🖤 Open Works #031 When Performance Feels Like a Process, Not a Practice

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

🖤 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.👇️ 

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”?

✏️ Tool: Manager Handbook

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

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

👣 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?

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

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With 🧊 & 🔥 

John & Adam

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