Introducing Zeal – Breaking the norm of company culture | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Zeal – Breaking the norm of company culture

zeal.technology

This feels a little dehumanizing to me. As a manager and someone tasked with helping build company culture, pushing that work off to a chatbot seems like an abdication. As an employee, I value having a relationship with my boss where I can convey concerns and where he elicits them. Anonymous feedback absolutely has its place, but this seems targeted at replacing regular 1:1 bidirectional feedback, which is an incredibly important part of good culture.

We do not aim to replace relationship between manager and employee. In fact our goal is to help strengthen the relationship. Believe it or not many managers do not have the proper training when becoming a manager to implement meaningful 1:1 meetings to solicit feedback and gauge how their people are feeling. We aim to better track and improve this relationship with gathered metrics so that managers never miss a beat. We also acknowledge that many people are not comfortable giving feedback in a one on one or publicly so our goal is to provide a channel for them to do so comfortably and productively. We have seen teams address feedback that has come through Ava and even implement and improve parts of their culture that management had no idea was an issue for its employees.

With that said, Ava is meant to strengthen relationships on the team and help the team collaborate when it comes to company culture. She even provides metrics on how relationships are within the company.

My two cents: Not sure what "Breaking the norm of company culture" means, but a company culture can be an important way to communicate the core values of a company. "Measure employee engagement" which is elsewhere on the website communicates the purpose much more clearly. Until I read your meetava page I thought this was some kind of replacement for company culture. Best of luck!

Thank you for the encouragement! :) We are actively working on fixing our message on the website to be more direct and clear.

Closed the website after a few unfruitful attempts at figuring out what it was about without watching videos.

Not nice.

Welcome to Zombocom!

sorry to hear that we will look at making some adjustments to come across more clear without the video

Honestly, a paragraph saying something like "Quarterly feedback reports are time-consuming, interrupt workflow, and often get put off or forgotten entirely, and waiting three months to get useful data prevents you from being proactive about changes. Zeal polls your employees via slack, getting data more often and taking less of their time and attention, allowing you to get more feedback faster and respond quicker than ever before."

Other feedback: if you used the Slack feature that lets you put buttons in messages this would get even more zero-friction than before because people could just click the opinion they had. Just a thought.

This is absolutely amazing feedback. They should send you a check. I was uninterested until reading your pitch.

Thanks for the suggestion! We actually have buttons in the works, the should be up in the next few days for all teams. They do make it so that all you do is click and move on.

We're taking all the feedback that we're getting and prioritizing what to work on next, thanks for helping out!

Hi danudey, We really appreciate your feedback and are taking it to heart. We were hoping to get in touch with you so that we could show our appreciation for the feedback you have given us.

Part of our mission is to help people be heard so that they can have a voice in shaping company culture and yours has been very appreciated here at Zeal. If we could get in contact with you so that we could show our appreciation that would be great! Let us know how we can get in contact!

Also, I'm unable to fast forward/rewind through video. Please hire a voice actor.

I've no idea what they do either, but I do know of ANOTHER zeal that's a really useful tool for viewing documentation offline:

https://zealdocs.org/

This is a common trend I've seen repeatedly. They have a great video on their website that makes it super obvious what they do in a short amount of time, and basically no information other than that to help you decide if it's worth looking at.

Honestly, it's not a complicated system. Four screenshots would convey the process super clearly, and they could be screen caps from the video. The product itself seems simple, clean, and easy to explain. I'm not sure why people don't bother doing so.

Suggestion to stop using the same fucking stock images with the same fucking benches everybody else is using to symbolize "cool company".

Noted :)

There is no such thing as good or bad company culture. The culture either supports the strategy or does not. Warm, fluffy and nice is an option, but there are others. A real pity the huge body of literature on this has been ignored.

Feel Free to ask us any questions here!

is it possible to chat with a demo ava somewhere?

We can set up a demo for you. Currently we are working on a way to talk directly to ava without installing her.

that would be awesome. please email me.

Since your website doesn't tell us, what is this?

yes. if you navigate to http://zeal.technology/meetava.html it should give a bit more info. our product is a chatbot named ava. she integrates with your slack team and gauges how your team is doing. she uses weak ai to gauge your morale, autonomy, mastery and a few other things. she is conversational and allows you to provide anonymous feedback to your company.

> our product is a chatbot named ava. she integrates with your slack team and gauges how your team is doing. she uses weak ai to gauge your morale, autonomy, mastery and a few other things. she is conversational and allows you to provide anonymous feedback to your company.

consider spelling it out like that on your front page. you've a two line description of what you do in the above that is 10x more informative and useful than what's currently there.

Thanks for the feedback! It really helps us revise what we do and do not show.

That page is SO much more informative. I let the video run for about thirty seconds before closing it, with no idea what you were selling or what problem you were trying to solve.

That should be the front page. It's informative.

thank you for the feedback. we really appreciate it and will make adjustments

Counterpoint: As I've said in other threads your front page should definitely have a clear, concise explanation, but I think your video explains it pretty clearly.

I do think a transparent pricing structure is important though. I generally assume that 'call us' means 'if you have to ask you can't afford it', and immediately skip over any service that doesn't let me immediately calculate a specific number I'll pay every month, and I assume that 'schedule a demo' is like 'schedule a webinar', and that you're targeting your business (and pricing structure) towards C-level execs or upper management rather than the people who are actually implementing policies.

It sounds like 'Ava' will need to interrupt employees and prompt for feedback on some frequent recurring basis in order to provide what your marketing describes as 'realtime' results. How are you going to balance this distraction and annoyance against your product requirements?

Ava reaches out to employees on a scheduleable basis and does what we call a "Check-In". Check-ins are short questions that are answered on varying scales that give insight into what is really going on at the company.

These interactions typically take between five and fifteen seconds to complete, and then you're back to whatever you were doing before. We have tuned when and how Ava reaches out to minimize annoyance, and to keep productivity high. We also let employees respond at their own convenience, so it's not like you have to immediately give Ava your attention.

Here's an example: http://i.imgur.com/M5cyOvZ.png

My experience with doing our own internal employee satisfaction reports is that they generally tend to be just enough work that I have to go out of my way to do them, or rather, stop saying "I'll do that later".

On the other hand, I go and check Slack every now and then, clear out all my unreads, and then go back to work. If part of that process is typing '4' into one of those windows then it's basically zero-friction from my perspective.

In other words, as long as getting a Slack message doesn't already interrupt, distract, and annoy people, neither will this, and if it does then you can tune your Slack notification settings to handle that. Turn off push notifications for the bot and you'll only see/answer the question when you go into the app to clear out unreads.

Not having pricing on your page (or .. having the "up to 10 users -> free", "more than 10-> call us") is a non-starter imo. I need some idea of pricing before I spend any time looking. $10/user/year? $100? $1000?

That's fantastic feedback, we're taking everyone's comments and deciding what changes we want to implement next.

Your CTA is missing the word "Again" at the end. /s

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