Speaker 1 (00:00:05) - Welcome to the HR Tech Spotlight podcast. I'm Deanna Shimoda, CEO of Growth Mode Marketing. The HR technology market is crowded, and we know it can be hard to find the best software solutions for your business in the sea of sameness. On this podcast, we shine a spotlight on some of the best up and coming technology options out there. Check it out if you are interested in learning about new, innovative solutions available in the market. And if you are with an HR tech company and interested in being considered for a guest spot. Stay tuned for details at the end of the show.
Speaker 2 (00:00:45) - Hello, and thanks for joining us for this episode of the HR Tech Spotlight. Today we are talking about Better Works in Intelligent Performance Management solution that combines generative AI and data analytics to enable organizations to make smart database decisions with a comprehensive solution that incorporates conversations, check ins, feedback, employee engagement, and recognition, all accessible in the applications employees use daily. Here to talk about better works is the Chief marketing officer, John Schneider.
Speaker 2 (00:01:16) - Welcome to the show, John.
Speaker 3 (00:01:18) - Thank you very much, Diana.
Speaker 2 (00:01:21) - So tell us a little bit about your background in the HR tech space.
Speaker 3 (00:01:25) - Absolutely. I guess I'm I'm relatively new compared to many of my colleagues, but I've been at Better Works for two years as the CMO. Uh, prior to that, I was working on software related to serving attorneys and, um, and consultants. And so quite a change to go into HR, but I have to say, there is a little background of that. Prior to that, I was at Jive Software, which was internet software, and my primary audience was to market to corporate communications leaders and HR leaders who care very much about intranets and their communication strategies with employees. And so what I realized when I was doing software for attorneys and for consultants, I missed, uh, my HR audience. I really enjoyed working with that audience. I think the challenges they face are very human, and I also think the opportunity to create software that helps all employees in a company is very inspiring.
Speaker 3 (00:02:20) - So I return to, I guess, my roots a little bit.
Speaker 2 (00:02:23) - Yeah. Welcome back. Let's talk a little bit more about what better works does.
Speaker 3 (00:02:29) - Yeah absolutely. So better works. You know from a mantra perspective we want to make work better. And we do that by trying to reimagine the performance management process. Um, a little background on on better Works prior to my joining, our CEO is the former president of Success Factors. And before that, he was holding many prestigious executive positions at some of the biggest Silicon Valley companies, um, out there like Cisco. And so he's had thousands of employees reporting to him in the past. And so his motivation and what we're trying to do to reimagine performance management really stems from his own personal drive. Um, he's seen what doesn't work, and he feels very passionate that the performance management process is broken and that if it was done right, it could have a profound impact on a company. Um, it's very specifically we don't really think of, uh, performance management as confined to what that annual review process looks like.
Speaker 3 (00:03:28) - Um, the way that we would describe it is that it has a resonant effect on the entire company. It goes way beyond the boundaries of performance management. Or we could call it a multiplier effect. Um, we believe a change it can change company culture. It can create better feeling of belonging and inclusion and a greater sense of accomplishment by employees, which is essentially what performance management is traditionally carved out to do in the first place. And ultimately, we really just want to make work more meaningful and purposeful for everybody in the process.
Speaker 2 (00:04:01) - When you think about performance management, what would you say is a big challenge or problem that your team is seeing facing HR departments today?
Speaker 3 (00:04:11) - That's a great question, Deanna. So, you know, we all hear the stats almost every year from Gallup, right? I think the latest 1 in 2022 is that 14% of employees believe the Performance Review Processes act an accurate reflection of their work. Um, that's a pretty horrible statistic for a process that's been around for over 50 years.
Speaker 3 (00:04:30) - We do a we do a survey, um, every year, and we study thousands of workers out there. It's not about our technology, but about the state of the workforce and our mindset around this, around these processes. And and in our report, 37% of workers gave performance management an outright fail rating. So they had multiple choices and 37% alone were fail and more than 50% just couldn't even see it as a valuable process at all. And so when we think about some of the challenges there, first of all, the that we try to try to break the issue of the episodic approach to performance management because we know it doesn't work. We know that managers spend insane amounts of time, like five weeks a year on average, writing performance reviews that either don't get reviewed, don't get looked at, or used for any progressive, uh, approach to helping an employee do better in their job. It's really just a check the box kind of activity at the end of the year. It creates tremendous strain on the employees as well.
