The things I was thinking of is that, like, you know, I know I'm writing this as town strategies from a distant from a distance, but, honestly, I think these are applicable even when you're, you know, in person or hybrid.Like, I think it works through all of them. So a little bit about me. I, oh, here's kind of quick agenda. And I know we only have now seventeen minutes, so I'll be fast. But what I introduce myself and vary, some key takeaways, how we invest in our people, our talent model, and our development cycle. Those are all really important to me. So I'm the COO of a company named Very, standard, like, small company. So I have a lot. I have operations. I have people, marketing, product, and finance is my purview and umbrella at Very. I always say that, my background's in people, though.

So I grew up in the people space and kind of, like, expanded my my background from there. So people tends to be, a place where I like to talk about a lot of, like, how I think we differentiate ourselves in business About Barry, so also in the tech space, we're an end to end IOT, development company. All that means is we build connected devices. So think about all the things in your house that probably connect to the Internet. So if you have a Nest or an Echo, anything that talks to the Internet, that's not your phone or your computer. Those are the types of devices that we build. And then we build the adjacent digital products.

Okay.

So about this session, I really believe that distributed companies have a great advantage. I understand why people don't do it, but I do believe that one of our biggest opportunities in the world today is the skill gaps that we see. Because, obviously, as technology continues to evolve, we really need to have talent development in order to meet those gaps. You do talent acquisition. You know how challenging it is to find unicorns out there. And so why not build some unicorns instead of always going out and trying to find them? So and then the other piece of this is when you develop your talent, you actually have reduced turnover. People feel like they have the opportunity to learn and grow. They're more engaged, and this actually does have a direct ROI on the business. So these are our five values that vary. I'm really proud of these.

We live them every single day. We talk about them every single day. And as you can see, one of the five is, invest in our people. So that is really important to us, and we really believe in making people grow. But other than invest in our people, we have optimized for success, orient for the long term, solve with alignment and focus, and culture of trust. So those are the values in the way that we sort of keep our heads around everything that we do.

I'm sorry, Jessica. Did you say how many employees?

So we are currently about 50. So we're about 50 employees, and we're all aligned in the Western Hemisphere, but not all in The US. Okay. Thanks. Of course. And so this is our definition of the, value of investing in our people. We drive growth and expand capabilities through intentional investment in our people, processes, and community. People are the product of Veri. We talk about this a lot, that the people are our product. So we have a special opportunity to build high quality people here, to build people who improve the world by solving problems with technology. So, this is, a value that I love living every single day, and we have lots of voracious learners who love to love to live this value for sure. Okay. So a couple of things. Our talent model at Veri, everything is really highly documented, and this is a thing that I push a lot of companies on.

I think a lot of companies do not document enough what their talent models are. So what we really like to do is we look at both technical or functional capabilities, and then we look at behavioral capabilities. So think of those technical or functional things as the things you have to do in order to do your job. The behavioral capabilities are the behaviors that we express, our ability to communicate, our ability to influence, our ability to collaborate. Those go across jobs. Right? So those are not job specific, but we think of them as level specific. If you're going to be perceived at a certain level in the organization, you need to have those capabilities at that level.

And so we do a lot of things that look at both those technical or functional capabilities and your behavioral capabilities, and we build towards them. And we like to do that with a lot of transparency so that people are never surprised when they don't get that promotion. They know exactly why, and that transparency is part of the engagement driver, of keeping people engaged. Because how many people do we all know who leave a company because they didn't get that promotion and they can't, for the life of them, figure out why? Nobody's giving them a a clear answer. This is why you didn't get promoted this year. So this is what our, talent development cycle looks like. So as you can see here in the top left hand corner, I'm gonna start kind of at year end because it feeds well.

We do our promotions and year end talent development cards. Then in q one, we go to our talent development plans. We take all that feedback coming out of the end of the cycle, and we feed it into, here's the talent development plans. I'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment, but those are really, really critical for all of us to be aligned of where people want to grow and also where the organization wants to grow that year. We use project feedback surveys really intermittently through the year. If you're on a project and it completes, we do a quick feedback survey because we all know that recency effect always affects our reviews. So what we try to do is collect some feedback through touch points throughout the year so it's not just collectively happening at the end of the year.

Then what we do is we do these and I'll talk more about our talent development cards in a moment, but we do these, mid year talent development cards. Again, we actually rate everyone on those functional and behavioral capabilities so people can see what level they're just they're demonstrating. And, again, that feeds right back into those talent development plans. And then we head into our performance review cycle in q three. We actually do 360 degree reviews for everyone in the org, so it's a really great way to get feedback, not just from your manager but also from your peers. And we also do upward reviews on our managers. And then that feeds into that promotional cycle. So I'm gonna dive into each of these pieces, but that's that's kind of a view of what our year looks like.

Okay.

Okay. So talent development plans. This is one of my favorites. We always really try to encourage people to use a blend of both behavioral and those technical skills to focus on during the year because I think we all recognize that it's easier to focus particularly when you're in technology, especially if you're talking about engineers. They wanna talk about the functional parts of their job. What can I do? What can I grow? But we really encourage them to also select a behavioral skill that they wanna work and grow this year. And, obviously, those are a little bit tougher because they tend to be more subjective in terms of feedback. Again, we have them all defined, which is part of how we say, it's not subjective. Here are the here are the reasons that we look at this this way.

