What follows is a rant. If rants are not for you, please don't read. But I think rants are great. They are a source of epistemic clarity. They bring me close to my real feelings. They help me say impolite things. And because the ranter doesn't rant to be liked, somewhere in the rant, some truths often emerge which otherwise go unnoticed. Hence, I rant. The rant now begins.

I like almost everything about working at The Whole Truth. We are deeply intentional about the smallest things. From the ingredients in the food we make to the rituals that shape culture.

However, as I wrote in my previous blog, the org is scaling—and scaling is introducing changes. Among other things, the scaling is introducing systems. The system's purpose makes total sense. I see two major things.

One is solving for the coordination problem (so underrated how syncing hundreds of people towards similar objectives is simultaneously very hard AND magical).

The second is solving for legibility. When you are less than 30 people, the leadership is close to people and the details of the work. You have a hold on things, a view that informs what you are doing well and what needs change. That changes when you have more than 200 people. You simply lose visibility.

You can't know that KR3 in O1 (guys, this is OKR lingo, which I find really funny, but it kind of works, so no complaints) is not moving because maybe the guy responsible for moving the needle is spending their waking time finding another job and doesn't care enough or maybe they are grieving the loss of a loved one and working in that phase feels disorienting because there is no law of nature that says grief has a timeline.

But sigh, however humane you want to be, leadership asks you to have a macro view of what is really going on inside the org. I feel this need too. Hence I find OKRs very useful. And why I think that Saiganu, Chief of Staff to Shashank, is doing one of the most important yet often thankless jobs at TWT right now. Because he is holding this system view together to have a check if the hundreds of us are collectively moving in a similar direction to our stated objectives and if that's happening at the pace we have self-decided. In short, the reality check, so we can see the mirror and course correct.

So you see, I totally get the point of having systems that help you coordinate and offer legibility.

But there is one such “system” which I find fairly problematic. And that's the employee NPS. Or eNPS, which is a "scoring system to measure employee satisfaction and loyalty within organizations". (Read in FAQs here.)

The idea is that every six months, employees fill a survey, and that serves as a temperature check of how our people are feeling at the org. It's really long form with around 50 questions where people give a rating on everything from org principles to manager review to decision making methods to fairness in performance rewards and so on. There is also space for open-ended subjective feedback. And all of this is anonymous—so employees feel they can say what they want to say without the fear of repercussion.

It all eventually boils down to a specific number, which you can track longitudinally, and if there are dips, that suggests to the leadership there are some cracks, some ignored places, something that needs attention.

When I first heard about it, I actually loved it. It's a sign of good culture that employees have a say—not just the leadership deciding narratives of culture. A company that doesn't even care about culture won't even think about having a system like this. So I totally get the idea and the why behind it.

But now that I have seen at least three rounds of this, man, I find this system to be exactly the kind of system that gives me "absurd corporate things" vibes. Four points.

First, the questionnaire is designed by People Cues. And we simply just follow what folks there think "good culture" means and what deserves to be measured and how questions are framed. This is the foundational flaw in this entire exercise. 

Think about it. The culture of the creative team (my job) is so wildly different from say the culture of the offline sales team. And yet, both teams are filling the same form? How the fuck does that make any sense? I am intentionally trying to cultivate a specific kind of culture which attracts a specific kind of talent and which means some people will self-select out—that's my job—but this "temperature check" is happening against a metric system which is just adopted because some consultant types at xto10x consulted whatever best practices to design what I am assuming is a "works in many cases" kind of form. And the culture is assessed against this? How stupid.

This is exactly why systems-loving people like me often find ourselves in situations where systems feel suffocating. Because an alien system design is simply imported devoid of context, which ends up producing a number, and then, because having a single number to track is so seductive, it becomes the objective truth. My goodness.

Second, the strongest point of this exercise is anonymity. So employees can really speak up. So their manager is not pissed with the feedback and using it against them. I get it. And yet, at least for me, anonymity here introduces exactly the same reasons why Reddit is simultaneously one of the most interesting and the most toxic places on the internet. And the toxicity of this exercise isn't even talked about.

When managers have to give feedback, we do so with our name attached. It has consequences. There is an expectation of nuance and care. But alas, no such control is needed in the anonymous form. I read some of the comments, and felt like this person is using this form as a pressure valve dressed up as dialogue, getting to throw grenades from behind a wall. I don't even have a problem with pressure valves—this whole piece is just that, but with my name attached. So the least we can do is not pretend that anonymous feedback is a conversation.

As a person—and by implication, as a leader—I prefer having hard conversations. I think relationships flourish when we can sit with friction for a while, feel the discomfort, and then have space to go to the person we are in relationship with to say this is how I am feeling about what's happening.

