be measurable, structured, and visible. Otherwise, it’s just another initiative that fades out.

📌 Next Steps

1️⃣ Update Your Manager Playbook → Extreme clarity on role, measures of success and problem-solving expectations. Get exec subscription.
2️⃣ Co-create your feedback loop (survey/team health check/retro) → Use it as a data source to assess proactivity.
3️⃣ Implement problem-solving forums & People Team support system→ Drive skill-building and get early visibility on risks instead of firefighting issues.
4️⃣ Create a transparent reporting loop → Drive accountability for solving, not just escalating.

📚️ Good resources relating to this problem…

🔍️ Team health check [Miro template]

📗 Creating a community of practice from scratch [Paid Playbook]

📕 Team health checks: an alternative to survey fatigue [Paid Playbook]

📖 People Manager Handbook, built by Open Org Community

🔨 TeamRetro (async team health check software)

🤓 Want to Get Your Current “People Problem” Featured?

This doesn’t have to be you. Hit reply, share your problem and we’ll cover it next time :)

We’re here for the trickiest challenges you’ve got. Hit reply to this email, and let us know what’s keeping you up at night, and we’ll feature next week anonymously!

🖤 John & Adam

🖤 Psst! Are You Part Of The Open Org Community Yet?

Well goodness my friend, you should be! 😉 

Join 450+ startup and scale-up People & Talent leaders in Slack, and get exclusive access to twice-monthly live events (roundtables and guest firesides), quarterly hackathons, and direct support from Adam and me.

With 🧊 & 🔥 

John & Adam

👉️ Know someone who’d love this newsletter? Forward it their way so they don’t miss out, and make my day whilst you’re at it! 🙂 

Welcome to Open Works. Every edition we solve a ‘people and culture’ problem crowd-sourced from the Open Org Community of 440+ Startup and Scale-up People Leaders.

📚️ Recent Editions

If you’re new round here, not yet a subscriber or you straight up missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🎯 Edition 26: How to co-create values so they don’t just end up as “words on a wall” – a principle driven framework to design and embed target behaviours.

🚥 Edition 19: Building a culture integration roadmap for your next merger – a tangible diagnostic, guided tour and framework to support you.

🎉 Edition 20: Everything we built in 2024 – our top open source resources for people leaders, downloaded 800k+.

💭 This Week’s People Problem

When the CEO asks you to predict the future and design your People Org on gut feel

🖤 Our Take On How You Solve This

🏃 TL;DR:

✔ Your People team should grow in response to business needs, not headcount alone.
✔ Start with generalists, then layer in specialists when demand justifies it.
✔ Distributed HR? Think local compliance + centralised culture and operations.
✔ Invest in tooling and automation early—don’t just scale by adding headcount.

⚡️ The Problem

Scaling the People function isn’t as simple as hiring ‘an HRBP for every 100 employees.’ Some companies can hit 500+ employees with a People team of 3-5. Others need 20+ because of the complexity of their…everything!

So instead of thinking "we’re at X employees, time to hire Y role," ask:

👉 What problems are we solving?
👉 What’s breaking?
👉 What do we need to proactively get ahead of?

Here’s how to think about who to hire, when.

💡 How to Scale Your People Team (Without Over-hiring)

1️⃣ The First 100 Employees: Build Good Fundamentals

🏗 You Probably Need: A strong generalist (Head of People and/or People Partner with dedicated Talent Partner if you are hiring aggressively into next phase of growth)

At this stage, the focus is building the fundamentals 😀 

✔ Hiring processes
✔ Onboarding & culture-building
✔ Performance management
✔ Basic compliance & People Ops fundamentals

💡 Trap to Avoid: Hiring specialists too early before the fundamentals are solid.

2️⃣ 100-250 Employees: Time for Specialists

🏗 You Probably Need:
✔ Dedicated People Operations (to handle compliance, payroll, HR systems and lite-weight self-serve process design)
✔ Talent Partner (especially hiring >20 people per year)
✔ People Experience Design (designing the end-to-end experience, reducing friction, and scaling culture intentionally)
✔ People Partner (to coach and support managers as teams grow)

🎨 PX Design Consideration:

• Early-stage People Experience (PX) is all about clarity—making it easy to join, perform, and stay engaged.

• Build a "Just Enough HR" approach → Simple, high-impact processes with minimal admin friction.

💡 If distributed: A dedicated People Ops hire with strong compliance chops to stay ahead of employment law across locations is a godsend.

Lauren Gomes’ team structure @ Learnerbly. Source: Learnerbly PX Open Source

3️⃣ 250-500 Employees: Scale Enablement Functions

🏗 You Probably Need:
✔ Comp & Benefits Lead (to handle pay equity and scaling perks)
✔ L&D Lead (to build leadership & manager development)
✔ Talent Leadership +3-5 Talent Partners (1 x TP per 15-20 annual hires as a rough rule of thumb. Also worth considering embedded to help on Talent to remain flexible to flux in demand

📌 Priorities:

• More structured manager enablement → Coaching managers on hiring, feedback, and performance.

