Next Jump

Next Jump
Lifetime Employment: One Company
Promises Never to Fire

Next Jump
• Next Jump is an e-commerce company
founded by
• Charlie Kim,
• Founder & Co-CEO
• Charlie Kim is the Founder and Co-Chief
Executive Officer of Next Jump.

Charlie Kim, Founder & Co-CEO
• Charlie is rated as a top mentor and coach in
several industries including: U.S. military,
professional sports, education, nonprofits,
start-ups and F1000 executives.

Next Jump
• Meghan Messenger, Co-CEO
• Meghan Messenger serves as Co-Founder &
Chief of Staff at Next Jump, Inc. (NxJ).

Meet The Team
• Tarun Gidoomal, Co-Head of UK Office
• Tarun currently serves as the Co-Head of Next
Jump’s UK office.

Tarun Gidoomal,
Co-Head of UK Office

Meet The Team
• Greg Kunkel, Head of Boston Office
• Greg Kunkel joined Next Jump in May 1998
as a co-founder of the organization.

Greg Kunkel, Head of Boston Office

• How would offering lifetime employment to
your employees change your organization?
• Ask almost any HR professional and they
would tell you that employee terminations or
layoffs are the hardest and most heart-wrenching
parts of the job. However, the traditional
employment model touts them as a necessary evil.
• One e-commerce company, Next Jump, is
taking a different approach, promising to
never fire and offering additional training if a
performance issue arises.

Employee Terminations Or Layoffs Are The Hardest
And Most Heart-wrenching Parts Of The Job

Next Jump, the company which never
fires anyone
• Most companies claim to be reinventing
something. But only few truly deserve this
label. Next Jump is one of the few.
• Their reinvention of company culture and
management philosophy has earned them
impressive accolades
• Next Jump has become a “Deliberately
Developmental Organisation” (DDO).

fires anyone

Next Jump in brief
• Next Jump was founded in 1994 by Charlie
Kim.
• The company’s core business is an employee
discount platform, used by over 70% of the
Fortune 1000 to help their employees save money.
• Their other, younger product line consists of
various apps and tools to measure and manage
employee performance and company culture.

Next Jump was founded in 1994 by Charlie
Kim
Charlie Kim, Founder & Co-CEO

Next Jump in brief
• The company has around 200 employees. It
is headquartered in New York, and has offices
in Boston, San Francisco and London.
• Next Jump entered into public
consciousness when, in 2016, it was selected
by Harvard Business Review to be one of
only three DDOs, or Deliberately
Developmental Organisations.

The company has around 200
employees

DDOs, or Deliberately Developmental
Organisations.

A Deliberately Developmental
Organisation
• DDOs, as defined by the Harvard scholars and
authors of An Everyone Culture, are companies that
have built their culture to support the development
of all their people, every day.
• At its core is the belief that the way to become a better
company is by employees working on themselves, and
helping others to grow, in turn.
• Better Me (improve yourself) + Better You (help
others with what you learned) = Better Us
• The biggest bonus and salary increases go to those
who improve the culture.

Inside Next Jump: 4 Levels of an
Inspiring Workplace
• Charlie Kim, founder and co-CEO of
technology company Next Jump, started the
company in 1994 as a college coupon business.
• Nowadays it’s the worlds largest provider of
employee savings and rewards programs.
• What sets Next Jump apart is their culture and
focus on personal development. Next Jump
proves that the combination of caring for your
employees and helping them grow as human
beings is possible while making money and
helping the world become a better place.

Inside Next Jump: 4 Levels of an Inspiring
Workplace

Inspiring Workplace
• Their mission clearly conveys this belief:
• Next Jump, a for-profit company, invests its
time and resources in growing its people
(Better Me) for the purpose of helping
others (Better You) which leads to a better
world (Better Us).

Personal Development
• For Charlie and Meghan, a culture focused on
personal development is at the core of their business.
• Their belief of “Better Me + Better You = Better Us”
is the basis for the Next Jump culture.
• Their culture is so important to them that employees
spend 50% of their time on growth and
development, while the other 50% is focused on
growing their business.
• The personal development of Next Jump employees is
encouraged through their own specific development
model. This model consists of 4 separate training
modules as illustrated in the pyramid aside.