Speaker 3 (00:05:33) - They're obviously under a lot of pressure and they feel nervous. And, you know, there's all those other statistics related to the notion of bias related to them. How does a manager compile an entire employee's performance for the year right in their head, especially when they may have seven, eight, nine direct managers to be writing about, you know, and so what we really are trying to solve for here is how do you shift it and really flip the script from what used to be an episodic, milestone driven type of event once or twice a year to a process that's continuous, and it just operates in the flow of work that we we make it so that the employee manager relationship is a notion of coaching and trust and, you know, moving forward on current initiatives and making accomplishments a reality versus building performance versus calling it performance management. And what we put together is a solution that includes employee engagement goals, one on ones feedback, recognition check ins, performance for the, you know, for the performance discussions, um, a calibration process for the HR team.
Speaker 3 (00:06:42) - And under development. We have some more exciting things around succession planning and other employee development capabilities as well. And so what happens in this technology today often is all of those things I just listed tend to be individual components and their silos, their data silos. Right. So if somebody gives somebody recognition that's a recognition and rewards application. And it doesn't actually speak to the application where somebody might be having a conversation with their employee. And so by having it all under one hood, we try to make it so that the the conversation between the employee and the manager is as robust as possible, that they have a very fair and balanced perspective of the entire profile of the employees work accomplishments, whether it's constructive feedback, whether it's recognition, um, it's all about their goal, accomplishment or lack thereof. The manager is enabled to have constructive conversations that lead to better outcomes in the future for the employee versus the manager trying to construct something simply for the the, the nature of trying to make compensation decisions at the end of the year.
Speaker 2 (00:07:50) - I love the statistics that you threw out. You know, I think it's so fascinating to think about performance reviews and how employees view them versus how management views them. Right? Yeah. Um, what would you say is better works unique point of view in the market compared to some of the other performance management platform options that are out there?
Speaker 3 (00:08:12) - Yeah, there's there's a few aspects to that. Um. One of them is our our laser focus on this idea of them being all connected applications. So I already mentioned that one. The next one that I think is really, really important to what we do is we, we, um, unlike most technology providers that will come out right and say they're a platform. We are a platform of technology, but we don't expect the employee to come to us. One of the biggest problems with the adoption of, of, of performance tools is that they're typically buried deep inside the HCM system. So you go into your workdays, you go into your success factors, and you might be 6 to 7 clicks deep before you could even look at your goals and make updates.
Speaker 3 (00:08:59) - And so the idea of living in the flow of work means that we don't actually expect somebody to go to better works. We expect that better works follows them. So we care deeply about our integrations to applications like Teams and Slack, outlook and Gmail, um, work productivity tools like asana. So why? Why should an employee have to go into their goals and update like, say, say it's an engineer? Why should somebody have to go into, uh, the the goal application and say that they accomplish, say, creating some, you know, creating some code that completed a story that that, that that should be just automatically updated from the source system. Um, Salesforce, why should a sales manager have to talk about whether they attained quota or not? That just automatically feeds into our goals module. So we look at this flow of work very seriously, because what we see is that our users across all of our customers on average, go in and use our application at least weekly. And by having that statistic, compared to the typical performance review cycle, where most people will go into a workday or success factors at a very episodic rate of like every three months or six months to update their goals.
Speaker 3 (00:10:12) - It's pretty profound in how much you know, how much interaction we're driving up. And that leads to employee engagement. Um, the other thing that we do, because we have all of this data that we're collecting, all these conversations, all this feedback, all this recognition, because of the adoption levels, we can be very proactive around insights and helping managers be better at their jobs. And we're really on the cusp of doing some really incredible things. But the idea being, of course, we can provide nudges, for example, that would actually tell a manager, you know, suggestions on how to be a better manager. For instance, what if a manager has spoken to three of their employees and had a conversation that's meaningful and talk development plans in the last month or two, or and yet there's three other employees that the person did not. We can actually suggest or nudge that manager towards better, you know, fairness across all of their managers giving equal treatment to all of them. And so the idea being over time is we keep taking this notion of continuous performance enablement further and further to the point where managers feel like they have a copilot along their way to help coach them into the best ways in which they can be great managers to their employees.