• Scaling onboarding & employee experience → Ensuring consistency across new hires.

• Compliance risk management → Especially for remote/distributed teams.

At this point, your People team shifts from reactive support to proactive enablement.

⚠️ Trap to Avoid: Scaling purely by hiring more HRBPs instead of better self-serve systems and enablement.

4️⃣ 500+ Employees: Your People Team Operating Model Reflects The Business Operating Model

At 500+ employees, your People operating model mirrors how the business itself operates. This is honestly a bit of an ‘it depends’ situation but let’s get into what we mean by that.

🏗 Your People Team Operating model should reflect:
✔ How decisions are made (centralised vs. decentralised)
✔ The speed of change (stable vs. fast-scaling)
✔ Business complexity (single vs. multi-business units, regional expansion, remote-first, etc.)

📌 Which People Team Operating Model Works Best?

Depending on your company's growth and structure, here are five People Team models to consider:

1️⃣ Traditional Centralised HR Model

✔ Best for: Stable, single-business organisations with a slower rate of change.
✔ Structure: A centralised HR function managing everything from HQ with strong policies and compliance oversight.

💡 Trap: Can feel bureaucratic and slow in fast-scaling companies.

2️⃣ Ulrich Model (HRBPs + COEs + Shared Services)

✔ Best for: Larger, functionally diverse organizations that need both strategic HRBPs and specialized expertise.
✔ Structure:

• HRBPs embedded in business units

• COEs (Centres of Excellence) handling areas like L&D, Talent, and Total Rewards

• HR Shared Services for scalable admin processes (payroll, compliance, HR tech)

💡 Trap: If not well-integrated, COEs may feel disconnected from business needs.

3️⃣ ‘Agile HR’ Model

✔ Best for: Fast-scaling, high-growth startups where adaptability is key.
✔ Structure:

• Cross-functional, project-based squads instead of fixed HR verticals

• HR and PX teams work in iterative cycles, solving problems as they arise

💡 Trap: Ownership and accountability lines across BAU vs strategic work can be difficult to draw. 

4️⃣ Decentralised People Team Model

✔ Best for: Multi-region, multi-business unit orgs where local autonomy matters.
✔ Structure:

• Local People teams for each business unit or geography

• Core People team at HQ provides high-level guidelines

💡 Trap: Risk of fragmentation—HR across regions may develop wildly different policies and employee experiences.

5️⃣ PX-Driven Model (People Experience at the Core)

✔ Best for: Employee-first organisations that focus on retention, engagement, and long-term growth.
✔ Structure:

• PX Design team sits at the centre → Focused on employee journey mapping & continuous experience improvement

• HRBPs + COEs remain, but with a stronger EX focus

💡Trap: Risk of fragmentation—HR across regions may develop wildly different policies and employee experiences.

📊 Open Org Community Benchmark: How Big Should Your People Team Be?

We don’t love the idea of scaling your People team purely by headcount—but if you want a benchmark from a curiosity pov, we asked the Open Org Community (450 People leaders) what’s happening in the wild. Here’s a summary:

🛠 People Team Sizes at Different Growth Stages

📍 80 employees → People Teams of 6-8 (2 Talent, 1 Partnering, 2 People Ops, 2 People Design)
📍 250 employees → People Teams of 15-30 (12 Talent, 6 Partnering, 5 People Ops, 5 People Design)
📍 450 employees → People Team of 20 (6 Talent, 5 Partnering, 4 People Ops, 4 People Design)

💡 Key insight: The company with 30 People team members had built the entire employee lifecycle infrastructure and automated many processes while doubling their headcount in a year.

📊 People Team % Benchmark: What’s the rest of the market doing?

People Team Percentage measures the size of your People team as a % of the total headcount in your organisation. It is calculated as a percentage, by dividing the size of the people team by total employee count and multiplying by 100.

peoplemetrics.fyi sample of 600 startups and scale-ups Series A+

📈 Market Data: What’s the Typical People Team Size?

According to the data sample from peoplemetrics.fyi (a sample of 600 Series A-C scale-ups between Q2 2024-Q1 2025) the People Team* % median was 4.1% (*including Talent, PEX, HRBPs, and People Ops).

peoplemetrics.fyi data sample from Q2, 2024-Q2, 2025

Benchmarks from Index Ventures and Anne Caron’s Zero to 1,000 suggest a 1 People Partner per 75-100 employees ratio is common.

💡Remember: These benchmarks should be directional, not prescriptive. The best way to scale your People team is by solving for real bottlenecks—whether that’s hiring, manager enablement, or HR operations.

📌 Next Steps

1️⃣ Map out your company’s biggest People challenges right now.
2️⃣ Hire for what’s breaking that you can’t automate—not just by headcount benchmarks.
3️⃣ For distributed teams, centralise culture & systems but localise compliance.
4️⃣ Invest in automation early to avoid scaling problems later.

