Increasing Team Performance With Incentives

Speaker 1: Welcome to the Process Breakdown Podcast, where we talk about streamlining and scaling operations of your company, getting rid of bottlenecks, and giving your employees all the information they need to be successful at their jobs. Now, let’s get started with the show.

Chad Franzen: Chad Franzen here co-host of the Process Breakdown Podcast, where we talk about streamlining and scaling operations of your company, getting rid of bottlenecks, and giving your staff everything they need to be successful at their job. Past guests include David Allen of Getting Thing Done and Michael Gerber of the The E Myth, and many more. This episode is brought to you by SweetProcess. Have you had a team member ask you the same questions over and over again and this is the 10th time you spent explaining it? There’s a better way and a solution. SweetProcess is a software that makes it drop dead easy to train an onboard new staff and save time with existing staff.

Chad Franzen: Not only do universities, banks, hospitals, and software companies use them, but first responders, government agencies use them in life or death situations to run their operations. Use SweetProcess to document all the repetitive tasks that eat up your precious time so you can focus on growing your team and empowering them to do their best work. Sign up for a free 14 day trial, no credit card required. Go to sweetprocess.com, that’s sweet, like candy, process.com. Jack Snitkovsky is the first employee and COO of Ninja Holdings. The company is seeking to revolutionize the way every day. Americans interact with financial services. Jack has more than 20 years of experience working in startups. Jack also serves on the alternative lending advisory board for TransUnion. Jack, thanks so much for joining me today. How are you?

Jack Snitkovsky: Hi, Chad. I’m good. Doing well. Thank you. How are you?

Chad Franzen: Good, thank you. Hey, so tell me a little bit more about Ninja Holdings and what makes it unique.

Jack Snitkovsky: So Ninja Holdings was founded by a group of entrepreneurs that were originally behind the company called Enova. They revolutionized the online lending industry back in the early 2000s. And a few years ago, the team got back together and thought about doing this again. But looking at new ways that we can modernize the same business, what can we do differently this time around? And that’s how we ended up here. At this point we’re four years old and about 200 employees with a few different business lines. And actually in the process of acquiring a bank spending regulatory approval. So it’s been a wild ride.

Chad Franzen: As COO, what does your day look like on a day to day basis?

Jack Snitkovsky: Well, as COO, every day looks a little different. Since I’ve been here since day one, I’ve been involved in almost every aspect of the organization. So like I said, at this point we’ve got multiple business lines. So on the day to day, I could be involved in any given business P&L. We’ve recently spun off B2B play, so sometimes it’s even a salesy day, trying to gather some clients. Other times we’re launching a new product called Ninja Card, which is a lending first new bank, basically is the easiest way to describe it. So there’s a of dealing with technology, trying to make sure we get everything set up, there’s coming up with different rules, how we’re going to approach it. There’s some marketing aspect, we’re talking to some branding agencies to figure out the messaging, et cetera. So it really is hard to describe a day to day.

Chad Franzen: Sure. With all those things going on, what have you found to be the best way to mobilize the staff, the people working on whatever specific thing happening in one specific direction, how do you mobilize them in that way?

Jack Snitkovsky: So one thing that we’ve done is we’re big on incentives. And that starts with overall incentives, all employees in Ninja Holdings have an equity stake. So they’re all incentivized for the whole company to succeed. Which is important, especially now that we have multiple business lines. We don’t want one business line just due to, let’s say sheer willpower of the leadership at the top there, drive everything in that direction and leave a mess behind for everybody else. So all of our employees, and they know this and they talk about it, there’s been a lot of instances where we announce something new and I’ve got some of my guys coming to me like, “So we’re about to buy a bank I heard, does that mean my equity now will own a bank?” Yes. So from the top level, that’s important. Everybody wants to make sure the company succeeds. And if you hire smart people and set up the incentives correctly, you just need to get out of their way. Yeah, go ahead.

Chad Franzen: How did you figure out that that was the best way of going about it?

Jack Snitkovsky: I’ve over the years overheard conversations when people had those kinds of incentives. A lot of companies have some profit sharing or some kind of equity, especially in the startup world. And there’s been instances where I’d walk by an office with a bunch of developers and you hear this QA, whatever, sitting in there and arguing. I remember one guy just going off on the rest of them like, “You make this mistake, it’s going to cost me money.” And I realized like, oh my God, you’re taking personally the success of this company. So that was one instance.