Speaker 2 (00:11:28) - What type of companies are the perfect fit for your solution?
Speaker 3 (00:11:32) - Yeah. And that's that's the other major distinction for us. The majority of providers and the performance management space typically solve for small to mid-market, lower and mid-market sized companies. And so what makes better works unique in terms of who we serve, as we tend to serve middle market up into the enterprise. So the typical customer for a for better works is some a company that might have 20 to 30,000 employees. Our biggest customer today has 190,000 employees using our technology. And the reason this is an important thing to underscore is because the challenge is a large enterprise expected to solve are different than a company that is a smaller employee profile that I mentioned before. For example, large enterprise expects tremendous amounts of control around the data and who has the rights to see certain data. And groups can't always interact with each other on a global scale or across offices. And so we have to be, you know, we have to provide the type of rules and permissioning that enable organizations incredible flexibility in what they do to ensure their data is secure and confidential.
Speaker 3 (00:12:43) - Um, along with that, large enterprise does expect things like branded experiences. Um, one of our customers, um, in in Europe is the largest global transportation logistics company in the world. They speak five languages within the company. So five languages and their their HCM technology they were using only worked in one language. So another aspect of being enterprise ready is that our platform can support multiple languages within one company or one instance. And so, um, those are just examples or punctuation points of things we've had to solve over several years to make the experience work well for our customers.
Speaker 2 (00:13:25) - So speaking of experience, John, what impact have you seen organizations have that have worked with better works?
Speaker 3 (00:13:33) - Absolutely. There are core operating metrics that we look at. And one of the things we really like to emphasize is that, you know, HR is in a in a position, uh, well beyond the idea of just measuring whether a process is completed. A traditional view of things like performance management processes would be, are the reviews done on time? Are we able to do a calibration process at the year end? And do you know our compensation planning and decisions.
Speaker 3 (00:13:58) - Right. And so, um, we shift the conversation much more to organization wide impact around things like what is the employee engagement level look like before and after? Um, how many goals do people have? So what we typically see when better works is deployed even within the first, you know, if you will, term of using it, you know, in replacement of the traditional process they had, you'll start to start to see that you have near near 100%, um, you know, adoption of at least one goal or more. And you'll see averages of employees in the 3 to 5, you know, goals, um, per employee kind of range. And so we track how many goals they have, how many goals are being completed. And that all gets to the point about productivity. Right. And so those are some of the bigger concepts we like to drive, which is that HR is not just driving a process, but also impacting and maximizing the most they can get out of the workforce, which I think is a very strategic C-suite conversation to be having, especially in a time when we've seen so much turmoil in the markets and in the job, in the job and the jobs reports and all of that, um, being able to talk about things like productivity and being able to talk about things like employee engagement are very critical for the CEO and others to understand whether their workforce is mobilized to provide the kind of agility that is needed.
Speaker 3 (00:15:21) - As you know, companies adapt and change to whatever challenges lie ahead for them.
Speaker 2 (00:15:28) - What would you say is one of the biggest hesitations that you see companies have as they're evaluating whether they want to implement a solution like yours?
Speaker 3 (00:15:37) - That's really an excellent question. And because we we tend to sell to larger corporations, it's a very it's a very serious and big decision. Right. And it's usually an elongated decision. And what we find is often that we we are working closely with HR leaders, both the middle, you know, middle layer of HR leadership and and up to the show. And some of the questions are really around how to drive the side of the change management side of it. How do we build the business case then? How do we transition the business case into an implementation plan that is executed effectively and ultimately measured against for success? And so unlike, you know, if you were selling to a smaller company, we have consultants like behavioral psychologists on staff. We that understand, you know, the repercussions of what the technology is intended to do.
Speaker 3 (00:16:29) - Um, we have experts that have been, you know, cross in the past that are able to help with transformative decision making and planning around how the workforce will adopt the technology. And we really put a punctuation mark around that because it you know, although our technology is not difficult to roll out, it's not difficult to turn on without driving the change adoption side of the equation. We don't see the same effect, you know, with the employee base. So that tends to be one of the most important things that we see having happen. And you know, the big thing is, you know, HR has a diverse range of challenges and also functions and roles. And so when we're talking about when we're talking to somebody in the talent team or whatever function we're talking to, that starts the conversation with us. They don't necessarily know everything they need to know in order to kind of take it through that process from from the business case, through the change management side of it. And that's where I think we really have to put a lot of energy to, to be on the side and partnering with the with the HR person to make these programs successful.