💡 Want a second opinion on your People team design? Hit reply—I’d be happy to soundboard. 

📚️ Good resources relating to this problem…

📖 Learnerbly PX Open-Source

📔 Anne Caron’s book From Zero to 1000

📘 5 Types Of Operating Models [AIHR]

🤓 Want to Get Your Current “People Problem” Featured?

If this is you. Share your problem, together we got this!

We’re here for the trickiest challenges you’ve got. Hit reply to this email, and let us know what’s keeping you up at night, and we’ll feature next week anonymously!

🖤 John & Adam

🖤 Psst! Are You Part Of The Open Org Community Yet?

Well goodness my friend, you should be! 😉 

Join 450+ startup and scale-up People & Talent leaders in Slack, and get exclusive access to twice-monthly live events (roundtables and guest firesides), quarterly hackathons, and direct support from Adam and me.

With 🧊 & 🔥 

John & Adam

👉️ Know someone who’d love this newsletter? Forward it their way so they don’t miss out, and make my day whilst you’re at it! 🙂 

Welcome to Open Works. Every edition we solve a ‘people and culture’ problem crowd-sourced from the Open Org Community of 440+ Startup and Scale-up People Leaders.

📚️ Recent Editions

If you’re new round here, not yet a subscriber or you straight up missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🚥 Edition 19: Building a culture integration roadmap for your next merger – a tangible diagnostic, guided tour and framework to support you.

🎉 Edition 20: Everything we built in 2024 – our top open source resources for people leaders, downloaded 800k+.

🎯 Edition 16: Building my people strategy from scratch! SOS – a principle driven framework to building your startup’s people strategy.

💭 This Week’s People Problem

When leadership make a decision without sharing context, the rest of the team be like..

⚡ The Problem

When leadership decisions feel like they’re made in a black box, trust erodes. The team feels disempowered, managers feel bypassed, and people impacted by the decisions are left confused (or worse, frustrated).

Here’s what we’ve seen happen in companies where decision-making isn't clear:

🚨 People spend more time decoding why something happened than executing on it.
🚨 The team gets stuck in “learned helplessness”—assuming decisions will happen to them, not with them.
🚨 Founders and leaders get overwhelmed by decision fatigue because they have to make every call.

The result? Slow execution, disengaged teams, and a lot of whispered “WTF just happened?” Slack DMs.

Not good.

Good decision-making is transparent, intentional, and inclusive where it makes sense—but it doesn’t mean every decision needs to be a democracy.

🖤 Our Take On How You Solve

🏃 TL;DR:

• Step 1: Map the current state of decision-making.

• Step 2: Surface the impact (positive and negative) of how decisions are made today.

• Step 3: Align on what good decision-making should look like.

• Step 4: Define a clear, agreed-upon decision-making framework.

• Step 5: Communicate back to the broader team what’s changing, and what they can expect moving forwards.

💡 How to Facilitate a ‘How We Make Decisions’ Session

🎯 Part 1: Map the Current State

Kick off with a sticky note exercise where leadership maps out how decisions are made today.

👀 Prompts to guide discussion:

• How do we currently make [big] decisions?

• Who is involved (or not involved) in the process?

• How do we communicate decisions once they’re made?

• What types of decisions do we currently make without consulting others?

🏆 Goal: Visualise the problem. Get leadership to see—on paper—the patterns and gaps in how they currently operate.

🎯 Part 2: Surface the Impact

💥 This part makes decision-making real by unpacking its impact.

Use specific instances and run a mini 5min retro on each.

🎬 Facilitation Hack:
Channel Friends episode titles:
"Ok, let’s zoom in on ‘The One Where We Moved Someone Without Telling Anyone.’”

🔍 Mini Retro Questions:

• How did this decision feel for those impacted?

• What did we waste (time, trust, energy) as a result of doing it this way?

• How did this decision-making approach impact our business goals?

• What could we have done better?

🏆 Goal: Get leadership to see the unintended consequences of current state decision-making.

🎯 Part 3: Align on a Better Way Forward

Now that leadership has felt and acknowledged the pain and waste of current state decision-making, it’s time to agree on a better way forward.

📝 Facilitate a ‘Start / Stop / Continue’ exercise:

• What are we going to start doing when it comes to making decisions?

• What are we going to stop doing?

• What are we going to continue doing that’s working?

🛠 Optional: Define a Decision-Making Framework
For teams ready to take it further, introduce a simple decision-making framework like RAPID (Recommender, Approver, Performer, Input-giver, Decider) or DACI (Driver, Approver, Contributor, Informed).

💡 FYI: In 100+ companies I've never seen RAPID/DACI or equivalent work well as a day to day point of reference. However, I have seen enormous value in just having the conversation that goes into populating one.  

