Using Rypple to get ongoing, actionable feedback is something that thousands of leaders do everyday to learn fast and reveal their blind spots. But many people who are new to Rypple want to know; what types of questions should I ask to get the most helpful feedback?

Here for your viewing pleasure are 17 role-based questions you can ask right now to help you on your way!

(Note: many of these questions are based on the “Make one thing your super power” principle)

If you’re part of the corporate leadership

• What’s one thing the senior management team can do to provide you with more visibility into how our business is being run?

• What’s one thing the senior management team can do to more effectively communicate organizational changes to you?

• Please share your thoughts on the recent [organizational event/economic changes] and how you feel it has impacted life at [company name].

• Would you recommend [company name] to a friend or colleague as a great place to work? What’s #1 reason why or why not?

• What’s the one thing you like most about your job? What’s the one thing you like least?

If you’re a manager

• What’s one thing I can do to be a more effective manager?

• What are the top 2 blockers or distractions you have in your role that I can help clear for you?

• What key strengths do you have that you feel you are not leveraging in your current role?

• What’s one thing we can do to ensure our weekly team meetings run on time and stay focused?

• How can we best recognize success and performance in non-financial ways?

• What are 3 key characteristics you admire in a manager?

If you’re a team member or individual contributor

• What’s one thing we can do to communicate more effectively as a team?

• What’s one thing I can do to communicate more effectively with you?

• What qualities do you value most in a team mate?

• What’s one skill you feel I should focus on developing over the next month?

• What can do I to take my game to the next level in my role?

• What’s one suggestion you have for me to enhance the way I interact with customers?

In my next post I’ll share a whole bunch more function-based questions you can put into use right away!

Tags: action, actionable, blind spots, Feedback, individual, Leadership, learn, manager, one thing, ongoing, Rypple, super power, team

Product & Community

65680 commentshttp%3A%2F%2Frypple.com%2Fblog%2Flooking-for-feedback-17-questions-you-can-ask-now%2FLooking+for+feedback%3F+17+questions+you+can+ask+NOW%212010-09-02+14%3A45%3A14David+Priemerhttp%3A%2F%2Frypple.com%2Fblog%2F%3Fp%3D6568

I’ve talked about why organizations should care about employee engagement and 3 tips to get yours back on the engagement train. Thing is, employee engagement is a tricky animal and most organizations see the early operational symptoms of an engagement issue before they see the greater problem.

Here at Rypple I’m fortunate enough to work with some pretty amazing organizations, all of whom come to us with the same end goal; to engage, motivate, and align their teams. However, the operational symptoms they come are sometimes different. To help you determine if you might have an engagement problem, here are 3 warning signs I see most often.

1. Your people say they want more feedback

I’d be a rich man if I had a nickel for every time I heard something like this:

“A recent organizational health survey revealed that our people want more feedback that we’re giving them now”.

This phenomenon is definitely not surprising. Changing workforce demographics means that organizations now have to contend with a larger number of GenY/millennial employees than ever before. These employees not only come with a greater sense of entitlement than previous generations, but they also think about feedback differently than they do. Like many of us, they crave smaller bits of actionable feedback they can put into practice quickly! Gone are the days where people are content with a once-a-year grade, rank, or score. Unfortunately many organizations struggle with providing their people with the volume and frequency of feedback they crave. As employee performance experts Zenger-Folkman point out in a recent study, if you aren’t in a position to help them get ongoing and continuous insights and coaching on their performance, they’ll find someone who can!

Solution: help them source as much feedback as they want as often as possible. You’ll never be able to provide it on your own.

2. Your people hate performance reviews

Hating performance reviews is certainly nothing new. In fact, in a previous post I summarized 3 key personal reasons why they simply to jive in the culture of many of today’s organization. However, the larger issue is that people simply don’t see them as an effective way to motivate and engage their teams (in fact, some believe doing them has the exact opposite effect).

Rebecca Doerr, HR Manager at Miovision, explained it the best when she said,

“We have a great culture and relationships within our people here. Our managers and our coworkers are our friends. Why would we sit down and have a once-a-year conversation where we act totally differently?!?”

If the goal of employee engagement is to bring your employees closer to the corporate bosom, to motivate, and align them with the corporate culture, then instituting a process that distances them from you is pretty much the worst thing you can do.

Solution: ditch the reviews and try promoting the social behaviors that drive performance (the topic of my next post!).

3. Your team isn’t hitting their goals

People can be challenged to achieve goals for a number of reasons; some operational, some motivational. Regardless, assuming their goals were somewhat reasonable to begin with, not hitting them can often be chalked up to lack of engagement and focus. Most of us actually want to excel in our jobs, but we sometimes struggle to focus on the specific actions and activities that will lead us to success.  The result: goals are missed, morale is deflated, and spiral of disengagement continues.