Inspiring Workplace

“Better Me + Better You = Better Us”

• Charlie shared a special childhood experience with us that
helped him build the culture at Next Jump.
• It brought him the vision to build a company that would make his
mother and farther proud.
• As a young child Charlie lived in Nigeria for a period of time. The
local fruit over there was of terrible quality. Charlie witnessed his
mother saving the best mango pits and seeds of other fruits to
plant them in their backyard. In an attempt to be smarter than his
mother, Charlie went up to her and said; “Mom, don’t you know
that trees take years to grow. We only are going to stay here for
about two years. Why are you doing this?” His mom replied with
one simple statement: “because it’s the right thing to do”. As it
turns out, Charlie and his family lived in Nigeria for 17 years, and
ended up having the best fruit in the community, which they would
share for miles around.

Vision: to build a company that would make
his mother and farther proud

• Charlie and Meghan underline the importance of
personal growth on preventing burn-outs.
• They refer to research by the Harvard School of Education
that shows that “the single biggest cause of burnout at
work is not ‘work overload’ but being too long in a
work-setting without experiencing your own further
unfolding”.
• At Next Jump they fight this phenomenon by training
their employees to be leaders, and Charlie and
Meghan truly believe that everyone within the
organization can become one.
• They use the 4 levels of development to train their
employees by raising their potential and reducing their
weaknesses. It’s the power of peer influence that is a
driving aspect for their training and feedback methods.

Physical Training
• While walking through their office it becomes clear that
physical development is the most visual aspect of Next
Jump’s culture.
• The desks are surrounded by healthy snacks and drinks,
the office has a yoga/napping room and there’s a large
fitness area.
• Meghan underlines their focus on physical health by
stating that they encourage all employees to visit the
gym regularly, at least 2 times a week.
• They even have an app that encourages physical fitness
by allowing employees to track each others fitness
activity and therefore adding a competitive element to it.
• And it seems to work; employees working out with one of
their personal trainers.

The desks are surrounded by healthy
snacks and drinks

Physical Training
Spin Class
Yoga Nidra

Emotional Training
• In an attempt to train their emotional aspects, Next
Jumpers are very keen on providing and receiving
feedback.
• They have an app in place to evaluate individual and
team performance and employees are encouraged to
attend situational workshops. But most interesting to us is
a concept which they call ‘Talking Partners’.
• Talking Partners (or TPs) is a buddy system in which
employees provide each other with feedback and discuss
their personal progress on a daily basis.
• You are free to pick whoever you want as a TP because
the leadership believes it is of utmost importance to have
a high-trust, personal relationship based on mutual
learning.

Next Jumpers are very keen on providing
and receiving feedback

Talking Partners (or TPs) is a buddy system in which
employees provide each other with feedback and discuss their
personal progress on a daily basis

Emotional Training
Situational Workshops (SWs) are our way to offer
scalable mentoring to groups of individuals on a
weekly basis.
10X is a unique opportunity for
Next Jumpers to reflect on their
personal and professional
development and share with the
entire company 2x a year

Emotional Training
• Performance Evaluations
• Performance Evaluation
App gives all abilities to
chart their growth over
time. Employees rate
themselves on a 1-4 scale,
as well as their managers.
• Next Jumpers also
receive anonymous
feedback from their
peers, who rate them on
the same scale for pure,
unrestricted feedback.

Mental Training
• There’s a strong belief at Next Jump that most learning should
be done on the job.
• However, they do reserve roughly 10% of their working time on
the development of additional skills.
• There are several different ways of how Next Jumpers train their
mental skills.
• There are technical workshops available (to increase technical
capabilities),
• ‘First Fridays’ (a monthly recurring technical training as, you can
guess it, on the first Friday of each month),
• ‘CEO-Talks’ (where successful CEOs such as Arianna Huffington
and Tony Hsieh share their experience), and
• ‘Hackathons’. Most of these development programs are publicly
available

Technical Situational Workshops

First Fridays
• First Fridays is a platform for Next Jumpers and guests
to learn from thought leaders and experts on a diverse
range of topics.
• Next Jumpers can learn in two very distinct ways: theory
and practical application.
• First Fridays conducted once a month as the
theory/classroom learning should only contribute 5-10%
of overall learning and practical application should
represent 80-90%.
• Sessions are taught by industry experts as well as by
Next Jumpers who know a topic “in their bones” and
use First Fridays as a platform to give back to their
peers.

