Underperforming staff at startups should either leave immediately or be given six weeks to improve, the boss of Revolut has said as he laid out his philosophy for building fast-growing tech businesses in a new report.
A high performance firm must “direct resources to retain and promote top talent” while focusing on “exiting underperformers as fast as possible,” Nik Storonsky said, adding: “Experience has shown that employees are unlikely to naturally return to an ‘above bar’ level of performance in a role were they have been consistently underperforming.”
Employees who are identified as underperforming must “take an enhanced separation package….and leave immediately,” 0r be given six weeks to demonstrate they are capable of ‘above bar’ performance.
Storonsky’s views were laid out as part of a new playbook released by Quantumlight, a venture investing business he founded earlier this year, offering a step-by-step guide for implementing these best practices into any tech startup that founders can put into action.
“We are publishing best practices that I wish I had access to in the early days of Revolut. We condensed years of learning into an easily accessible tool for the unicorn founders of tomorrow,” Storonsky said.
The report sheds light on some of the employment practices adopted by Storonsky and his co-founder Vlad Yatsenko as they built Revolut into a $45 billion fintech business over the past decade. Some of those practices have attracted criticism.
According to a Guardian report, some former Revolut staff have claimed “they were set unachievable targets in the name of the startup’s growth, forced to do unpaid work and put under severe pressure to the point where they eventually quit their jobs.”
Revolut last year said it had assembled a team to track whether staff are being “approachable” and “respectful” in a bid to address criticism over its corporate culture and foster a more “human” approach to its working environment.
Previous job ads posted by Revolut have warned the “bar is very high” and staff falling short of “perfection” will be assessed “accurately, not kindly”, even though “it might hurt sometimes”.
Among other recommendations in the Quantumlight report, published today, Storonsky suggests assembling a team of talented employees who report directly to the CEO on staff performance matters separately to the HR function.
“Talent is a force multiple for a company – it shouldn’t sit under HR, but it should be a core priority of the CEO’s office,” the report says. It recommends individual performance reviews with the opportunity for promotion every six months, with promotions based on performance rather than tenure, and the largest bonuses reserved for the most impactful staff.
“A-players are the biggest contributors to company success, and they should be rewarded exponentially,” the report says.
Ilya Kondrashov, CEO of QuantumLight, said: “Cultivating a high-performance environment in your startup is a complex but crucial task, and, in the tech world, sound advice from founders who built a global business is hard to come by.”
Quantumlight’s full report is available to read here.
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