🏆 Goal: Create an agreed-upon approach to decision-making that balances speed, inclusivity, and transparency.

🎯 Part 4: Share Back with the Org (If You’re Feeling Brave. P.S Be Brave :) 🚀)

The most impactful leadership teams don’t just change things internally—they tell the org what they are changing and why they’re changing it.

💬 Example Slack / Email Post-Session:

"Hey team—at our recent offsite, we reflected on how we make and communicate decisions. We realised there have been times where we’ve made calls that impacted people without enough context-sharing, and we want to do better. Moving forward, you can expect: [3 bullet points of agreed changes]."

This step takes real leadership courage—but done well, it builds massive trust and credibility.

🧠 Takeaways & Next Steps

1️⃣ Map your leadership team’s current decision-making approach.
2️⃣ Unpack real examples to surface the impact.
3️⃣ Align on a clear, consistent way forward.
4️⃣ Optional: Share back with the broader team.

📚️ Good resources relating to this problem…

Principles of Decision Making [LEVELS HEALTH] 

Decision-making framework [JURO]

🤓 Want to Get Your Current “People Problem” Featured?

You don’t need to feel like this. Fridays are a happy day. Share your current challenge with me and I’ll feature it next time 🙂 

We’re here for the trickiest challenges you’ve got. Hit reply to this email, and let us know what’s keeping you up at night, and we’ll feature next week anonymously!

🖤 John & Adam

🖤 Psst! Are You Part Of The Open Org Community Yet?

Well goodness my friend, you should be! 😉 

Join 440+ startup and scale-up People & Talent leaders in Slack, and get exclusive access to twice-monthly live events (roundtables and guest firesides), quarterly hackathons, and direct support from Adam and me.

With 🧊 & 🔥 

John & Adam

👉️ Know someone who’d love this newsletter? Forward it their way so they don’t miss out, and make my day whilst you’re at it! 🙂 

Welcome to Open Works. Every edition we solve a ‘people and culture’ problem crowd-sourced from the Open Org Community of 420+ Startup and Scale-up People Leaders.

📚️ Recent Editions

If you’re new round here, not yet a subscriber or you straight up missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🚥 Edition 19: Building a culture integration roadmap for your next merger – a tangible diagnostic, guided tour and framework to support you.

🎉 Edition 20: Everything we built in 2024 – our top open source resources for people leaders, downloaded 800k+.

🎯 Edition 16: Building my people strategy from scratch! SOS – a principle driven framework to building your startup’s people strategy.

💭 This Week’s People Problem

When Founder finally agrees it’s time to focus on values & behaviours…People Leaders be like…

🖤 Our Take On How You Solve This

🏃 TL;DR:

1. Involve the whole org—values only stick when people co-create them.

2. Design for action—define the behaviours behind the values.

3. 10:90 rule of Design : Operationalising. The design part is only the tip of the iceberg.

🔥 The Problem

We’ve all seen company values that sound great but don’t mean anything in practice. Cough Enron, Cough. "Integrity." "Respect." "Communication." Cool… but what does that actually mean?

The goal is to design a set of values that actually shape how decisions are made, how teams collaborate, and how leaders lead.

This is where most companies go wrong. They:

❌ Write them in a vacuum. Leadership picks words that sound nice.
❌ Make them generic. They don’t reflect how work actually happens.
❌ Never operationalise them. No link to tangibles in hiring, feedback, or promotions etc.

If your values don’t show up in daily decisions, they are pointless.

So how do you make them real? Here’s how we run this project.

🚀 Open Org’s 7-Step Approach To Values Design

💡 Goal: A co-created set of values and behaviours that shape decision-making, meetings, personal development, hiring, and more.

📅 Timeline: ~4 weeks

1. Org-Wide Comms: Start With Why

🔹 Message: Why we’re doing this, why now, and how we’ll avoid this being “words on a wall.”
🔹 Slack Comms Example Template

2. Concise, Powerful Survey

One of the pitfalls is to try and do a war and peace survey with 10s of questions. You don’t need to. Keep it simple and ask good questions.

🔹 Focus Areas:
✅ What behaviours help us do our best work?
✅ What’s holding us back?
✅ What should we protect as we scale?

🔹 Survey Setup: Typeform, Slack, and email comms.
🔹 Example Questions: 

Simple values design question bank

3. Data Aggregation & Synthesis

🔹 Translate qualitative and quantitative data into a clear summary.
🔹 Output: Notion page or deck with key themes and patterns.

💡Pro Tip: GPT is excellent at summarising free text responses into themes, so use a custom GPT to accelerate your work here.

// Prompt for config

"You are an experienced people experience designer and data nerd who provides accurate, non-biased interpretation of survey data free text responses into key themes, insights and stories. You are especially gifted at pattern recognition and sentiment analysis and when i provide you with a .csv of survey data you create a notion page with charts summarising the data into 4-7 candidate core values with suggested behaviour statements in "Do's and Don't' format."