CEO Talks
• CEO Talks were
introduced by Charlie as
a way to give back to the
Next Jump community,
including family, friends
and invited guests. The
talks offer an avenue for
employees and guests to
continue their education
and learn from some of the
most inspirational leaders.

Hackathon
• A way for Next Jumpers to
let loose and show off their
technical prowess.

YouTube Channel
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClxt05oUbYNWQTfhDw5G7qA
• The Next Jump YouTube Channel is a look into the culture of a
company that believes corporations can change the world.

Spiritual Training
• The last pillar of Next Jump culture is their focus on
having a sense of purpose.
• By improving themselves and the community, they
want to help the world to become a better place.
Projects such as ‘Adopt a School’ and ‘Code For a
Cause’ proof they put there money where their mouth
is. With the ‘Adopt a School’ program they use their
time and expertise to teach children on four different
subjects: robotics, coding, health & wellness, and
business skills. ‘Code for a Cause’ is similar to
what we’ve seen in the Spanish company Cyberclick,
where programmers use their expertise to support
non-profit organizations at no charge whatsoever.

Adopt a School
• Next Jump announced the launch of its Adopt-A-
Public-School program. Through this program,
Next Jump will partner with public schools to
build long lasting relationships that serve and
support students, teachers, and parents.

CFAC: Code For a Cause
• Expert Engineering for Your non-profit for 2
weeks. Absolutely Free.
• Code for a Cause pairs small, expert teams of Next
Jump engineers with non-profits to help scale and
build charitable products, free of charge.

The following pillars are at the heart of Next
Jump’s culture and management philosophy.
• No HR department
• Yes, you read that correctly. A company of 200
people, without a dedicated HR team. Every
person has HR-related responsibilities.
• Employee engagement, payroll and HR policies
are all distributed within the entire
organisation.
• The leadership team decides on promotions
and pay raises, taking into consideration the
data points they see through their (in-house built)
Performance Evaluation technology.

Decision-making is a key skill -
accelerate its practice
• Decision-making is a key skill - accelerate its
practice
• What does work actually consist of?
• One way of answering this question is through the lens
of planning and executing: First you decide what you
will do, and then you do it.
• The first part, decision-making, is a skill which can be
learned and developed. Next Jump believe that the
best way to do that is by making many decisions,
receiving feedback, learning from mistakes, and
making more decisions with these lessons in mind.

Decision-making is a key skill -
accelerate its practice

Decision-making is a key skill - accelerate its
practice
• Next Jump use an analogy from the US
Navy. Above the water-line projects will, at
worst, make the ship look bad. Below the
water-line project failures can be fatal.

Next Jump use an analogy from the US
Navy

Hire for humility
• Next Jump don’t want to be a company of, as they
call it, “brilliant jerks”.
• So their #1 hiring criterion is humility, as they
believe that this is the most important predictor of
personal growth.
• Coach ability, responsibility, and absence of
victim mentality are other key characteristics.
• Recruiting for these traits means that it’s hard to
fake your way into the company.

Super Saturday
• Super Saturday is Next Jump’s hiring process. Thrice a
year, top applicants are invited to spend a day at next jump.
• Thousands of resumes are reviewed and hundreds of
candidate screenings, to narrow down to an elite group of
40.
• These potential Next Jumpers are flown to the host
office for a full day of skills tests, practical exercises, and
interviews.
• It’s also important to give candidates the chance to connect
with Next Jumpers on a more casual level and get to know
Next Jump. Meals are eaten in small groups, and there are
opportunities for informal Q&A, including popular “Career
Fair.” Candidates also hear from senior leaders and a
presentation and Q&A with Co-CEOs.