Solution: help your team stay focused and engaged by setting aside a few minutes each week to chat with them 1:1. Not only will they feel more connected to you and the business, but you’ll ensure the things they’re working on will help them hit their goals.

Tags: Employee Engagement, Feedback, gen y, geny, operational symptoms, performance appraisal, performance review, Rypple, Tips, tricks, zenger-folkman

Product & Community

65540 commentshttp%3A%2F%2Frypple.com%2Fblog%2F3-warning-signs-you-may-have-an-engagement-problem%2F3+warning+signs+you+may+have+an+engagement+problem2010-08-31+15%3A00%3A40David+Priemerhttp%3A%2F%2Frypple.com%2Fblog%2F%3Fp%3D6554

Hi everyone! I’m Steven Chung, a Computer Science/Business Option and Three-Year Geography student at the University of Waterloo. I just started a co-op term at Rypple. Yeah, my designation is mouthful, but I enjoy learning a variety of things. I’ve transferred a few times and know what it’s like to be unsure of what career path to take. After jumping around, I found an interest in design. I read about it almost every day — you can follow along on my Google Reader feed if you’re interested.

I learned a ton of stuff during my last co-op term at Xtreme Labs and I wanted to see what other start-ups are up to. Rypple attracted me because I read a blogTO post that featured Rypple. I also wanted to stay close to home, I can’t picture myself going to California permanently yet. Plus, the commute is surprisingly one of my better commutes from Markham.

During my first week at Rypple, I’ve been setting up my development environment, learning about the code, reading up on the frameworks and fixing bugs. I’ll be honest: they aren’t the most fun things in the world, but you gotta learn them somehow. Plus it’s been really interesting getting up speed on the app and how the dev team here works.

My goal for this term is to learn about website design. Whether you want to design a user interface, craft some code or do some marketing work, you’ll get to see many aspects of a startup during a co-op term. And with weekly one-on-one’s, I get to clearly express what I’d like to do. The team has shown clear motivation to move me towards my goals, starting with weekly user testing on Wednesdays.

To me, all of my six co-op placements had their own special thing. So far, I think Rypple’s magic comes from its people. The people at Rypple are the most enthusiastic co-workers I’ve had. You can always ask for help whenever you’re stuck and someone will be glad to lend a hand. Your concerns are taken into account whenever you speak up, which kinda makes sense considering that Rypple is about employee feedback software. The next best thing is the perks. You get free snacks and subsidized gym membership! I also get to work with three monitors in front of a window with a nice view. Weekly group lunches are awesome and we just got a PS3 on Friday.

And that’s my thoughts on working at Rypple so far! I look forward to seeing more and hopefully learn lots about design. Stay tuned for more updates.

Tags: blogTO, Feedback, first week, gym, perks, ps3, Rypple, snacks, steven chung, university of waterloo, waterloo, website design, xtreme labs

70710 commentshttp%3A%2F%2Frypple.com%2Fblog%2Fmy-first-week-at-rypple-2%2FMy+first+week+at+Rypple2010-08-30+16%3A58%3A39Steven+Chunghttp%3A%2F%2Frypple.com%2Fblog%2F%3Fp%3D7071

We’ve had a great run of our Rypple Leadership Series webinars, featuring the likes of Marshall Goldsmith and David Allen. September will continue that trend with an appearance by Brian Halligan, our much-anticipated host and the CEO of HubSpot.

Brian’s going to address Creating a Post-Modern Business Culture:

Mad Men has provoked many vibrant discussions among marketing thought leaders. What’s changed since the 1960s? What’s the same? Join HubSpot Founder and CEO Brian Halligan for a talk about how he has built a unique, post-modern business culture at HubSpot, inspired by a Mad Men-style thinking. Brian will discuss how he has applied lessons from inbound marketing strategies to foster a creative and productive work environment that emphasizes transparency, experimentation and innovation.

Join us for this free webinar on Wednesday, September 15th, 2010 at 1:30 pm ET. You can register here. See you on the 15th!

Tags: brian halligan, business, Corporate Culture, culture, hubspot, leadership series, Mad Men, post-modern, Rypple, webinar

Jay has been providing a human side to technology for over ten years, as a technologist, user experience specialist, and visual designer. Jay is the author of The Facebook Cookbook for O’Reilly Media.

