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Google Snippets

November 1, 2023 by I Done This Support

The Definitive Guide to Google Snippets

I knew nothing about Google Snippets before I moved to Silicon Valley. But when I was out there, I kept hearing that successful company after company — like Google, Facebook, Foursquare, Buzzfeed and more — used the snippets system to power a flat and decentralized management structure, enabling autonomy, transparency, and happiness in the company.

This guide tells everything you need to know about Google snippets, from its inception at Google to how it’s used at top tech companies today. You’ll learn why snippets is so useful and how to get snippets going in your own company.

If you’re interested in using iDoneThis for snippets, just go to idonethis.com. We’d love to hear what you think about snippets and our guide at @idonethis.

This Deli Makes $50 Million a Year By Staying Small

November 1, 2023 by I Done This Support

smallgiants

It’s crazy to discover there’s a deli that makes $50 million dollars a year. It’s stranger still how they’ve managed to accomplish it.

Most restaurants grow their revenue by opening more locations and eventually developing a franchise model like Subway. You sell more and more sandwiches as you open more and more stores. The problem is scale — maintaining quality over a massive empire is much harder than over a single shop. Your restaurant becomes more about volume than great food and remarkable service.

Zingerman’s, a deli based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, faced this fork in the road: open more locations or face continually stagnating revenue growth. Instead of choosing the conventional franchise path, they blazed their own trail.

The Shit Sandwich and Other Terrible Ways to Give Feedback

November 1, 2023 by I Done This Support

Contrary to common misconception, giving feedback—insightful, useful feedback—is surprisingly difficult. Why? Because, as legendary venture capitalist Ben Horowitz once observed, it’s completely, utterly unnatural.

“If your buddy tells you a funny story, it would feel quite weird to evaluate her performance. It would be totally unnatural to say: ‘Gee, I thought that story really sucked. It had potential, but you were underwhelming on the build up then you totally flubbed the punch line. I suggest that you go back, rework it and present it to me again tomorrow.’ Doing so would be quite bizarre, but evaluating people’s performances and constantly giving feedback is precisely what a CEO must do.”

Sometimes it’s tempting to feed our employees a shit sandwich—more on this momentarily—and give vital feedback in other completely awful ways, but it’s crucial to your career as a manager that you resist the urge to do so. As a cautionary tale, here are three uniquely terrible ways that inexperienced managers often give feedback and how you can avoid doing this yourself.

18 Best Places To Store Your Team’s Documents

January 2, 2024October 24, 2023 by I Done This Support

You should always store team documents in a secure and organized manner is imperative for businesses because it isn’t an ordinary document it is a sensitive file that needs to be protected at all costs. Documentation is to your business what water is to fish. It’s everywhere. You need it to survive and grow. A … Read more

95% of Managers Follow an Outdated Theory of Motivation

November 1, 2023October 24, 2023 by I Done This Support

This post was originally published in 2014. It has been revamped with additional research and advice for managers in 2023.

Photo by Alex Kotliarskyi on Unsplash

What, by a long shot, is the most important motivator for employees at work? Is it money, pressure, or praise?

Typically, managers believe the idea that pressure makes diamonds. The thinking is that if you want exceptional performance, you align employee objectives with end-of-year bonuses for hitting certain milestones and then employees will turn up their work ethic to reach them.

Long-held conventional wisdom on management dies hard. That’s because it’s based on gut instinct and superstition — and managerial understanding of motivation is no different. A massive 95% of managers are wrong about what the most powerful motivator is for employees at work.

Not only that, they’re thinking about employee motivation fundamentally wrong.

The Ultimate Remote Tool Stack For 2020

October 24, 2023 by I Done This Support

This is a guest post from Lisa Banks, an expert in workplace communication and writer at content marketing agency Animalz.

Choosing the right tools for your remote team is second only to hiring the right people.

There are a number ted talks for teamwork available to inspire your remote team but choosing the right kind of tools is more important than that.

Remote tools offer structure, streamline operations, and hold your company together as it grows. And you need a lot of them. You need remote tools for team communication, tools for talking to people outside your organization like customers and vendors, tools for managing the business, tools for hiring and development, and so on.

But picking the right tools for a distributed company is not easy with so many to choose from. I’ve whittled through every remote tool in the most common categories to pull together a list. All the following tools are ones my team uses or have come highly recommended by other remote teams.

If you’re setting up a distributed team this year, these are the remote work tools you need.

This Company Made Millions Because There Was Nothing Going On

October 24, 2023 by I Done This Support

Harvest is a multimillion-dollar, fantastically profitable, growing business that boasts thousands of customers from freelancers to Fortune 500 companies. The company has grown to over 30 employees and boasts one of the most beautiful tech offices in New York City.

But it’s how they did it that’s most impressive — over the course of 10 years, without a dime of outside investment, 100% bootstrapped, and in the city of New York.

In an age of tech celebrity, high-profile fundraises, and billion-dollar acquisitions, it’s how Harvest founders Shawn Liu and Danny Wen’s achieved success that you’ll find incredible. What Shawn told me was their secret ingredient is something you’ll never guess.

You can also check out this company’s culture which is reported to be making over $50 million per year.

Company with the “World’s Least Powerful CEO” Makes $2.5 Million Every Day

October 24, 2023 by I Done This Support

The popular depiction of the CEO is the titan of industry who rules with an iron fist. The CEO’s will is the employees’ command.

Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen, the world's least powerful CEO, organized Supercell into autonomously-working cells

Not so at Supercell, a remarkable Finnish company that’s making $2.5 million dollars every day and has been described as “the fastest growing company ever.” Supercell CEO Ilkka Paananen, calls himself “the world’s least powerful CEO”, and that’s not the surprising part. What’s incredible is that Paananen made himself a weak CEO by design:

This company beat even Zingerman’s which is reported to be generating over $50 million in revenue per year.

Share More Feedback and Recognition with Individual Likes & Comments Per Done

October 24, 2023 by I Done This Support

Many of you told us that you wanted to be able to give specific feedback on people’s dones, and we couldn’t have agreed more. So we’ve revamped the feedback system so that you can now add comments and likes to individual dones — on the web and through your email digests!

Likes and comments per done at iDoneThis

These changes may seem simple, but for us, these small improvements are significant. We had a hunch that improving the feedback system to make it more responsive and interactive would be key to increasing the engagement and fulfillment of our members with their work. Since launching the feedback per done feature on February 6, we noticed some interesting trends that indicate we’re on the right track. We thought we’d share some of those preliminary observations, based on three measurements: number of likes over time, number of users giving likes, and number of comments over time.

The number of likes and comments won’t be as fake as your manager’s feedback sandwich. Haven’t heard about this term before? You can learn that in this iDoneThis article.

Remote Work is Here to Stay

October 27, 2023October 24, 2023 by I Done This Support

Remote work is increasing across the globe, in every industry that can manage it—and it isn’t just the pandemic that’s making it happen.

Sure, the pandemic forced an increase in speed and breadth of adoption, but this snowball has been rolling down the hill for years. Employees expect more flexibility; employers need to prepare for a massive change in the average worker’s schedule, the likes of which haven’t been seen since the Industrial Revolution.

Whether you’re a team leader, an investor, or a business owner, you have to understand this: Remote work is here to stay. And it can be very effective, too—especially with the use of tools to help you and your workers maximize their morale and production, no matter where they’re logging on from.