We also do really talk about, in our company, hey. Listen. In the year ahead, particularly, let's say, like, engineering, here are some of the things that we're trying to achieve as an organization. And so what we'll do is we'll feed into individual, development plans some of the overarching topical themes that the organization wants that year. So, typically, what you'll see is there's one goal that's something that's the org is working towards. There's something that they personally are working towards in terms of their functional skill set, and then there's usually something behavioral that they're working on. And the reason why we like to document this is a few things. One, it is tried and true.

Everyone knows, that, you know, when you write down your goals, you are more likely to achieve them.

And then the other piece of this is this is a really great way for individuals and their managers to be able to connect

and individuals and their managers to be able to connect and talk about what those goals are on a continuous basis. If somebody's just doing it on their own or if the manager's just pushing it to the individual, there's a chance these goals are not gonna get any traction throughout the year. So those shared goals that are documented working towards collectively are really, really important to us.

Are there touch points beside the the mid year? I guess maybe that depends on the manager.

It depends on the manager, but most of our managers have a one on one at least twice a

month. Okay. Oh, that's good. Okay.

Mhmm.

So I said we try to collect some feedback intermittently through the year. These are these project feedback reviews. These are short. These are short and punchy. They're intended so that we just have some collection of data that we can use throughout the year. Even though we do a three sixty at the end of the year, we know recency always becomes a bias. So at the at the conclusion of any program, we try to do a quick ten to fifteen minute questionnaire. Just a couple of pieces of feedback. How did this person excel on the project? What are their opportunities for development? And is there any any other notes? And then this way, the managers are able to look back through the year and see like, oh, this person, this is a theme from the year, or this is how the person was able to grow or mature through the year.

And these are great ways that they can kind of look back as they look forward into the end of your process. Talent development cards. So this is that documentation of what I was saying where we have this tool where we align on. Here are the levels. So here's your function and here's your level. These are the expectations across all of your behavioral and technical skill set. And what we do is we actually rate them. So the managers will say you right now could be a mid level engineer in these three areas, but you're actually working as a senior engineer in these three areas. And again, what this does is through the year, if that person is working towards a promotion, they can very clearly see the gaps that they have of where they currently are and where they need to be in order to receive that promotion. And oftentimes at the end of the year, if the person doesn't get the promotion, we can see it was documented the entire year, the reason why they didn't get it.

And so we very infrequently have people who disagree with these because these are openly shared. This is not like a you know, sometimes some orgs have these sort of, like, behind closed doors. This is just a manager in their little notebook. These are visible. The manager's documenting to them and sharing it with the individual so they have visibility to it through the year. And then we do our three sixty review cycle at the end of the year. So everyone does their self review, and they, we have peer reviews, manager reviews, obviously, which is the the standard. Everybody usually that's how they think of reviews is just from the manager. And then we also are a big believer in the upward reviews.

So we have each of our individuals who do provide, a review to their manager, and the level above that individual is the one who sort of gathers all that feedback and puts it together. They aren't seeing it just one, you know, one at a time, which we do believe in because we wanna make sure they're getting a blended result, for a variety of reasons. And we have three main areas that we do on the on the review, which is we everybody gets reviewed on our five values that I started with, our behaviors, and then the technical or functional skills dependent on their role. So there's some things that obviously the whole or gets reviewed on values and behaviors. The technical and functional is very specific to their individual role. Okay. And then promotions. So the way that we do promotions is we actually do a promotional panel. So it is not up to just the manager. The managers will decide, is the person ready to be reviewed for promotion or not? Then what will happen is, whoops. Sorry.

Is if we have an individual who is, someone who is below a lead level, but they are, in fact, being, reviewed for a promotion, there is a, a document that the manager must prepare about why this person is, eligible for promotion, and then they have to present it to the panel.

If they are, in fact, a lead level, which is a very high level role, obviously, the lead them the person who wants to be a lead, they themselves actually have to both have their manager present, but then they have to make a fifteen minute presentation to the panel as to why they believe that they're ready for this level and, in fact, what, you know, what they think that they can bring at that level.

Again, this is a this is a senior level role in our engineering org, and so it's really important that, that they're able to interact with senior leadership. And the promotion panel is typically, at least one c level leader and, at least two VP level leaders. So Okay. It's a really senior level in the org. And then in terms of learning environments, so listen, anybody who's studied any kind of adult learning knows, in fact, that there's a couple different things about adult learners that are different than there are when you're learning when you're growing up. So I have an eight year old, and I can clearly see the difference of how he learns versus how I learn. Adults are primarily experiential learners. They learn by doing. So what we've done is we've set up our learning internally to to mirror that adult learning. So the number one place that people learn is on the job doing the projects.

And what we really try to do is align people's skills and also the places that they're they're trying to grow with their projects. The second part is what's called dApps or, or delivery amplification programs. These are when I talked about the organization will have specific things that we're trying to learn and grow in our capabilities this year. So we will build these specific programs that are we want you all to learn this skill, learn this technical capability, and we will provide specific hours and constructs around that. And so there's milestones built into that. And then finally, guilds. How else do we learn? We learn from each other. And so, when we have access to each other and our in our brains, we're able to better learn and grow. So our guilds will actually meet. They'll have presentations.

But then also in addition to that, we will have, paired programming hours where people can come on their studios, people come off the mic. Hey. I'm struggling with this. Can somebody help me with it? And then the engineers will actually do some paired programming together, which is really, really, a great way to be able to learn and grow from each other in a peer to peer format. Nope. It went backwards. And this is the big thing. Just never stop growing. And this is something that's a big drumbeat for us in the org. We always want people to feel like they're not stagnant, they're not sitting still. In the world today, generally, we want people to always feel like they're constantly, moving on and increasing their skills. So with that.