70620 commentshttp%3A%2F%2Frypple.com%2Fblog%2Frypple-leadership-series-brian-halligan-ceo-of-hubspot%2FRypple+Leadership+Series%3A+Brian+Halligan%2C+CEO+of+HubSpot2010-08-30+13%3A00%3A34Jay+Goldmanhttp%3A%2F%2Frypple.com%2Fblog%2F%3Fp%3D7062

This week’s Funny Friday comes from Ted Goff, accomplished editorial cartoonist. Ted was also the pen behind last week’s Too Busy for Performance.

Tags: budget, complaining, Funny Friday, money, Rypple, ted goff, therapise

70660 commentshttp%3A%2F%2Frypple.com%2Fblog%2Ffunny-friday-the-moneys-gone%2FFunny+Friday%3A+the+money%27s+gone2010-08-27+16%3A18%3A27Rypplehttp%3A%2F%2Frypple.com%2Fblog%2F%3Fp%3D7066

Pivotal Tracker Integration

If you’re using Rypple and Pivotal Tracker then you’re in for a treat!

As of recent releases, Rypple now supports pulling the feed from Pivotal Tracker into your private and company feeds. This has the benefit of making your work more visible and easier to track. You’ll also get more appreciation through kudos, more insights through comments, and  your 1:1s will be more focused and less stressful as your stories will appear automatically on your Rypple Worksheets.

Let’s get right down to the details. All you have to do is ask your Rypple Administrator to set it up for you. The administrator will have to go through the following process:

Step 1 (Optional): Sign up a new Pivotal Tracker user that you will use for integration purposes. If you don’t know how to do this, send us an email to support@rypple.com or give us a call, we will help you out!

Step 2: Log in to Pivotal Tracker with either the new user that you’ve set up, or you own account. Go to your profile: https://www.pivotaltracker.com/profile. Scroll to the bottom, and look for the API Token section. Click on the “Create New Token” link.

Step 3: Go to Rypple’s Administrative Dashboard and switch to the “Integrations” tab. Copy-paste the API Token that was generated for you in Pivotal Tracker. Click on “Save”.

What next?

Rypple will pull in chores, bugs, and features from Pivotal Tracker every 30 minutes. They’ll appear in your company feed, as well as in your 1:1 worksheet. You can comment on the story, give kudos, transform it into an action.

We love feedback!

Leave any questions, suggestions, or ideas for different tools you’d like to see integrations with in the comments.

Tags: agile, integration, pivotal labs, pivotal tracker, Rypple, stories

70130 commentshttp%3A%2F%2Frypple.com%2Fblog%2Fpivotal-tracker-integration-in-rypple%2FPivotal+Tracker+Integration+in+Rypple2010-08-23+17%3A37%3A18Iurie+Cangeahttp%3A%2F%2Frypple.com%2Fblog%2F%3Fp%3D7013

Every manager wants to have an awesome team. Awesome is the whole package: great culture, communication, intensity, fun, learning and performance that delivers results. Getting to awesome is hard. Even worse: the advice out there on how to change your team into an awesome team is often very fuzzy.

This is the kind of problem that Chip and Dan Heath write about in Switch. They give concrete tips on how to effect change in almost any context, based on the latest research on behavior, communication, and psychology. Their first bit of advice is that to effect change you need to be very specific about the exact steps people need to take to change.

One example from the book: weight loss. If you want people to lose weight, give crystal clear direction instead of broad, complex behavioral advice. The US FDA food pyramid is complex advice: you should eat so much from carbs, oils, nuts, vegetables, meat, fish, etc.. Contrast that with an experiment from West Virginia, with a single bit of simple advice: instead of buying whole milk, buy 1% or skim milk. This clear change alone accounts for a substantial reduction of overall fat in peoples’ diets. Apparently, one glass of whole milk has the same fat content as five strips of bacon. Ugg.

The same problem arises in management advice on building awesome teams. We feel that human beings are complex and so therefore the advice on how to improve interactions between people should also be. The courses, books, conferences, and approaches to building and inspiring teams are the “food pyramids” of management: accurate, scientifically accurate, comprehensive, detailed… and in many cases useless.

So, in this spirit, I offer you three dead-simple bits of advice on how to make your team more awesome, aligned and inspired. Consider these to be the “skim milk” of awesome teams.

1. Every day, give someone public recognition for specific work.

This is simple, cheap, and very effective. As Ken Blanchard wrote in The One Minute Manager, “the number one motivator of people is feedback on results”.

Pick a time (3pm works for me). Find out what people are working on today. Go tell them in front of other people that it’s good work, and why. If you use email, be sure to CC the team (or use Rypple!). It doesn’t need to be a big huge honking deal. Just say something nice on something specific. And do it every day. Be genuine, be specific and rotate through your team – and people will step up their awesomeness.

