Introducing the Reflektive People Management Suite

When I started Reflektive, I was working in mobile game development — and for the first time, was managing a team of managers. This got me thinking about the behaviors of a good manager versus a bad manager. I started to ask, how do I create tools to enable my managers? This is the core of Reflektive.

We invented the real-time feedback plugin to help managers give feedback in real-time so employees are constantly developing. We’ve expanded over the past five from feedback to performance management, offering performance reviews, check-ins, and goal management, and today announce our next step.

At Illuminate, Reflektive’s conference by people leaders, for people leaders, I shared my 2019 Outlook and debuted two new products, People Intelligence and Engagement, which join our existing Performance product to make up the Reflektive People Management Suite.

The Problem With Performance Ratings

Starting four years ago we saw a lot of press and people talking about getting rid of ratings. There are a few reasons. First, it hurts employee engagement. Our customer data shows employees who have higher ratings have higher engagement. Low ratings are demoralizing and actually hurt productivity. The cost of doing them is high.

The second reason is that ratings are inaccurate. There’s gender bias, ethnicity bias, and manager bias, which says who your manager is affects your rating. There are easy graders and hard graders.

Companies started announcing they would get rid of ratings, and it became a huge trend in the news.

But what we should be talking about is pay equity. That’s why ratings actually matter. It became an academic discussion of how to get rid of ratings, but the reason ratings matter is because they are tied to compensation. If we can fix ratings, we can solve for pay equity.

We ran a benchmark study to see if the trend actually happened, and found 90% of companies still use ratings. When I talked to customers, I found the reason was that there wasn’t a better alternative. Since ratings aren’t going away, how can we make them better to solve a real problem?

What if you had data to show you how people of different gender, ethnicity, or manager are rated? When you calibrate a rating for your direct report, you can actually update their score to solve for inequality in pay.

Transforming Performance Management

Reinventing performance management is why Reflektive grew so rapidly. Everyone in the market is familiar with the Deloitte article about problems with performance management. Bersin found performance management actually had a NPS score of -60, much lower than other HR programs.

Many companies followed suit. By working with our customers, we’ve had a really interesting vantage point to see how this transformation works. We learned the most successful customers listened to their employees. In general, what they were solving for is better management and better conversations.

If you can systematically help managers bring conversations up so they happen and give them prompts, you can actually solve the issue of how to make managers better.

Our research found there are five main types of conversations employees want to have with their managers:

• Appreciation
• Goal alignment
• Coaching
• Career planning
• Evaluation

The Integrated Approach

We’ve taken these learnings and are now able to offer new and existing customers a system spanning technology and best practices.

This is how we solve performance management — it’s the process, not just the tool. We are introducing a new onboarding package that will run internal research of your organization, provide best practices for program design, and support your new program launch.

Today, we are also announcing engagement surveys and people intelligence, our HR analytics product.

Here’s how we think about it: Performance management is the action to help you manage people, and engagement surveys and people intelligence provide data to help manage your people better. It’s powerful to have these three components in the same place.

There’s no product that does what the People Management Suite does — it takes data from your HRIS, engagement, performance, and more, and puts all of this in one place so it’s accessible. If you have metrics on time to hire, attrition, performance, and engagement,  every leader — your VP of engineering or customer success or sales — should know so they can act on it. But right now it’s locked away in disparate systems.

We are putting it together for the first time.

Interested? Learn more about Reflektive’s People Management Suite here.