Learn. Try. Repeat.

“In a world of change, the learners shall inherit the earth, while the learned shall find themselves perfectly suited for a world that no longer exists” - Eric Hoffer

One of the finest qualities an organisation can have is the ability to always evolve in every organisational function. It applies even more to technology companies given the fast pace of innovation in the field. Whether it's hiring, training, coding, testing, communication, performance reviews etc., nothing a tech company does can keep producing results without continuous improvements. However many organisation and individuals fail to evolve for various reasons. Mostly, people are risk averse and if the leadership fails to encourage experimentation or tolerate failures then no one steps up to take a chance. Soon that results in an organisation with an outdated culture, practices and processes. There is no bigger risk today than to work for such an organisation. Another factor that makes continuous improvement critical is that organisations never stay the same. They change in size and in nature of products or services they offer. To adopt to such changes the organisation has to evolve.

Confiz luckily has a culture where we encourage change and experimentation. We are also not averse to calculated risks and rely on our ability to learn and improve quickly. Confiz has increased in size significantly over years and has a much bigger services and products portfolio now so continuous improvement is a need. Below I briefly share few examples where my colleagues and I have continuously experimented and improved quite a few functions in Confiz. We are no where close to finish line, rather it is ingrained in our culture that we will always evolve.

Let's take hiring, one of most challenging function in any organisation, as our first example. Every year new student batches graduate with evolving aspirations. I have been actively hiring for last eight years and few student had aspirations to work in Startups, Big Data and ML five years ago. That has drastically change and graduates want to join fast paced organisations working on contemporary technologies. Luckily Confiz does projects in these contemporary technologies so we are able to discuss relevant work and opportunities. Another hiring problem is finding the best talent from large numbers of graduating classes. We believe in ample due diligence before making a job offer so later issues can be avoided. However, tests and interviews consume time and it's hard to reach large number of students. Recently we added preemptive steps in our hiring processes. We have started visiting universities months before graduation week. We network with students via sessions and collect strong resumes. Then close to graduation time we conduct online tests to reach a lot of students in multiple cities. That has increased our reach without adding manual work for HR.

Another example is performance reviews. Performance reviews are one of the hardest things to master and no organisation gets it right easily, to the extent that many organisations have started to dump performance reviews. Confiz has a different philosophy and we believe in necessity of performance reviews to help our teams improve and stay goal oriented. Currently we have a pretty decent performance review process but it has taken years to improve that and it's still evolving. Few years back we used Google sheets to gather performance feedback of employees from their manager. We had a similar feedback form for Managers from their team so feedback goes both ways. The Google sheet had a background script that calculated a resulting score between 1-5. Many employees, especially recent graduates, found that similar to a GPA and got confused. We changed that to a performance band based ranking inspired by McKinsey. That really helped, but we further evolved that into lesser bands and detached bonus from performance bands. Now a days we are indulging into OKRs. Point is we have to keep evolving performance review function by trying new ideas, measuring them and improving.

Let's take one last example from our Software testing department. Confiz is primarily a services company and works for customers all around the world. Most of these customers are large enterprises with particular needs and processes when it comes to Software testing. Some customers use spreadsheets, some using specialised tools, some prefer automation and some prefer detailed documentation. To keep our testing department agile, we have to continuously train our test engineers and evolve our processes. We have improved our on-boarding trainings in a manner that experienced engineers do not spend cycles on basics rather pick up advanced tools skills. We have further added layers of reviews for test cases and test planning to make sure quality and knowledge of testing stays uniform across engineers and teams. Moving on its evident manual testing will reduce in demand and automation will take over. We have started polishing our trainings for tools like Cucumber and Selenium so we develop deep expertise in test automation sooner than later.

I can share examples of our other organisational functions but then the article will get too long. It's important that organisations deeply value continuous evolution and encourage their employees to continuously Learn, Try new learnings and Repeat this process all the time.