Jun 20, 2018
Simplus Response
7yThank you for your feedback! I have reviewed your thoughts with key members of the executive team and we’d love to respond to a few items you’ve pointed out to see if we can clarify our messaging:
Utah culture - Simplus is a global organization. We are proud of our Utah heritage where hard work, honesty, and accountability are key features to the Utah culture and history. 5/9 of our executive team and roughly 90% of our employee base are all based out of Utah. With that in mind, we strive to focus our internal messaging to apply to all of our employees. In July of 2018 we will have 300 employees and about one-third of those are outside of the U.S. in our Philippines and Canada locations. Simplus is headquartered in Utah, however our corporate culture is based off of our three company values: Critical Thinking, Stewardship, and the Underdog Spirit. Employees are recognized for the work they provide our clients and other employees and we are transparent when feedback is received that is both good and bad.
Non-existent strategic thinking - each quarter, our executive team comes together to present a new Playbook for the quarter. This document outlines what is most important to all of Simplus employees and is at its core functions a purely strategic document. Business strategy is defined by Michael D. Watkins writing for the Harvard Business Review as, “a set of guiding principles that, when communicated and adopted in the organization, generates a desired pattern of decision making. A strategy is therefore about how people throughout the organization should make decisions and allocate resources in order accomplish key objectives. A good strategy provides a clear roadmap, consisting of a set of guiding principles or rules, that defines the actions people in the business should take (and not take) and the things they should prioritize (and not prioritize) to achieve desired goals.” We would be open to feedback from our employees via our Anonymous HR Feedback tool in Salesforce, or our All-Ideas Slack channel on how we can better communicate our business strategy and provide this information to employees in a usable format.
Management cares more about publicity than performance -- During our weekly company meeting the number one topic and most important thing we discuss is customer satisfaction. This is our company's number one initiative across all departments and in our company Playbook, we track and focus on Customer Satisfaction Ratings, 5-star reviews, and hitting Pipeline, Sales Bookings, and Revenue targets. In July of 2017 we hired a VP of Marketing and started to consider our public performance valuable as a form of external recognition what allows us to grow our customer base and solutions is happy referenceable customers.
“Crowdsourcing an expansion strategy” via interactive Zoom poll - Simplus allows for open Q&A at the end of each company meeting. We also use Zoom as an organization-wide video conferencing tool. This tool allows us to poll employees real-time and later run analysis on the results. These results, while interesting and immediately engaging, did not alter the business plan the executive team was using behind the scenes to consider expansion strategies. It allows us to get a pulse on the thoughts and interests of our employees, to potentially affect where we decide to look at building in the future.
Focus more on business performance and quality -- As listed in the Simplus Q2 Playbook, our “most important thing” for this quarter is “to drive consistent delivery quality through consulting and technical training.” You nailed it! We continually update our focus for each quarter to be nimble and be able to react to the market. As discussed in our company meetings, our goals are set internally and not by Salesforce. We intend on becoming a global contender regardless of our partner ranking or Salesforce certification program.
As we mentioned, we have anonymous suggestion features internally, along with multiple Slack channels where feedback can be given. Based on your response, I would also encourage you to review, in detail, our executive teams’ V2MOMs and our current quarter Playbook to familiarize yourself with our current business strategy.
