Olivia Williams joined us on The Modern People Leader.

We talked about how Vercel shortened its performance review cycle from 11 weeks to two weeks and how they built a 15-factor flight risk tool to retain top talent.

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(12:25) Why Vercel Rethought Its Performance Review Cycle

(13:35) Realizing Vercel Was Spending Five Months a Year in Review Mode

(14:05) Why Most Employees Submitted Reviews on the Last Day Anyway

(14:40) Cutting the Review Cycle From 11 Weeks to Two Weeks

(17:35) Faster Feedback and More Relevant Review Conversations

(18:55) What the Two-Week Review Cycle Looks Like

(20:50) Treating the Review Cycle Like a Product for the Business

(22:10) PerfBot and Continuous Monthly Feedback

(22:35) Why Olivia Wants to “Kill Culture Amp”

(24:05) Monthly Slack Check-Ins With Three Simple Questions

(26:00) Hiring an HR Technologist Inside the People Org

(27:15) Stephen’s Rant: Why Traditional SaaS Tools Are Cooked

(29:45) The Importance of Play, Curiosity and Building

(30:20) Why People Teams Need AI Muscle and HR Technologists

(32:30) Olivia Demos PerfBot in Slack

(37:40) Vercel’s Employee Health Score and Attrition Risk Tool

(40:40) Using Claude to Analyze 15 Employee Risk Factors

(43:20) Thinking of HR as a Product for Employees

(46:45) Advice for People Teams With Head Trash Around AI

(49:00) Why Companies Should Bake in Time to Build

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Past guests on MPL include Brené Brown, Annie Dean (VP of Team Anywhere, Atlassian), Josh Bersin, Katie Burke (Chief People Officer, Harvey), Liz Fosslien, Helen Russell (Chief People Officer, HubSpot), Dave Scott (Chief People Officer, ADT), Melanie Rossenwasser (Chief People Officer, Dropbox), Crystal Boysen (Chief People Officer, Sprout Social), and many more.

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