And doing this is hard. Very hard. Because there is asymmetrical power in professional relationships. Which means there is so much more that leaders have to do to make space for employees to trust them enough to come and share. It takes time. It requires you to first trust your reportees before earning their trust. And it's never done. It can only be managed. Because friction always persists. And that's okay. What you need are ways to have these constant negotiations to make this work. This is the hard work of culture I want to do in my mini org at TWT. And then this anonymous form enters the scene.

This is the point where I want to share my proudest moment from February. A team member—my skip report, not a direct report—said they wanted to talk. They said they are sorry, because they didn't trust me enough on something, and hence something something happened. They said they find trusting hard, and they will try. I asked what can I do to make it easier. I wanted to know if any past action of mine or a behaviour has led to this. I requested that if there is anything at all they are feeling, that they want to share, I am listening. A few days after this chat, this person sent me a long message on WhatsApp, where they pointed to something I had said which made them feel off at work, which stuck in their head, and requested: "Please do not repeat it again, only solace is - to believe you didn't mean it."

Receiving that message made my heart full. This was a sliver of an opening. For building trust. Because they were actually right. I should not have said it. And I didn't really mean it either. In fact, I had even forgotten I said that. But this calling out made me reflect, and it's something I will not forget, and be very thoughtful about. (If you are reading this, thank you. People like yourself make me show up better at work.)

Had this come from an anonymous form, and then I would have learnt about this in an HR debrief, well, uff. Not comparable. No scoring on "trust" can capture this. I want to learn and do this hard work of having uncomfortable conversations rather than rely on scoring forms with anonymity. 

Because I don't want to replace relationships with measurement. Trust is always slow, specific, uncomfortable, and simply cannot be scored. (Now before you ask, can this scale? I don't know. But that's not the point of this rant anyway.)

Third, what happens after this exercise? At TWT, we flash the org-wide eNPS in the Townhall. It's really good (70+) and then we all clap. But then we flash function-specific eNPS on the slides. It's at this point where the leaders, at least some of them—and I am one of them—start feeling this weird energy inside. A leaderboard energy. Which function is where. And oooh, what does that say about the leader. Oh wow this guy is at 100, nice yaar. Oh, 40 for that? Oops. And for a number that is hard to interpret and make sense of, it feels more like transparency-accountability theatre than something with actual meaning.

Yesterday, when this happened, I saw this guy who sends such a weird energy every time I see him at the office being completely disengaged when the top leadership was sharing company updates. And then I find this dude becomes suddenly attentive—right at front, arms crossed, back straight, focused on the screen—when these numbers were on screen.

I saw at least one leader—whom I respect as a great leader—step away when these numbers were flashed. Because their score wasn't flattering.

Some of you might be thinking: "Ah okay so Samarth is basically pissed because his org score wasn't great, he didn't like what folks have filled in, and he felt ashamed for the number to be flashed, and hence this rant drama?"

Well, yes and no. My org score is neither awful nor wow. But that's not even the point. I had called this out two months ago—"Fuck eNPS!"—in as many words to myself when I was planning to introduce changes in the team.

And yet, I don't like the unintentional leaderboard energy in the org—and that too based on such a flawed metric. All the invisible hours invested for our people are now flattened and reduced to this single number for the org. How demeaning.

Fourth—and this one is the most politically incorrect thing to say. If the eNPS exercise is supposed to be feedback for the leader to do things better, but it is by its very design aggregated, how is the leader supposed to differentiate between employees who have ongoing performance problems—who have behavioural problems, who have been given feedback they didn't like hearing—and the ones who are flourishing?

A good survey or measurement system should offer this signal: that the things you are doing intentionally to build your team in so and so way are actually working for this set of people and not working for this set of people, and you want to know how they map on the performance lens. Because every change is not equally likeable for everyone, and it's the job of the leader to offer clarity: this is how we do things here, because this is how we will get where we want to be.

But in this communication, where values of how we think about work and relate to it start clashing, or the self-image the employee carries doesn't match the new system, well, that's a foundational clash which is so hard to resolve. What good does merging all these numbers into a single score lead to?

The point is not that low-performers should not have a voice. They absolutely should—everyone should. That's basic human dignity. All I am saying is that their voice means something different, but the system is simply too foolish to capture that.

That's it. Stopping now. Because if I sit down more with this thought, I will have more to say. But as much as I love rants, they need to be time-boxed. The time for this one, for now, is over.

Thank you for reading if you did. And I would love to hear your thoughts. I am sure I have blindspots and I would like to engage. Just don't send it anonymously. (samarthbansal@pm.me)