2. Every week, meet 1:1 for 15 minutes with every team member.

Sounds so blindingly obvious, no? If you want an awesome team with engaged people you need to … engage with them!  And yet, time and time again we hear about managers who are “too busy” to make time for a simple conversation.

1:1 meetings are like working out; everyone knows you should do it, but they are very often avoided, forgotten and not done. Big mistake. Simply setting the time, and sticking to it can make a huge difference. Just listen (mostly) and talk; it need not be a hugely structured discussion, although that helps. Others can give great advice on what to talk about. My simple observation is that the basic habit of making space for a human conversation leads to all the good engagement, learning and relationships required for meaning at work – and awesome teams.

So, just meet face-to-face at least every two weeks for 15 minutes with everyone who works with you (remote teams can try Skype). This simple bit of advice is very powerful and often overlooked because it’s so basic.

3. Once a month, ask your team a question get their anonymous feedback.

We all have blind spots. Even the most attuned, open manager will have blind spots to team problems that can easily be changed with knowledge. Our blind spots can kill awesomeness, so you should kill your blind-spots. If you don’t know your blind spots (and trust me: you have ‘em), try the Johari Window exercise we’ve previously written about.

Marshall Goldsmith, the noted executive coach, wrote a great article on coaching for leadership skills (“Leadership is a Contact Sport” – PDF). In a nutshell, he found that the biggest single determinant of whether teams experience change in a leaders behavior was frequent follow-up questions. Across trainers, coaches, and companies, the most lasting change was seen in those leaders who simply asked people how they are doing on a repeated basis. It’s that simple.

So, schedule a time to ask monthly. Ask a single, simple question, like “What is one thing that I can do next month to improve how I communicate with you?”. If you can, use a free-web service (like Rypple) to ask anonymously, so people can give you safe feedback.

Tags: 1:1, ask, awesome, chip heath, dan heath, Feedback, food, Leadership, marshall goldsmith, meet, Rypple, switch, team

Daniel Debow is a co-CEO of Rypple. Daniel was one of the founders and the VP of Corporate Development and Marketing for Workbrain, an enterprise software company. He holds a JD and an MBA from the University of Toronto and an LLM in Law, Science & Technology from Stanford University. He's a huge music fan, plays the bass (badly), and spends far too much time online. He lives in Toronto with his wife.

67870 commentshttp%3A%2F%2Frypple.com%2Fblog%2F3-steps-to-a-totally-awesome-team-inspired-by-switch%2F3+Steps+to+a+Totally+Awesome+Team+%28inspired+by+Switch%292010-08-18+14%3A39%3A34Daniel+Debowhttp%3A%2F%2Frypple.com%2Fblog%2F%3Fp%3D6787

Just over a year ago BusinessWeek published Performance Review Take a Page from Facebook. Jena McGregor, the author, talks about how services like Rypple apply a Facebook-style approach to feedback and performance. While it’s true that Rypple provides a familiar user experience, we believe the idea of using social software to drive employee performance is more than a cosmetic application of feeds, comments, and status updates.

We believe the word “social” isn’t meant to describe a set of common specs or features. Rather, social refers to a set of interactions based on real-life human behavior.

Lesson Learned from Facebook

Facebook allows people to connect with one another by engaging in the behavior of sharing photos and updates with family and friends. Closing in on 500 million of users, Facebook’s success is undeniable. But what did we all do before Facebook existed? Did no one share photos or keep in touch with friends and family? Of course not. They just used other means (e.g. email, snail mail, phone calls, etc). The difference is in how much we shared: the existing tools were cumbersome, difficult to use over distances, and sometimes unfamiliar. As a result, we simply lacked the motivation to use them to the same degree.

Enter Facebook: a service that took an existing human desire to connect with others and made the related behavior easier for more people to do.

What happened? More and more people who otherwise would not have engage in that behavior did and we’re now more connected than ever before.

The way we engage, motivate, and align our teams at work is no different.

From Facebook to Employee Performance

Having worked with hundreds of organizations and learned from thought leaders like Marshall Goldsmith and Ken Blanchard, we consistently see three key behaviors that top leaders engage in to drive performance (I’ll talk about those three behaviors in an upcoming post). Do ALL managers exhibit these behaviors? No… but the good ones do!

So what about the rest? Well, they’re like the snail-mailers from the pre-Facebook era. They have the desire and understand the behaviors, but the tools they currently use (i.e. email, infrequent reviews, surveys, conversations) simply don’t make it easy.

