Transforming Work with Sophie Wade
115: Jenny He - Pursuing Productivity Managing Distributed Teams
Jenny He is the Founder, CEO, and licensed contractor at Ergeon, a construction company making home renovation easier for consumers and contractors. Jenny combines her strong engineering, technology, and consulting background to convert and facilitate contractors’ construction projects as well as to manage Ergeon’s fully distributed workforce. She applies a consistent, rigorous approach to contracted project progress and outcomes as well as to evaluating individual employees’ task and teamwork results. Jenny shares her thoughtful analysis of how productivity can be assessed and tracked appropriately for specific disciplines, teams, and individuals.
TAKEAWAYS
[03:15] Jenny is born in China to parents who are both engineers.
[03:53] Jenny moves to the UK at 10 years old as her father pursues research and his PhD.
[04:48] The family moves to Canada and Jenny studies electrical engineering at college.
[05:24] Enjoying solving hard problems, Jenny's PhD optimizes Internet routing protocols.
[07:23] A random situation results in Jenny becoming a consultant and joining McKinsey.
[08:37] Learning leadership and soft skills, Jenny follows good managers, not projects.
[09:34] The hardest part is not solving the problem but defining the right problem to solve.
[11:42] Jenny discovers insufficient technology is built to support skills tradespeople.
[13:00] Jenny proposes a useful solution for a skilled field tech—how else can she help?
[13:59] EZ Home’s app gamifies workflow for gardening service providers.
[15:28] The CTO/Founder of EZ Home also co-founded Odesk and has great relevant experience.
[16:22] Tackling physical work projects is even harder than Odesk’s business.
[16:48] Why the technology needs to be more mature for the new venture.
[19:29] Jenny wants to empower high skilled trade entrepreneurs.
[20:50] Renovating her home, Jenny plans and uses technology and has a positive experience!
[23:02] The name Ergeon captures the vision of the company.
[25:07] Measuring customers’ experiences is a key productivity metric.
[28:12] Jenny takes project complexity into account and assesses contributions to set prices.
[29:09] How Jenny's business takes care of most front- and back-office construction coordination.
[36:06] Creating a scalable, full distributed factory with an iterative communication process.
[31:02] Scalable groups perform tasks with construction knowledge embedded into the technology.
[32:28] They identify specific skills to hire for and teach the rest.
[33:25] Is the unit of productivity the team or the individual?
[34:55] To measure productivity, there often need to be sufficient similar jobs to compare.
[36:44] Onboarding is very deliberate since Ergeon hires many people with no experience.
[37:32] In the first few days, new hires are trained about processes and best practices.
[38:44] Role-playing in initial weeks’ boot camps increase knowledge and confidence.
[40:25] Onboarding timeframes and programs depend on the type and complexity of the role.
[42:30] Distributed working issue #1: Building trust is hard.
[43:15] Transparency is important to avoid a tiered system of senior execs and everyone else.
[44:12] Distributed work issue #2: Mitigating time zones using async methods and alignment.
[45:13] Distributed work issue #3: Interpersonal connections need purposeful nurturing.
[47:03] How to evaluate individuals whose productivity is measured at a team level.
[50:34] Technology progress leads to reskilling, evolving roles, and supported outplacement.
[53:27] IMMEDIATE ACTION TIP: To measure productivity, start with performance and assess variation between identical roles. Address systematic challenges hindering goal achievement including employees’ access to suitable tools before identifying productivity measures and ensure people have the training and support to focus their efforts.
[54:48] Jenny is revising for multiple exams so Ergeon can operate in many more U.S. states.
RESOURCES
QUOTES (edited)
“Often the hardest part isn't solving the problem, but defining what is the right problem to solve.”
“We also have other teams in the company like supply ops because it's a small team. we're looking at the team level targets and productivity versus the individual. Because I do believe, unless you have say five plus people doing exactly the same job, they can't be having some different variants of the job.”
“Building trust is hard, and it is harder in a distributed environment.”
“We are trying to create a scaleable factory where no one’s co-located.”
“We do a lot of async communications and make to make [work] sustainable for people. We're generally thoughtful about hiring for specific roles where async work is easier.”
On connection, “It's not even just about distributed or not, it's if everyone is co-located, it happens somewhat naturally. When you can't not see other people and have casual conversations, it has to be then very purposeful to create that environment. To give people that opportunity to connect.”
“Start with performance, before you think about productivity. Understand how much variation you have within the exact same roles. If the delta is huge, what is causing the delta—are there systematic challenges that make it difficult for people to achieve their goals?”
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