This tech CEO shares his secret for his 100% approval rating on Glassdoor - and any manager can do it
- Manny Medina is the CEO of a hot and fast-growing Seattle startup called Outreach.
- Through its rapid growth, Medina has, so-far, maintained a 100% approval rating on job-hunting site Glassdoor.
- He explained several reasons why he thinks this is so: he goes to great lengths to interact with his 300 employees in direct, personal and humanizing ways.
- He shared his three tips that any manager can do to create a happier team.
Manny Medina is the CEO of a hot Seattle startup called Outreach. The company is growing like gangbusters, from about 170 employees and 1,200 customers a year ago to about 300 employees and 2,400 customers today.
And Outreach just raised another $65 million ($125 million total raised so far) to fund more growth, too.
Medina is a former exec from Microsoft and worked, back in the day, at Amazon on the team that founded Amazon Web Services, Amazon's juggernaut cloud computing service.
But this is his first run as a CEO and founder. Often, when startups grow this fast, particularly under their founder CEOs, they hit predictable growing pains. As employees pour into the org, communication plummets. Then project management suffers, the right hand stops knowing what the left is doing, and employees grow frustrated and start complaining about the company and its management.
But for now Medina has a perfect 100% rating on Glassdoor while 97% would recommend the company to a friend. He knows that his perfect CEO rating probably won't last forever, that it will be impossible to keep everyone happy all the time.
Still, he shared some tips with Business Insider to help explain why his rating is so high and to give other managers useful advice to keep their team as happy as possible.
1. He personally greets every employee every morning, walking through the office to see everyone.
Medina is a high-energy, cheerful sort of guy, so his greeting comes in the form of a fist bump to each an every employee he sees when he comes into the office in the morning.
He began the tradition when the company was tiny and struggling to stay alive. The fist bump was a way to raise spirits, determination and energy, he told us.
It worked, too. The company turned around in 2015 and has been going gangbusters ever since.
Even now that the company is 300 employees (not all of them located at the headquarters office), he continues morning fist-bump tradition.
A fist bump might not be every manager's style, but the basic premise of a cheerful daily greeting to every person on the team before the day runs away can be adapted by anyone.
When you smile, it boosts your mood and the mood of the people you've smiled at. It makes you appear more courteous and likeable, and, most surprising, it also makes you appear more competent, research from the University of Missouri-Kansas City found.
2. He learns people's names.
"I do make an effort to memorize everyone's names. I know 300 first names and you can test me on that," he laughed. Obviously, the more people a manager oversees the more difficult it is to memorize everyone's names. But research shows that our brains become more engaged when we hear our first names.
So, to the extent that this is possible, it's worth the effort to learn as many names as possible.
3. He sends a weekly email of personal thoughts which humanizes him and the job of CEO.
"I send an email to the entire company every Sunday: How did my week go? What did I learn? Maybe a shout out. The emails are my point of view, where I just talk about what happened that week, top of mind, as if we had a beer together," he said.
"85% of the employees said they read the letter and didn't want it to stop, and the other 15% didn't answer the survey," he said. That clinched it. Employees liked it, so the email stayed.
Whether a weekly personal email is your style or not, the lesson here is that regular, personalized communication is the cornerstone of good communication. And this is not "messaging," although good leaders do need to be articulate the company's mission and priorities and repeat those messages often. This communicating is about interacting as a fellow human being, helping your staff understand why you make the decisions that you make.
Research shows that good communication has a massive impact on the workplace.
Robert Half's Happy Work report finds that managers who communicate well create camaraderie and that camaraderie leads to happier, more engaged employees.