Enter Rypple: a social software service that takes the behaviors of top leaders, and helps more people replicate them in order to drive peak team performance.

The key is making these behaviors easy to engage in. The easier they are to do, the more people will do them. The more people who do them, the more engaged, motivated, and aligned their teams will be.

In the coming months we’ll no doubt see the proliferation of social software principles being applied to business applications but the principle will be the same; help unleash people’s desire to engage in highly productive behaviors, and supercharged business performance will follow!

Photo of facebook by MrTopf. Licensed under CC.

Tags: employee peroformance, facebook, Performance Management, Productivity, Rypple, rypple takes a page from facebook, social software, team performance

Product & Community

60340 commentshttp%3A%2F%2Frypple.com%2Fblog%2Fsocial-software-rypple-takes-a-page-from-facebook%2FSocial+Software%3A+Rypple+Takes+a+Page+from+Facebook2010-08-16+13%3A32%3A37David+Priemerhttp%3A%2F%2Frypple.com%2Fblog%2F%3Fp%3D6034

Hey SXSW fans!

Some of you will remember our Workplace Hero campaign from last year’s SXSW (and are probably still finding kudos stickers stuck in odd places). Good news: we’re back this year with two Panel Picker panels. It would be a huge help if you could go vote for them and we’ll buy you a beer in Austin (yes, all of you):

Session 1: Agile Ain’t Just for Developers: Agile People Manifesto

Love it or hate it, the Agile Manifesto changed software forever. It makes programmers into more effective developers and kicks their code up several notches. Why should they have all the fun? We’ll present The Agile People Manifesto: a call to arms for managers and team leaders to re-evaluate, re-focus, and re-learn. We need to move on from old school mantras focused on hierarchies and heavy processes and embrace concepts like collaboration, iteration, simplicity, feedback, and CULTURE! Join us for a kick-ass exploration of the new leadership: awesome, effective, and getting shit done.

Co-presented with Andre Gaulin.

Session 2: Everything You Wanted to Know About Launching Websites

The shift to digital and online marketing means more and more people end up in charge of launching websites. It’s tough for technical people to keep tabs on all the latest and greatest — what’s a poor marketer or executive to do? They should attend this session. From planning to content to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), we’ll take a look at the key concerns you need to focus on, the basic info you need to be prepared, best practices you should follow, and top criteria for selecting vendors. Session will include a series of useful checklists you can take home and use on your own.

A whole bunch of our Rypple friends also have panels in there, so vote for too:

• Life After Wii Fit: Geeks on Fitness by Wesley Hodgson, Form&Method
• Bend Over? Surprise! Agencies Are Screwing You by Lucia Mancuso (The Blog Studio) and Meghan Warby (Argyle Communications)
• Stop Working Nights / Weekends and Get a Life! by Ryan McMinn, Microsoft
• Social Shopping: The Future of Selling Art Online by Willo O’Brien, Willotoons
• Scratching Your Personal Projects Itch by Cap Watkins, Formspring.me
• Naked Dating: Finding Love in 140 Characters or Less by Jeremy Wright (BNotions) and Melissa Smich (SoftCom)

Tags: Rypple, sxsw, sxsw2010, sxswi

Jay has been providing a human side to technology for over ten years, as a technologist, user experience specialist, and visual designer. Jay is the author of The Facebook Cookbook for O’Reilly Media.

68770 commentshttp%3A%2F%2Frypple.com%2Fblog%2Frypple-at-sxswi-2010%2FRypple+at+SXSWi+20112010-08-12+15%3A20%3A36Jay+Goldmanhttp%3A%2F%2Frypple.com%2Fblog%2F%3Fp%3D6877

David Allen, veteran coach and creator of Getting Things Done (GTD), joined the Rypple Leadership Series for a practical, in-depth look at stress free managing through better productivity. This one hour webinar looked at how GTD can transform your management practice, giving you the ability to relax, focus, and conquer your tasks. We explored both sides of management productivity: getting your things done and giving your team the tools and feedback they need to excel.

Take a look at the full webinar below!

David Allen Webinar Recording from Rypple on Vimeo.

Here’s David’s slides if you’d like to share them on your own blog:

Tags: David Allen, Getting Things Done, GTD, Rypple, Rypple leadership series, the art of stress free managing, webinar

67890 commentshttp%3A%2F%2Frypple.com%2Fblog%2Fthe-art-of-stress-free-managing-with-david-allen%2FThe+Art+of+Stress-Free+Managing+with+David+Allen2010-08-04+20%3A19%3A19Rypplehttp%3A%2F%2Frypple.com%2Fblog%2F%3Fp%3D6789