Jack Snitkovsky: And another instance when I actually started and one of the teams I had to take over was help desk. And it was a large organization, we had on an 800 person call center. So there was a lot of help desk tickets and people weren’t happy. There was a lot of grumbling from not, just the call center, but the corporate side as well, that they weren’t getting the answers they were looking for. I looked at it and I realized that, how do you normally incentivize help desk? What do you tell them? “Oh, we’re going to look at how many tickets you guys close.” Well, that’s great. But what happens when they just close those tickets and move on and they don’t actually solve the problem? So I started thinking about, how do we make sure that the team’s measurements for success aligns with what we want to see from them? So the incentives are, you just got to line them up to the end result that you want to see. So then I implemented a bunch of different metrics around help desk, not just number of tickets.

Jack Snitkovsky: And we still had to look at the number of tickets, but now that was a much smaller part of how the team was measured. You’re looking at things like how long were tickets open, how many times do you have to reopen them, all of that. And then at the end, conduct a simple survey. Every time you close a ticket, goes back to the original submitter just to see how happy they are with the resolution. And those metrics were a big part of the overall incentive for the help desk team. And on the other side, now you got to get people to actually fill them up. Everybody’s busy at work now I got to click a link, maybe there’s only four or five questions, but why am I going to do that every time my printer broke? So we implemented a little raffle. Every month, somebody would win a gift card, whoever filled out surveys. It’d be a random raffle.

Jack Snitkovsky: I started getting so many responses and they weren’t… My original expectation was most people will click that when they’re unhappy because I want to complain, so I’m going to click that link. And it turns out that wasn’t the case. We were getting a lot of responses. You could track how, as people as we’ve been implementing new things, you could see how the end result of satisfaction of the end customer started going up. Right. So I found that whatever that team is, whatever team you’re managing, you just got to figure out where do you want them to be? What is their goal? And then you try to set up the incentives so that all you got to do is just explain the incentives to them and the metrics that they’re being measured on and want to step back and let them do their thing.

Chad Franzen: So like at Ninja Holdings, are there different incentives for different types of employees?

Jack Snitkovsky: Well, the incentives at the top level it’s just obviously different amounts, but at the end of the day they get company success.

Chad Franzen: Sure.

Jack Snitkovsky: But then you’ve got additional incentives, there’s bonus structures, et cetera, that will be tied to specific teams that you’re working on. And for every team we’ll have a different structure, different things that they’re measured on, different expectations. Not just every team, but every level of an employee. Somebody who’s fresh out of college, the expectations for them are going to be very different than the guy that we hired with 10, 15 years of experience. And so you just got to keep that in mind and make sure that all of your management, senior and middle management, are on the same page.

Chad Franzen: And then how does each employee or whoever, is there a process for making sure that they receive those incentives, like you talked about with help desk?

Jack Snitkovsky: Yes, absolutely. Obviously the other part of this is you’ve got to make sure that they know. If you implement these programs but you don’t actually explain, then it’s a waste of time, nobody. But we go out of our way to make sure that the employees understand there are expectations. The other thing I’m being on that however often you do your reviews, we do them twice a year, if during the review cycle the employee is surprised by something, unless it’s good news, you got failed as a manager. So the goal here is that you don’t wait until the review, you make sure that there’s constant feedback. So that if the employee’s going down the wrong direction, you want to make sure they correct that quickly.

Jack Snitkovsky: Again, at the end of the day, we got to do it this way and here’s the incentives. Constantly go back to that. And at times there’s been a lot more work, we’re launching new product, people need to put in more hours or it’s harder or there’s bugs that you got to deal with. Again, I’ve heard these conversations of, yeah, I know we’ve been working hard, but I can you imagine once this product launches, if we do well, what that means to us as a company and what that means to me, how is that going to change my life?

Chad Franzen: How do you maintain that communication with everybody to make sure there are no surprises?

