May 28, 2024
How often have you heard the term 'driving high-performance' in teams?
I hear it all the time.
Using the word drive is an interesting choice. It normalises comparing a team to a car. One that the leader - being in the driver's seat - has full control of. Continuing the analogy the team is therefore a machine. A collection of mechanical objects. One that heads in the direction it's steered, at the speed determined by the driver's foot. End of story.
"What do you wanna be when you grow up one day Olivia? I wanna be a piston!" Said no kid ever.
Teams are not machines. They are a group of humans working together. Complete with emotion, imagination and the ability to reason. Despite the advances in AI in recent years - humans are still, by comparison, quite spectacular.
Why? With the right information and motivation, a team of humans can still go far beyond what any machine can do. They can over-deliver and they can innovate.
So, let’s start by ditching the first piece of BS associated with high-performance. People are not like machines, nor should they try to be.
Many employees perceive leaders as a distant character. Even more so with CEOs. They assume CEOs are very busy, but rarely know what it is they are busy with. Rather than being a distant leader, I have decided to be an intimate one.
Using the word intimacy is deliberate. The meaning in this context is being close. After our restructure last year, the top request from our team was for more transparency.
As CEO, I am privy to every success and challenge we face across the entire business. I encounter many of both every week. I know the direction we are headed. I know what we need to achieve in the short, medium and long term to succeed. I know what obstacles we may encounter. I know our strengths, and our weaknesses. And I know how we intend to react to various scenarios. Obviously, I don't know it all. But I know more than most. My vantage point updates in real-time every day.
Having that view is a privilege.
So, one of my top priorities as a CEO is to share a simple version of that view to the entire team. I do it once a month at a company wide meeting. I put effort into presenting this in a thoughtful and digestible way.
I want everyone to feel like an insider.
It's not easy to maintain candour to this degree with an entire organisation. Conversely, it's not always easy for the team to hear when things haven't gone to plan. But I have remained committed to this approach and I know the team universally appreciate it.
How often have you heard the term 'It's not personal, it's business'?
I hear that one all the time too.
For an employee, business is extremely personal. A person's livelihood, security, and happiness relies on your company's success. Pretending that it's not is utter BS.
Another way I develop intimacy is regular one-on-ones with every team member at Joyous. I do this once every three months. This is an invaluable way to create a safe space for vulnerable conversations.
Each person is unique and each conversation is different. As a result I understand and appreciate every person for who they are. And I hope the same understanding of who I am will develop in return.
Mutual empathy is a gift - over time we have built a network of empathy across the entire team.
The idea that people should operate on a 'need-to-know' basis. Yup, you guessed it - more BS.
As a CEO, every thing you say matters. Every word counts. Your words have the power to clarify, inspire and motivate teams. Your words (or lack thereof) can also confuse, discourage and demoralise them.
When it comes to ensuring teams are able to achieve goals, why is as important as what. If not more important. A lot of leaders don't spend enough time on this. Telling people what to do is easy. Getting a team to internalise why it matters is hard.
If you can do this well, then your team will understand how their actions will make an impact. This dramatically increases the likelihood of high-performance.
If they don't understand why, things can go wrong.
One of my biggest learnings is that it's not enough to explain your why's once. You need to explain many times over - ideally from different angles. Why this choice? What other choices were considered? Who was involved? What information was used? What impact will this have? What impact will not doing this have? Why now? Who will this impact? How will this impact them? It's those sweet little why's that add up to one big Aha! for the team.
There's this wonderful haiku that I really love.
In Kyoto,
hearing the cuckoo,
I long for Kyoto.
It's written by Bashō.
He loved Kyoto, the city in Japan so much, that he wrote this poem about it. And it perfectly sums up how I feel about Joyous.
At Joyous,
feeling the struggle,
I long for Joyous.
I feel a responsibility to impart my feeling of gratitude for being part of Joyous to others.