Example GPT output from prompt

4. Playback To The Org

🔹 Share the findings from the survey with whole org (notion page or pack and use as a foundation to invite volunteers to help sense-make and refine in the next step.

Exec summary of survey data analysis

5. Facilitated Workshops (Miro or In-Person)

We are aiming for somewhere around 15%-20% representation of the company in these. So if you are 100 people, aim for 15-20 from a mix of tenure, function and seniority.

You can run them 100% async and meeting-less or facilitated over Miro/Figma.

🔹 Small group sessions (<10-person workshops)
🔹 Format:
✅ Silent sorting: Identify key themes.
✅ Dot voting: Prioritise.
✅ Drafting: Define draft values & behaviours from
✅ Making it actionable: “Do’s & Don’ts” for each value.

🔹 Example Output:
💡 Value: “Challenge Directly, Care Deeply”
✅ Do: Give real-time feedback with good intent.
❌ Don’t: Store up feedback for annual reviews.

6. Publish Version 1 & Gather Feedback

🔹 Draft and share the first version.
🔹 Format: Short, punchy statements with behaviour examples.
🔹 Engage leaders to invite feedback from their teams.

We should be aiming for something like this:

Great example format from Runa

7. Operationalise & Embed

🔹 Share public roadmap on how values will be embedded and made real.

🚀 Example People Roadmap: Operationalising Core Values

📌 Recruitment & Hiring

✅ 📋 Values-Based Hiring Scorecard – Ensures interviewers assess candidates on alignment with company values, leading to better culture fit and lower attrition.
✅ 💬 Structured Interview Question Bank – Standardised, values-driven behavioural interview questions to reduce bias and improve hiring consistency.
✅ 🎯 Hiring Manager Training on Values Alignment – Enables hiring managers to identify, attract, and assess candidates who align with company values.
✅ 👥 Candidate Experience Guide – Ensures candidates experience company values from first touchpoint, improving employer brand and offer acceptance rates.

📈 Performance & Retention

✅ 📊 Values-Embedded Performance Review Templates – Employees are evaluated not just on outcomes, but on how they achieve results in alignment with values.
✅ 🚀 Promotion & Career Progression Criteria – Clearly defines how demonstrating core values impacts advancement opportunities.
✅ 🏆 Employee Recognition & Reward Program – Celebrates employees who consistently demonstrate company values, increasing engagement.
✅ 📖 Manager Playbook for Coaching & Feedback – Guides managers on how to reinforce values in everyday coaching and performance conversations.

🎓 Leadership & Development

✅ 📢 Manager & Leadership Training on Living the Values – Equips leaders with tools to model and reinforce values in their teams.
✅ 🧭 Values-Driven Decision-Making Framework – Helps teams navigate tough decisions by referencing core values as a guiding principle.
✅ 🆕 Onboarding Program Reinforcing Core Values – Ensures new hires understand and integrate values into their daily work from day one.

🏢 Culture & Employee Engagement

✅ 📊 Quarterly Values Pulse Survey – Measures how well values are understood and lived across the organisation.
✅ 🎙️ All-Hands & Town Hall Integration – Leadership ties business updates to core values, reinforcing their importance.
✅ 📢 Internal Communications & Values Messaging – Regular storytelling around values in action (e.g., newsletters, Slack channels).

📌 Next Steps

📌 Run a values survey – simple but powerful starting point.
📌 Plan small-group workshops – sense-making, not brainstorming. Target 20% representation.
📌 Build values into systems – decision-making, hiring, and feedback loops.

Values aren’t real until they shape decisions. Make sure they do.

👉️ If you’d like some help on your values project, hit reply–we’d be happy to soundboard for you.

📚️ Good resources relating to this problem…

📖 Runa values (‘do’s and don’ts’ format)

📗 Learnerbly Values Evolution (open source project)

🤓 Want to Get Your Current “People Problem” Featured?

Don’t be so Chandler about your challenge, share it and help others.

We’re here for the trickiest challenges you’ve got. Hit reply to this email, and let us know what’s keeping you up at night, and we’ll feature next week anonymously!

🖤 John & Adam

🖤 Psst! Are You Part Of The Open Org Community Yet?

Well goodness my friend, you should be! 😉 

Join 440+ startup and scale-up People & Talent leaders in Slack, and get exclusive access to twice-monthly live events (roundtables and guest firesides), quarterly hackathons, and direct support from Adam and me.

With 🧊 & 🔥 

John & Adam

👉️ Know someone who’d love this newsletter? Forward it their way so they don’t miss out, and make my day whilst you’re at it! 🙂 

Welcome to Open Works. Every edition we solve a ‘people and culture’ problem crowd-sourced from the Open Org Community of 420+ Startup and Scale-up People Leaders.

📚️ Recent Editions

If you’re new round here, not yet a subscriber or you straight up missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🚥 Edition 19: Building a culture integration roadmap for your next merger – a tangible diagnostic, guided tour and framework to support you.

