7y
Ryan Petersen here - Flexport’s CEO. It’s never easy to hear that anyone had this experience working with us, and I’m sorry they feel this way. While I respect each person’s experience as their own, I would like to address a few of the items cited in the review, to clarify.
On employee NPS and satisfaction surveys: We take our employees’ experiences and how they feel about working here seriously. Feedback from our teammates is critical to helping us understand what we can improve or need to repair. I hope that the reviewer participated in the survey and gave us their candid feedback, but sounds like perhaps they didn’t, despite us having a clear process and vehicle to do so.
We use CultureAmp (to protect the individual respondents’ identities so as to encourage complete candor) to administer a comprehensive employee satisfaction survey two times each year. I personally wrote the questions, based on the values and characteristics I want to see in our company and culture. I also made it intentionally difficult for us to “pass” as a company, and I myself gave us low scores in a few areas, particularly around being data driven and steering resources to people and teams with the best track records.
The data is analyzed and used to make improvements - in fact, we have used feedback from surveys over the years to make changes to compensation plans, develop and implement a new decision framework, re-organize teams, and even make key leadership changes. Another great, survey-based action was to create and deploy a much more effective performance review cycle which structures feedback from managers and peers. An exhaustive calibration exercise is the run up, down, and across the company to ensure fairness between managers and departments, enabling a fair and balanced approach to promotions.
On career growth and geographic expansion: From our tremendous growth over the past six years, we can’t help but experience career paths developing from our increased size and complexity as a company. And a key part of our growth is to expand geographically, to be closer to our clients. I believe a cornerstone to a strong culture and solid employee engagement includes celebrating our wins. We’re exciting to be expanding in Chicago, and even opening new offices in Philadelphia and Seattle soon. Just as we’ve seen in the past (New York, Chicago, Atlanta, for example) we see tremendous growth opportunities from within the operations function, from where we’ve repeatedly found leaders for new territories. If anything, we recognize that in the past we’ve stretched our emerging leaders too far, and not provided enough training and mentorship in their new roles as managers.
On automation: It is no secret that the freight forwarding industry is practically a green field for improvements driven by automation. We’re excited by automation and what it brings (efficiency, reliability, transparency, the list goes on and on….), and we think about it A LOT. In 2018, we’ve been able to use technology developments and process improvements to shave 99 minutes of Flexport operations labor from the typical ocean container shipment from Asia to the US. There’s still a long way to go (eventually it should only require a compliance review!), but we are making progress. In the vein of celebrating wins, I will admit we need to do a better job of sharing more of these types of successes, more frequently.
On changing employee referral bonuses: We did make a change to our bonus program, where we moved from a cash-based referral bonus, to a donation-based award. This change increased referrals. That’s why we did it, not to save money. If future experiments show that monetary bonuses lead to a higher instance of successful internal referrals, we can bring back the cash.
Practice candor is one of our company values. It’s not always the easiest value to live, but important nonetheless. That’s what “Many Problems” and I have both done here. I’m committed to nurturing and improving the environment in which existing employees at Flexport can practice candor while they are still here - so we can constantly improve, for our colleagues and clients, alike.