Even if Joyous were to fail (it won't). Even if I was presented another opportunity (I have been). There's no place else I'd rather be. I cherish this moment. As if it's already past and I have the benefit of hindsight. I cherish this team that I get to work with every day. As if I already miss them. Success for Joyous is inevitable. Because this is a high-performing team that I have the privilege of supporting.
I don't want to be the leading cause for a team to feel constant stress or pressure. A stressed team are less likely to be sustainably high-performing.
So, I try to impart that feeling of gratitude to others.
In today's world, particularly as a parent and a leader I've noticed something curious. We treat kids like adults, and adults like kids. It's the wierdest BS of all.
I was recently asked if working from an office was a reason for our teams high performance. The answer is yes for some, but not for the reason you think.
Forcing people to work from an office will not translate to a high-performing team. We do not have an office so that we can monitor and control people. We have an office so that people who appreciate being able to work from an office have a place to go when they feel like it.
For our fully remote team members, they can also work from an office if they want to and we will subsidise them. It's about mental well-being and spending quality time with people you actually like. It's not about command and control.
Here's a crazy idea...lets treat kids like kids and adults like adults. One way to treat an adults appropriately is to give them really good information and then trust them to do the right thing.
I've never seen that idea tested as intensely as we are doing now at Joyous. With the right people, this 100% works. I believe it's the number one reason we have such a high performing team.
I thought it would be ironic to ask a machine what humans view as high performance. So that's what I did. GPT 4o tells me it's "The ability of a group to exceed goals and expectations consistently". It further elaborates on seven key elements that make up high performance:
That's a pretty solid list. The focus of this blog was to delve more into the last element: Leadership and Management.
Here's why: It doesn't matter how good a team is at the first six elements. And besides any credit for the first six belongs to the team. If the leadership and management isn't clear and supportive the team may be performing extremely well despite being disadvantaged - at doing the wrong thing.
Good design = more accurate and useful responses. Every question:
And yes, skipping a question is always an option. This keeps participants in control and increases survey completion rates.
The Joyous HR Engagement model is based upon an Open Source project that was released by Joyous in 2019, namely the EX Genome Project. This engagement model has continuously evolved and been regularly updated and revised since.
In 2025, the Joyous HR Engagement Model consists of a library of assets, including survey and campaign templates, all of which are available directly from the tool in the People & Culture category of the Campaign Templates Gallery.
These templates are highly customisable and configurable:
The Employee Experience Genome Project V1.0 was first released in 2019 after 18 months of research. Since then Joyous has incorporated the feedback and analysis of millions of responses in Joyous.
The purpose of the Employee Experience Genome project is to demystify the science of measuring employee experience and engagement - enabling a more transparent, productive workplace. And importantly: to make that science easy to understand and accessible for all.
The premise of the model is that Employee Experience is everything people encounter, observe or feel at work. Employee Engagement is the emotional commitment people have to their workplace.
The model breaks Employee Experience into three core categories that have the greatest impact on engagement: Culture & Environment, Fairness & Inclusion, and Wellbeing. These are complimented by a fourth category: Engagement.
Each category includes three topics. The first release included 25 question pairs offering two rated statements per topic, each with a related open-text question, often referred to as a conversation starter.
A few early adopters in the first two years saw great success with the conversational approach. The biggest success was a shift in the perception that 'nobody is listening' and 'nothing ever changes' as a result of feedback. For many, changes were personal, and therefore highly visible.
Leaders were responding directly to employee feedback. Ensuring a positive employee experience was no longer perceived as the sole responsibility of the HR team. Instead it became a shared responsibility across HR, leaders and the individual employee.
At the same time other adopters faced challenges. Not all teams or industries were ready for open dialogue between managers and employees. Our research discovered a strong correlation in drop off rates to manager engagement.
In all cases, repeated exposure to the same questions led to fatigue - similar to what occurs with traditional surveys - and participation gradually dropped off over time.
Participation rates dropped by 15% to 35% over a six to 12 month period until hitting a plateau.