Speaker 2 (00:17:35) - What is the future vision for better works?
Speaker 3 (00:17:40) - That's a great one. Well, you know, I talked about things like the five, the the five weeks of time a human being a manager has to spend doing performance reviews. We'd like to see that be zero, right? Frankly, and especially with generative AI, the potential for that is real. We don't want people sitting there in front of their screen with a blank, a blank page, essentially trying to figure out what to say about an employee's performance. For the last six months. What we want is a relationship between the employee manager that's highly productive and growth oriented, and that happens constantly. And we do believe that there's a there's a time and a place where this all sort of melts away in the background. This idea that you have to go through these toll gates of, you know, tracking your goals and having these conversations and documenting them. And with generative AI, we do believe the type of co-pilot or assistant that the employee is going to get in the manager will make it so that it really is about what it was originally intended to do, which is enable exceptional performance, help employees feel that they're treated fair and in a balanced way, that they see paths to growth in their career.
Speaker 3 (00:18:51) - So there's a lot of there's a lot of very exciting things, and we see many extensions to the rich data we have around those employees by being able to move into things like succession planning and other technology solutions that we are going to be introducing this coming fiscal year.
Speaker 2 (00:19:06) - I love that vision. I mean, I can tell you it was a it was a people manager. Performance reviews were always one of those things on the list that it's like you need to get done, but not many people jump up and down about doing. No.
Speaker 3 (00:19:20) - I don't think. I still don't know that. I don't know that we've met a person that says they jump up and down for their performance review. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (00:19:26) - Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Both ways. Right. Like it's it's always this cringe worthy event that as a manager takes a lot of time and you want to do it well. And as an employee going into it, it's always kind of nerve wracking when it's, you know, only once or twice a year.
Speaker 3 (00:19:41) - Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 4 (00:19:44) - John, what.
Speaker 2 (00:19:44) - Final thoughts do you want to leave our audience with?
Speaker 3 (00:19:48) - Yeah, I think I think, you know, we we are really about, um, a belief and empowerment and that, you know, we, we like as a, as a CMO and in marketing, I really believe that that these things start from a partnership perspective. And that means that my marketing efforts have to be about giving value back to people. And and so what I would encourage people to do is not to be, um, to, to, to, to not just wave things off around performance processes just because everybody around them is saying that it's okay today, I would say explore and learn. There's lots of great resources out there. Um, I think networks.com has a lot of them because I, uh, guide a lot of the research we do. Uh, I really think that, um, it's not nearly as hard to drive these changes as it may seem on the surface when you when you look into it and you try to understand what what the potential benefits are, I think these business cases are relatively straightforward and that when they're made, um, people will pay attention.
Speaker 3 (00:20:55) - The workforce is the most precious and expensive asset you have in a company today. And the idea that this process, which is supposed to make them the most capable and productive people, is a fail, just seems like something that no one should ignore.
Speaker 2 (00:21:10) - So you kind of alluded to my last question here, but where can our listeners go to learn more about better works?
Speaker 3 (00:21:16) - Absolutely. I would just say better works. Com and if anybody likes learning things, we have a tremendous webinar series called People Fundamentals and How People Can Learn can earn, um, credit for HRC and Shrm. Um, they're all education driven. So there's lots of great educational resources on the, on the website. And so just encourage people to explore it.
Speaker 2 (00:21:39) - Well, I appreciate you joining me on the show today, John. And for those listening in on this episode, be sure to check out the show notes for links to connect with John on LinkedIn and to explore the Better Works website.
Speaker 1 (00:21:56) - Thanks for listening to this episode of the HR Tech Spotlight podcast, where we showcase some of the best up and coming HR technology options in the market.
Speaker 1 (00:22:06) - If you are an HR tech company leader who would like to be. For a guest spot on this program, please contact me via growth Mode.
Speaker UU (00:22:14) - Marketing. Reach out to me. Deanna Shimoda on LinkedIn. And if you found this show informative, subscribe. Connect with us on social media and leave a review.
Speaker 1 (00:22:25) - This is Deanna with Growth Mode marketing. Signing off. Thanks for listening. We hope you'll tune in again next time.