Emerald uses a Fresh Eyes Journal to capture new hires' unfiltered observations during their first quarter. Employees note odd processes, interview colleagues about the reasoning, and propose fixes. Founders dread reading them because they expose real problems, but the practice prevents groupthink and complacency.
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So the last thing that I wanna talk to you about in terms of the sort of present day stuff is something that we call our Fresh Eyes Journal. And this is something that came out of the idea that we have all of these amazing employees and we wanted a way to capture their sort of initial feedback on the company, because when you're in something and you're working at something for years, things that seem bizarre and unusual to other people just begin to seem commonplace to you. And so it becomes very easy to sort of become immune to things about the way your organization operates that are strange or maybe incorrect. So one of the things that we do is every employee who joins Emerald gets one of these journals and they keep it for their first quarter. At the company, and so anytime they see something that seems weird to them, some issue, something that we do that seems unusual, they write it down. And then they're tasked with going and talking to other people at the company and saying, why do we do things this way, like what's our reasoning for doing this? And then once they do that, Then they have to say, okay, I understand that, I've reframed that in my own words, but are there still remaining issues given that rationale? And if there are, they have to come up with some potential solutions. So what are some ways that we could fix this? What are some things that we could do better? And then after 3 months, that gets sent to me and my co-founder, and also, their manager, and we read them. And reading these things is painful. And the reason it's painful is because when you're building a company, you grow to love it, and so you sort of apologize to yourself for its faults, and you make excuses for it, and so having people point out to you the things that, you can see are actually wrong with that thing you love is a very strenuous and stressful process, but it's also a really healthy one because it stops us from drinking our own Kool-Aid and from getting to this point where we're sort of in this echo chamber because everyone has just bought into everything or has sort of been bullied into the way that we do things. So we found this to be an incredibly useful exercise The one thing I will say is, so my co-founder insists that if you decide to do this, that reading a Fresh Eyes journal has a 2-drink minimum. So you've been warned.
