Elephants, dead fish and vomit: No, these aren’t the co-ordinates of the world’s worst pub, but a very interesting approach to employee engagement and culture, through problem identification and exposure, employed by Airbnb.
A lot of issues or problems in companies remain unsaid.
They can take various shapes and forms, but the common denominator is that they remain private, in employee’s heads, where they fester and cause resentment. They can only truly be dealt with once they have been brought into the open, given a name, identified and shared.
If something is annoying us outside work, we usually fix it there and them. Stone in a shoe? We take it out. Have a headache? We take a painkiller. Thirsty? We have a drink of water. Problem. Solution applied. Job done.
Why then do so many of us keep all these issues quiet in work? Is it that we think we are the only one who sees the problem and we don’t want to stick our neck out and be scoffed at? Is it that the issue is being caused by someone way up the chain and there might be some form of resentment or reprisal for having highlighting it, or maybe it’s someone who is so highly respected that we don’t think there is any point bringing it up, as we will not be believed over them? Whatever the reason issues are often kept hidden, yet remain in our heads.
So how do we fix this? Well, really the simple answer is to create a culture where these can be flagged up, shared and dealt with, so the employees/company can move on.
Maybe one of the more famous examples of this approach is Airbnb.
They did an employee survey and realised that some employees didn’t like various aspects of the company culture, which didn’t align with what the company itself thought the culture was, or at least what it aspired be.
Now many companies could take that information and work quietly behind the scenes to try and fix whatever was identified in the survey and that’s all well and good, however it doesn’t necessarily deal with the core problem: that these issues had been kept well under wraps and that it took a survey to prise them out and shine a light on them. The quite fix doesn’t necessarily equate to employees becoming more vocal, rather they may just wait for the next survey to come along. Equally, unless the results are published in very honest, raw format, other employees may never realise there had been an issue raised.
What Joe Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb, did was to tackle this head on. For the regular, global meetings where employees had a voice, he introduced the concept of calling out elephants, dead fish and vomit.
- Elephants (as in the elephant in the room) are the big things that everybody can see, know they exists, but which are ignored and nobody is talking about.
- Dead fish (which rot and smell) are those things that have happened a while ago, maybe even years ago, that people just can’t let go as they have never been addressed. They fester.
- Vomit (purging oneself of bile) are the bits that employees just need to get off their chest right now to make themselves feel a little better. There may be less logic and more emotion attached, but keeping them inside is making that person feel sick and they need to get it out of their system.
It’s a raw, honest and brave approach to adopt.
Now for many companies who might think about using these types of prompts or framework, sensible advice is to keep your expectations low in the beginning. Start small, do it right and build on it.
There are many reasons why issues have not come to the surface before now. Simply putting a new label in place won’t necessarily mean employees will start spilling their guts to management (or peers) immediately.
There needs to be clear guidelines in when and (very importantly) how these issues are shared. It’s not an invite for employees to take every minute of every day to cast up any issues that cross their minds that second, or that they happened to remember coming into work.
Equally the issues need to be raised with respect as, more often than not, there may be people in the room who were either involved or impacted by the issue themselves (and who may hold a very different opinion on what happened)
Once identified there also needs to be some form of action. One of the things that will set you back from the off, when trying to embed an open, opinion sharing culture like this, is to ignore what has been identified.
Whether it’s right, wrong or shades of grey, the matter needs to be closed off and a resolution reached, so that everyone can move on from it.
Equally personal vendettas or reprisals for employees bringing up (genuine) issues can kill this stone dead.
Why raise an issue in good faith if you are going to have your career set back or be embarrassed by a rant in front of you peers, right? Proper guidelines need to be set and employees should know (or be taught) how to raise genuine issues constructively and have them acknowledged and dealt with respectfully.
Done right however (with appropriate follow up) these approaches can be very positive and liberating for the business. They can create an open culture where employees seek to improve the business and where accountability and honesty become cornerstones.
That’s not to say elephants, dead fish and vomit are your thing. Maybe the titles sound too extreme for your business. There are as you might expect multiple other varieties of this which companies employ, with similarly ‘catchy’ names.
From ‘squirrels’ (things which are distracting a team most, away from the important stuff) to ‘porcupines’ (prickly things that seem too spiky to go near) or ‘zombies’ (embedded, old ways of working that seem ingrained and impervious to change, they just seem to have been there forever and can’t be killed off).
You can shape the labels however you want, in a way that you think will work best for your workforce, but really the overarching principles are the same: encourage staff to get things in the open, give them a name and allow them to be dealt with, rather than fester away, souring and corroding employees and the business from the inside.
- Barry Shannon is a specialist in HR matters