Another challenge faced was skepticism from senior leaders that the scoring was accurate, due to the open nature of the feedback. Joyous later conducted an experiment which disproved this, however this skepticism remained.
In parallel, many customers started using Joyous for operational feedback. Their goal was to make people's jobs easier by reducing friction in their daily tasks. This not only improves employee experience but also has a positive impact on cost efficiency and productivity. In contrast to the employee experience use case, the operational use case found open and conversational feedback to be effective and universally positive.
Instead of conversations with managers, employees were engaging directly with Subject Matter Experts or Project Leaders right before or after they implemented significant changes in products, services, tools, processes or organisational structure.
Several customers correlated an increase in their employee engagement scores with the shift to using Joyous for operational feedback.
In 2021, Joyous released Employee Experience Genome Project V2.0.
The original question set was revised based on feedback from early adopters, employee comments and exhaustive analysis on the performance of individual questions. The model also expanded to 50 question pairs, enabling two sets to be rotated every six months. The adoption of the revised model saw an initial uplift in adoption and a slower drop off rate for new adopters over time.
In 2022, Joyous released a third version as the Te Reo Māori Employee Experience Genome Project V1.0. As a proudly New Zealand organization Joyous worked with our valued partner, Maurea Consulting, to adapt both the model and the Joyous product to support delivering the model in dual language side-by-side. This was the same 50 question pairs as version 2.0, with some further improvements to the english questions based on feedback and in-line Te Reo Māori versions to support our Kiwi customers in helping to uplift Māori cultural competency.
Over the course of 2022 to 2025, most Joyous customers shifted away from weekly conversations between managers and employees. Today, nearly all Joyous HR customers use a combination of quarterly surveys and action focused campaigns - following the current Joyous HR Engagement Model, outlined in this article.
The EX Genome model has been adapted and refined over the last three years to suit this approach and been renamed to the Joyous HR Engagement Model and action-focused campaign templates targeting specific topics were added to compliment the surveys. This version is not Open Source.
Joyous supports a variety of question types and features to suit different goals — from measuring engagement to collecting targeted, actionable feedback. Three core question types are used in the Joyous HR Engagement Surveys and Campaigns.
A 10 minute assessment (29 questions) of work experience, suitable for annual measurement across engagement, well-being, culture & environment and fairness & inclusion.
Download the template in an excel workbook here.
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A medium length (13 questions) assessment of work experience, suitable for six monthly or annual measurement across engagement, well-being, culture & environment and fairness & inclusion.
A short assessment (6 questions) of work experience, suitable for quarterly measurement.
Targeted conversational campaigns focused on specific improvements on topics such as: Environment, Growth, Role Support & Strategy.
Approach:
Action focused campaigns should only be run one to three months before the organization intends to take action on a focused topic. They are a fast and meaningful way to gather specific actionable ideas from people. This greatly helps improve the quality, awareness and adoption of the prioritised actions.
Download the template in an excel workbook here.
And there you have it! If you made it this far, well done! You now have a comprehensive understanding of how Joyous recommends approaching HR and Engagement with our Employee Experience (EX) product.
Rest assured, your account manager will partner with you on your journey and you will be supported at every step. We are here to work alongside you and will tailor our approach to suit your unique requirements and culture.
If you have any feedback or questions don't hesitate to reach out to your account manager directly.
Ruby is a comedian-turned engineer, previously leading product at two global tech companies, she has been CEO at Joyous for 4 years. Her passion for making a positive impact on people’s lives is perfectly matched with the mission of Joyous to make life better for people at work.
She enjoys working across all parts of the organization and is passionate about product direction and data science.
She is the co-author of Joyfully, a book about shared leadership, modern organizational structures, and a new way of working. Her second book Pathways, is a guide to help woman and other under-represented people get a job in technology in six months or less.
She was the Winner of the Product Category for Women Leading Tech Australia 2022 and a finalist in the Inspiring Individual Category of the HiTech awards in 2023.