Jack Snitkovsky: That’s a tough one. So to some degree we’re struggling a little bit with that ourselves right now, is going through growing pains. We started out small team, we all knew each other, there was constant communication, we’re very open, anybody from the call center can go talk to the CEO and make suggestions, whatever. But now, we’ve grown probably whatever, 5X over the last year. In addition to that, we’re now all remote. So it’s been a challenge. We’re trying to come up with ways to keep the culture alive, keep that communication going. And there’s a lot of different ways that we’ve done this, excuse me, starting with the obvious, some town hall company meetings where everybody is involved, team events here and there, now that we’ve been able to do most of it in person again, as well as one of new things we fairly recently implemented was every new employee that we hired, we do a little mini coffee chat with the executive team one on one.

Jack Snitkovsky: We want to make sure that no matter what level you are, you meet the execs, we get to know you, and become more comfortable coming to us with questions or suggestions or ideas. And part of that is when we try to instill those messages, the cultural message. One of which being we’re all incentivized the same way. If we do well, it’s not like the top tier are going to make a bunch of money, and you guys will continue getting your salary and nothing else. No, as a company, we want to make sure everybody is moving in the same direction and wants the whole company as a whole to succeed. Which again, a lot of times people will speak up even though they’re working on their own silo, they’re working on a given product line. But they know what else is going on and will bring up issues like look, this makes sense for us here, but we’re going to cause some issues for this other product that we’re trying to launch, so let’s revisit what we’re doing.

Chad Franzen: How do you come up with the incentives that work for everybody, not only the person receiving the incentives, but for the company as well?

Jack Snitkovsky: Well, one thing I know, maybe it’s not that popular message right now, but most people go to work to make money. So that’s a big part of everybody’s incentive. And I’ll be honest, it works. And we try to hire people that will be incentivized by that because this is a company and we’re trying to make it a success. The other piece obviously, some of it is you do talk to… It’s on an individual basis, some people want titles, some people want time off. We’re very flexible, we try to be as flexible as possible. We had people in the past here and other companies, I’ve had this where something happens in their personal life and they need additional time or something, we always try to work around that.

Jack Snitkovsky: So at the end of the day, simple, treat others as you’d like to be treated approach. And try to find what works for a given individual. Again, it becomes harder as you go from a 20 person company to a 200 person company. Because now you’ve got to make sure that your managers are also doing the same thing. But somebody that’s just mentoring them. But again, at the end of the day, we incentivize at the top level with equity in the company so that you see company makes money, everybody does. And the way that they’re structured is that there’s no way to steer it so that the execs make more versus everybody else gets left behind. Everyone, including the executive team, same incentives, same path forward, success.

Chad Franzen: Do you have any favorite tools or software that you like to use on a day to day operational basis?

Jack Snitkovsky: You know what, there’s really not, I can’t say there’s a favorite. I try a lot of different things and there’s some things work for certain aspects better than others, then I constantly changing. Software nowadays, every month there’s something new, something exciting.

Chad Franzen: Sure. How can people find out more about Ninja Holdings?

Jack Snitkovsky: Well, obviously we have a webpage, ninjaholdings.com, there’s also a LinkedIn page. We’re working on some more branding for the company as a whole. We’re still only four years, so we were just busy making everything work. And now we realize, especially in this environment, as we’re going out, we’re trying to hire. We need to create that image, make sure people know what our culture looks like when they’re looking for jobs and they’re going to our website. So still in process. But I’d say a good start would be the LinkedIn page. You can see not only the company, but the people that work there. And a lot of times that speaks more volumes than with the marketing department that or HR department can put out.

Chad Franzen: Final question for you, do you have any books or a podcasts that you find particularly valuable or enjoyable during the course of your career journey?

Jack Snitkovsky: Honestly, no. Nothing specific. Again here and there.

Chad Franzen: Nothing too specific, okay. Well, hey, it was great to hear about your process, Jack, and I appreciate your time this morning. Thank you so much for joining me.

Jack Snitkovsky: Nice meeting you, Chad. Thank you.

Chad Franzen: Nice to meet you. Thank you. So long, everybody.

Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to the Process Breakdown Podcast. Before you go, quick question, do you want a tool that makes it easy to document processes, procedures, and or policies for your company so that your employee have all the information they need to be successful at their job? If yes, sign up for a free 14 day trial of SweetProcess. No credit card is required to sign up. Go to sweetprocess.com, sweet like candy and process like process.com. Go now to sweetprocess.com and sign up for your risk free 14 day trial.

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