Building a culture of transparency
How KPIs bring alignment and transparency to the BlaBlaCar team
Some managers fear transparency, and the lack of control that results from it. They prefer to retain information. I believe that’s a big mistake. What you gain from trusting your own team and sharing learnings from your performance creates way more value for all.
BlaBlaCar has a strong culture of transparency, anchored in some of its core internal principles such as “Share more. Learn more”, which creates space for sharing information and learning from each other, or “Fail. Learn. Succeed”, which encourages team members to communicate about failures so that we all learn from them.
This culture of transparency at BlaBlaCar has also been illustrated by one specific habit: regularly sharing a select set of KPIs that everyone can relate to, that we systematically track through time, and which we regularly report on to the team.
As I exchanged with other founders, I realised that many were curious about how we developed this habit and what its merits are. So I thought a brief post might be worthwhile to share insights with a larger group.
It all starts with being clear about what we, as a team and as a company, are optimising for — communicating it clearly, and holding ourselves accountable for it.
5 KPIs — BlaBlaCar’s “health check”
We identified 5 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that encompass what we want to achieve irrespective of the context, and importantly that send the right incentives to the executive and senior teams. These KPIs keep our team aligned on where we want to be and how to get there.
Setting company KPIs is a tricky exercise, and an often misunderstood and frustrating one. It’s hard to make the choice between meaningful targets, whether they’re financial, related to our team or to our product.
Since 2018, we’ve started to systematically report to the entire company on these 5 key metrics that I believe to be the drivers of long-term value. They are our regular “health checks”. Irrespective of evolving company objectives and specific project OKRs, we never lose sight of these five indicators and communicate them to the entire team at least three times a year during CEO talks.
- Employee NPS: to measure employee health and happiness, month after month, team by team;
- Member NPS: to measure the health and happiness of our 90+ million members in 22 countries;
- # Passengers transported: because at the end of the day, that’s what we do!
- Gross Margin: it shows our ability to sell our service, and to do so at reasonable cost.
- EBITDA: that’s the ultimate goal to build a self-sustaining business.
Here’s how the logic goes: happy employees give their best to satisfy our members, who in return use our product more, turning usage into revenue (and with reasonable cost-based, high growth margin), and eventually profitability, which then allows us to meet the needs of our employees and members sustainably over time. It’s a virtuous cycle, with each pillar sustaining the next. Missing one could significantly damage the chain and ultimately affect the bottom line and long-term success.
Transparency in practice
The way we put these KPIs into play and make them tangible for everyone is by having two plans:
- A Red Line plan that is essentially the lower bound and the limit below which we fail.
- An Ops plan that is a realistically ambitious upward bound at which we feel we’ve executed well.
We then hold ourselves accountable by applying Red Line and Ops Plan for the five company KPIs and regularly reporting on where we are, and more importantly why we under-perform or over-perform and what’s being done about it. In practice, at each all-hands CEO-talks, which occur at least three times a year, I provide an update on how the company is doing and where these numbers stand.
Communicating on underperformance is key to learn and progress — in line with our “Fail. Learn. Succeed” principle. And celebrating successes matters just as much when everyone is giving their best to achieve very ambitious roadmaps. These regular check-ins create space for both, and empower the team to understand where we’re heading and where the brick they are building fits into the wider story.
Last and not least, we incentivise our executive and leadership teams on these KPIs only, that determine their bonuses. It makes it real and re-enforces alignment.
This “Health check” model is simple, it’s transparent and creates alignment. It also develops a mutual understanding on how we connect our mission to these KPIs in the long-term and what we solve for short-term. As I often say, you rarely achieve great things long-term by messing up every short-term objective…
More importantly, it builds trust with the team and empowers each and everyone of our team members to know how we’re doing and why.