🎉 Edition 20: Everything we built in 2024 – our top open source resources for people leaders, downloaded 800k+.

🎯 Edition 16: Building my people strategy from scratch! SOS – a principle driven framework to building your startup’s people strategy.

💭 This Week’s People Problem

That moment when everyone finally gets what your job is (and isn’t)

🖤 Our Take On How You Solve

🏃 TL;DR:

• Emotional labour is real work.

• It’s everyone’s responsibility, not just People & Culture’s.

• Leaders need clarity on their role in emotional wellbeing.

• Set boundaries early and often so people know what your job is and isn’t.

• Pushback isn’t villainous—it’s leadership.

⚡️ The Problem

Ah, the Emotional Labour Trap. It happens when:

👉 You’re the de facto team therapist.
👉 Leaders say, “Can you just handle this?” (without handling their own team’s wellbeing).
👉 You’re expected to carry the culture, without owning the business decisions shaping it.

Sound familiar? 😵‍💫

It’s exhausting. And if you’re here, you’re probably at capacity—or close.

So, how do we draw the line before we burn out?

💡 Setting Boundaries Without Being ‘The Villain’

Boundaries don’t make you a bad People Leader. They make you a sustainable one.

Here’s how you reset expectations:

🔹 1. Define What’s People Team’s Role vs. Leadership’s Role

Your job: Enable the business to lead well—not to carry everyone’s emotional burden.

💡Pro Tip: this might be the time to reset expectations on you and your team's role more broadly* 

*Mini blueprint for resetting role expectations

🎯 Align you<>founder/CEO/SLT on your core accountabilities

🎯 Check priorities

🎯 Check desired results

🎯 Publish

Simple example from Open Org’s Doing Culture Right Playbook: How to set effective boundaries for you and your team

🔹 2. Make Emotional Labour Visible

If something’s invisible, it’s easy to offload. So, make it measurable:

✅ Audit where emotional labour shows up (e.g., conflict resolution, mental health support, DEI work).
✅ Track how much time it’s taking. Show leadership the cost—because yes, it is a cost.
✅ Reframe it as a leadership capability gap. It’s not a People Team issue; it’s a leadership accountability issue.

🔹 3. Put Emotional Labour Into Leadership KPIs

If leaders expect you to handle wellbeing, they need skin in the game.

📌 Tie leadership KPIs to team wellbeing. Example: Measure psychological safety in engagement surveys and make it a performance metric.

📌 Train managers on ‘holding space’ skills. Empathy, listening, handling difficult conversations—it’s a leadership skill, not a People team accountability.

📌 Shift the language. Instead of "People Team owns wellbeing," frame it as:
"Our leaders shape the culture. The People Team equips them to lead well."

🔹 4. Push Back with Clarity (Not Guilt)

Here’s a script if you’re feeling the villain arc coming:

💡 Pro Tip: If a leader offloads emotional labour, ask: “How have you supported them so far?” Wait in the silence. 

🔥 Next Steps

📌 Assess where emotional labour is creeping into your team’s workload.

📌 Run a leadership session on managing emotional wellbeing within teams.

📌 Shift wellbeing from a People Team problem to a leadership accountability metric.

📌 Give yourself permission to push back. Because setting boundaries is leadership.

📚️ Good resources relating to this problem…

📖 Luke Shipley’s Substack: “People and Culture Pickles”

💰️ How to set effective boundaries for you and your team – Open Org

🤓 Want to Get Your Current “People Problem” Featured?

You do not need to feel like April

We’re here for the trickiest challenges you’ve got. Hit reply to this email, and let us know what’s keeping you up at night, and we’ll feature next week anonymously!

🖤 John & Adam

🖤 Psst! Are You Part Of The Open Org Community Yet?

Well goodness my friend, you should be! 😉 

Join 440+ startup and scale-up People & Talent leaders in Slack, and get exclusive access to twice-monthly live events (roundtables and guest firesides), quarterly hackathons, and direct support from Adam and me.

With 🧊 & 🔥 

John & Adam

👉️ Know someone who’d love this newsletter? Forward it there way so they don’t miss out, and make my day whilst you’re at it! 🙂 

Welcome to Open Works. Every edition we solve a ‘people and culture’ problem crowd-sourced from the Open Org Community of 420+ Startup and Scale-up People Leaders.

📚️ Recent Editions

If you’re new round here, not yet a subscriber or you straight up missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🚥 Edition 19: Building a culture integration roadmap for your next merger – a tangible diagnostic, guided tour and framework to support you.

🎉 Edition 20: Everything we built in 2024 – our top open source resources for people leaders, downloaded 800k+.

🎯 Edition 16: Building my people strategy from scratch! SOS – a principle driven framework to building your startup’s people strategy.

