May 26, 2017 | Blog

Welcome to the New Era of Continuous Performance Management

Engage Your People
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Today’s digital technologies are undoubtedly changing the way we work for the better. Workers are hyper-connected, data is always within reach and organizations are leveraging groundbreaking technologies like AI to welcome the future of work. The way we manage, lead and organize our teams is changing before our very eyes.

As one TechCrunch contributor put it, HR 2.0 “enables organizations to attract, hire and maximize talent, a central competitive advantage in today’s economy.” At BetterWorks, we’re on a mission to help people, quite literally, get better at work. Our goal is to help organizations keep their people inspired and productive. This mindset was the original building block for BetterWorks, and continues to drive our team to make big changes and updates to our software.

This is why I’m so proud to introduce what we’ve been working so hard to build: BetterWorks Feedback Suite. Welcome to the new era of continuous performance management, where feedback is given in context and in real time.

Goals, Meet Feedback

Goals/OKRs have been the bread and butter of BetterWorks since day one. When people ask me what sets BetterWorks apart from our competition, my short answer goes something like, “we do goal-setting better than any other company.” This continues to be true, and ultimately prompted us to build and design BetterWorks Feedback Suite.

In the past year, we’ve recognized the growing need for smarter feedback across the modern workplace. While 88% of companies find feedback valuable or extremely valuable in driving performance, 65% of employees say they need more feedback than they currently get. On top of lack of feedback, the current performance management process is broken. Companies spend 17 hours per employee doing annual reviews, yet 59% of office workers feel performance reviews have no impact on how they do their job. BetterWorks is in the position to provide bigger and better feedback technology because we can harness the power of data and goals. In other words, BetterWorks users can get manager and peer feedback in the context of their work.

Other HR technologies available today – even those designed with the digital workforce in mind – don’t put feedback in the context of business goals. Feedback can easily become biased based on the manager-employee relationship, or when friends agree to share only positive sentiment. We don’t believe this type of feedback actually moves the needles for businesses.

Employees need meaningful feedback, given in real time based on what they’re actually working on.They need regular, lightweight signals, not a single annual review at the end of the year. Feedback should be seamless to give, and seamless to apply. Time and effort should be spent on improving instead of gathering feedback. This is the only way employees will continue to improve at their jobs. This is why we’re deepening our continuous performance management platform. We’re giving organizations a simple way to harness the power of valuable data and context, by providing feedback that matters to all employees.

The Lowdown: BetterWorks Feedback Suite

So what is BetterWorks Feedback Suite? It’s our way of getting deeper in the performance process. We’re giving managers a structure for gathering feedback on employees from the people they work with most often.

BetterWorks Feedback Suite includes:

  • Conversations/check-ins: Managers receive progress updates from employees and provide them with meaningful, lightweight feedback and coaching.
  • Peer feedback: Managers automatically receive recommendations of who an employee should receive feedback from based on who they work with most often.
  • Program Autopilot: Organizations schedule recurring program cycles, drive participation with automated reminders and easily track participation with the usage dashboard.
  • Reviews: Managers conduct formal performance reviews within BetterWorks.
  • Integrations with HRIS: BetterWorks sends qualitative information and quantitative data to and from systems of record. Access to this information gives managers context to make decisions around employee compensation, rankings and reviews. Organizations can leverage BetterWorks to facilitate their unique continuous performance management process, no matter what their cadence may be.

Shari Stier, VP of Global Human Resources at Pact said it best: “It’s so important to gather input on our impact in the workplace. It gives individuals the information needed to hone, to strengthen and to build skills. Even in the most transparent workplace, it is important to ask for input from one another so your organization can perform at its best.” Pact, along with dozens of other enterprise organizations, will pilot BetterWorks Feedback as part of their continuous performance management process.

There’s a dire need for better, more frequent feedback in the modern workplace. As the way we work continues to evolve, the focus will shift to retaining and maximizing top talent.  We welcome this new era of HR 2.0, and are excited to see existing and future BetterWorks customers implement a feedback process that helps employees work better, together. 

To get a free trial of BetterWorks, just visit www.betterworks.com/trials/ to begin your journey towards continuous performance management!