Feedback is anonymous and open
• Started as an internal project, Next Jump has
developed apps that are now being offered
publicly.
• For example, in the Feedback app, everyone can
give anonymous, public feedback to everyone else.
• This is a staggering idea. It can lead to situations
where the CEO gives a presentation about the
company’s future, and at the end of it, he might see
anonymous negative comments. And he knows that
everyone else inside the company can see them, too.

• The app is also inspired by an insight from
primary schools: Children are more open
towards feedback from classmates than from a
teacher or parent.
• employees: are more likely to respond to
feedback from their peers than from their
manager. And the Feedback app provides an
easy way to give candid, peer-to-peer input.”

No Lying, Hiding, Faking
• When providing updates, most company cultures
lead to people window dressing their results.
• Next Jump noticed that and changed the question
from “What have I done this week?” to
“What’s the thing I don’t want you to ask me
about?”.
• Their shorthand for these difficult topics is
Eggshells. Focusing status updates on Eggshell
topics leads to a more open culture where
problems get solved faster.

Everyone has a buddy
• Or, As Next Jump calls it, a Talking Partner.
Someone you can bounce ideas off, someone
close who can tell you when you’re on the
wrong path.
• You get your Talking Partner from among
people who get hired at the same time as
you. If you don’t gel with him or her, you
can always change.

No firing for performance reasons
• Next Jump introduced a No Firing Policy in
2012 – offering a commitment of lifetime
employment for their employees – “the
ultimate safety at work”

• Aside from increasing our hiring standards,
this was a signal of intent for employees to
show that you can expose vulnerabilities,
weaknesses, and faults without the fear of
losing your job.

• Performance is not binary, i.e. “either we fire you or
promote you”.
• Because Next Jump put so much effort into finding
the right talent, they will go to great lengths to
support you when you stumble and provide options
to help you succeed: Change your Talking Partner,
sharpen existing skills or acquire new ones, or find a
new role in the company.
• If, after several attempts and remedial actions, it’s
still not working for either party, Next Jump will
help you find another job.

If, after several attempts and remedial actions, it’s still not
working for either party, Next Jump will help you find
another job.

Recognition for the biggest helper
• Next Jump have learned that recognising only
the people who make the most amount of
money for the company leads to a culture of
self-centeredness.
• And so they instituted a policy whereby the
biggest bonuses and highest form of recognition
(the Avengers Award) go to those people who
have helped others the most.
• This fosters a culture of teamwork and is the
logical next step if you abide by the idea of better
me + better you = better us.

Recognition for the biggest helper

Linking culture with business results
• Next Jump is a privately held company, but
it claims that their sales have increased
fivefold to $2.5bn since 2012 when they set
culture as their primary business strategy.
• They have also seen an impact on other
metrics like profitability and retention of
leadership (which is at 10 years – unusually
high for a technology company).

• Next Jump’s ideas and concepts - Eggshells,
Accelerated Decision-Making, No Firing and the
Bench - are very convincing.
• But before you consider implementing some of these
ideas yourself, be mindful that these are not tactics that
you can just try out for a month or two.
• For example, in a company that is not used to
transparency, starting using the Feedback App in all its
brutal honesty could lead to disaster. The company
needs to be ready for it, the ground needs to have
been prepared.
Next Jump, the company which never fires
anyone

fires anyone
• Next Jump’s concepts are highly
interdependent parts of a deliberately
cultivated company culture.
• Besides long term-commitment, you will need
to plan very carefully how you introduce them.

References
• Culture spotlight: Next Jump, the company which never fires anyone for
performance reasons
https://www.charliehr.com/blog/next-jump-ddo/?fbclid=IwAR3FiIh_R-SvtAWOIl6UI_Wh7S-
O6NYTRx8UHcnd8uIokyoBenToHgOF7qk
• Lifetime Employment: One Company Promises Never to Fire
https://www.cornerstoneondemand.com/rework/lifetime-employment-one-company-
promises-never-fire
• Next Jump – Change the World By Changing Workplace Culture
https://www.nextjump.com/
• Next Jump
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Jump
• The Most Successful Company You've Never Heard of: Next Jump
https://www.inc.com/srikumar-rao/the-most-successful-company-you-never-heard-
of-next-jump.html

Next Jump

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