💭 This Week’s People Problem

C-Suite choosing new managers be like…

🖤 Our Take On How You Solve

🏃 TL;DR:

1. Clarify what you need – People Managers, Team Leads, Something else? Scope matters.

2. Decide build vs. buy – Promote internally or hire externally?

3. Define expectations – What does “good” look like for your first managers and what is their principle accountability?

4. Train & support – First-time managers need help, structure, and mentorship.

5. Align with leadership – Ensure managers reinforce the culture and strategy, not dilute it.

⚡️ The Problem

As you approach 50 people, the typical “flat” structure can start to break down.

• Founders/execs are stretched too thin. Everyone reports to them. Decisions slow down.

• High performers start burning out. No career path. No structure. No mentoring.

• Communication silos form. Teams work hard but pull in different directions.

The answer? A deliberate management layer. But done wrong, it can create more complexity, not less.

💡 So, What Does a Good First Management Layer Look Like?

It should be:

✅ Small & purpose-driven – Only create management roles where they add real value.
✅ Designed for scale – Roles that will still make sense at 100+ headcount.
✅ Culturally aligned – Reinforce what makes your company great, not introduce bureaucracy.
✅ Set up for success – First-time managers need training, coaching, and clarity and they have to want the job. #accidentalManagers = a risk you don’t need to take.

🧠 Approach to Building Your First Management Layer

1️⃣ Decide: Do You Need Managers or Leads?

Not all teams need “managers” in the traditional sense. Think about what your business actually needs. Consider:

• Player-coaches – Senior ICs with mentorship responsibilities.

• Team/Functional Leads – Focused on execution, goal alignment & team coordination, not performance management.

• People Managers – Responsible for career growth, feedback, and team success.

2️⃣ Build vs. Buy: Promote Internally or Hire Externally?

Each option has trade-offs:

🔐 Pro tip: Even if you hire externally, invest in up-skilling internal talent to grow into leadership roles.

3️⃣ Define: What Do You Expect From Your First Managers?

Be explicit about:

• What is their principle accountability - Team performance, creating an environment for teams to thrive, coaching/mentoring, regular performance clarity? If you are being ruthless the answer is probably not all of the above.

• What success looks like – Clear measures of success, consistent feedback, career conversations and clear personal development.

• How they lead – Values-based leadership and decision-making, not micromanagement.

• How they communicate – Transparency, alignment with leadership.

Define what they are:

LifeLabs example

Define what they are not:

LifeLabs example

📝 Write a “How We Manage, Here” Playbook – even if it’s just a one-pager.

Simple and concise Manager Guide from Checkly

4️⃣ Set Them Up For Success

🚀 First-time managers typically need:

• Training – Coaching conversations, feedback skills, goal setting.

• A support system – Peer groups, mentorship, 1:1s with leadership.

• Tools & frameworks – Clear processes for hiring, performance and pay reviews, and team planning.

💡 Pro tip: A great first hire in People Ops is someone who can build a lightweight but effective manager enablement system.

5️⃣ Align With Leadership & Culture

Your first managers will set the tone for your org’s future leadership.

👎 Bad management = politics + bureaucracy + frustration.
👍 Good management = clarity + accountability.

💡 Define principles early. If you don’t, they’ll form organically—and not always in the way you want. Some great examples in the resources section below. 

📌 Next Steps

1. Define what good “management” means at your company.

2. Identify if you need managers, leads, or player-coaches.

3. Decide who to promote vs. where to hire externally.

4. Support first-time managers with training & mentorship.

5. Align leadership on what great management looks like.

📚️ Good resources relating to this problem…

🔥 Great Manager Playbook - LifeLabs

📖 Managers Playbook - Clearbit

📖 Manager Guide - Checkly

📖 Manager Handbook – PostHog

💰️ Building a people manager community of practice from scratch – Open Org

📔 The Managers Path – Camille Fournier

📔 Scaling People – Claire Hughes Johnson (Ex-COO, Stripe)

🤓 Want to Get Your Current “People Problem” Featured?

We’re here for the trickiest challenges you’ve got. Hit reply to this email, and let us know what’s keeping you up at night, and we’ll feature next week anonymously!

🖤 John & Adam

There’s no need to feel like this. Hit reply and share what’s stressing you! We’ll feature your problem anon next time 😉 

🖤 Psst! Are You Part Of The Open Org Community Yet?

Well goodness my friend, you should be! 😉 

Join 430+ startup and scale-up People & Talent leaders in Slack, and get exclusive access to twice-monthly live events (roundtables and guest firesides), quarterly hackathons, and direct support from Adam and me.

With 🧊 & 🔥 

John & Adam

👉️ Know someone who’d love this newsletter? Forward it there way so they don’t miss out, and make my day whilst you’re at it! 🙂 

Welcome to Open Works. Every edition we solve a ‘people and culture’ problem crowd-sourced from the Open Org Community of 420+ Startup and Scale-up People Leaders.

📚️ Recent Editions

If you’re new round here, not yet a subscriber or you straight up missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

🎉 Edition 20: Everything we built in 2024 – our top open source resources for people leaders, downloaded 800k+.

🎯 Edition 16: Building my people strategy from scratch! SOS – a principle driven framework to building your startup’s people strategy.

💰️ Edition 17: How to share financials without stressing your team or your CEO – a guide to incrementally improving financial literacy and transparency.

💭 This Week’s People Problem

Editors note: the answer is NOT employee monitoring software.

🖤 Our Take On How You Solve

🏃 TL;DR:

• Focus on how people spend their time, not how much.

• Choose metrics that align with your company’s business context and growth stage.

• Be mindful of the “busy-ness trap” – measure outcomes, not outputs.

⚡️ The Problem

When it comes to productivity and performance, it’s easy to get hard stuck in a maze of possible metrics or fall into the trap of measuring "busy-ness."

I’ve worked with some CEOs who have asked for some pretty wild things here 😅 (cough, monitoring software, cough, cough) and have learned it’s important to help guide stakeholders away from data points that reflect activity rather than impact.

It’s crucial to anchor your metrics in what truly drives business outcomes.

💡 Our Take On How To Solve

👉️ Pick meaningful metrics for your size and stage and make sure you focus on outcomes not output. Here’s what I mean.

⚠️ Bad Productivity & Performance metrics measure OUTPUT not OUTCOME. Examples to stay clear of: 

- Time spent on laptop/at desk
- Hours worked
- Slack messages sent per person
- Tasks completed

🔑 Good Productivity Metrics

1. Cycle Time – Measure the time taken for deliverables to move from start to completion. Can apply this to product team workflows (e.g., feature cycle time) or any team’s internal deliverables/requests/tickets and understand bottlenecks and flow.

2. BAU: Strategic Work Ratio – Compare the time teams spend on business-as-usual tasks vs. strategic work. Not much point having OKRs if your teams are only able to spend 2% of their quarter on them!

3. People: Process Ratio – Track how many people are involved in core processes (e.g., onboarding) to spot inefficiencies.

🔑 Good Team Performance Metrics

1. Team Goal Delivery – Measure planned vs. actual delivery rates for goals (e.g., OKRs). Split this by operational and strategic initiatives.

2. Team health - Measure de-motivators and to what extent the teams’ environments set them up for success.

3. Meetings Survey – Evaluate meeting formats, efficiency, and relevance through surveys/Miro/Figma boards.

🔑 Good Business Performance Metrics

1. Revenue Per Employee – A common metric for tracking efficiency, though it might not fit smaller, early stage or specialised orgs.

2. Customer Retention or Churn – Tied directly to business impact and team performance.

3. General Administrative Burn Rate – Measure total people costs (salary and taxes) minus revenue.

🛠 Guiding Principles For Selecting The Right Metrics For Your Organisation

1. Link Metrics to Business Goals: Align every metric with what moves the needle for your company’s objectives.

2. Avoid the Output Trap: Busy people aren’t always productive people. Measure impact (e.g. delivery on goals) instead of activity (e.g., hours worked).

3. Use Scorecards for Accountability: Weekly scorecards (EOS framework does a good job here. See Resources section below) help track key metrics. If a metric is red for three weeks straight, dive into root causes and address them.

🧠 Step Plan: How To Start Tracking The Right Metrics For You

1. Align with Leadership: Define shared priorities and decide which areas need focus.

2. Conduct a Gap Analysis: Where is your team underperforming? Where is time being wasted? (we wrote about that last week)

3. Prioritise Metrics: Choose a small set (3–5) of critical metrics that truly reflect performance and productivity.

4. Experiment and Refine: Test metrics for a few months, gather feedback, and iterate.

💡Pro Tip: Want a free Loom review of your draft metrics or feedback on your approach? Reply to this email—we’re here to help!

✅ Key Outcomes

• Better Metrics Selection: You’ll identify and implement metrics that align with your business goals, focusing on impact rather than activity or busy-ness.

• Clearer Performance Tracking: You’ll gain clarity on how to measure both team and organisational performance effectively, avoiding common pitfalls like output-based metrics.

• Improved Alignment: By involving leadership and linking metrics to business priorities, you’ll ensure company-wide buy-in and focus on what truly matters.

• A Scalable System: You’ll have a repeatable, adaptable framework for refining metrics over time, ensuring they stay relevant as your organisation grows and evolves.

• Data-Driven Decision Making: With actionable insights from well-chosen metrics, you’ll be equipped to tackle inefficiencies, improve outcomes, and drive measurable business impact.

📚️ Good resources relating to this problem…

📘 5 Steps To A Great Scorecard [EOS]

📊 peoplemetrics.fyi [Open Org] –benchmarking platform for Scale-up people and talent metrics.

📘 Lean Metrics Overview [Planview]

📘 Startup Performance Metrics [Carta]

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🖤 John & Adam

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