Betterworks

Betterworks is a performance management solution that helps HR professionals increase employee engagement, manager efficiency, and business impact.

Most companies spend too much time on performance management, which doesn’t always correlate with results. Arnaud Grunwald, CPO at Betterworks, says, “20% of employees think performance management is helpful to them, but 80% think it’s a complete waste of time. It’s really a process that is universally hated.”

Looking to improve the performance management process, Betterworks made its tools accessible where their customers actually work. There’s no need to log in to betterworks.com to leave employee feedback — everything is integrated into the software that everyone already uses, such as email, Slack, and Microsoft Teams. As a result, performance management becomes part of a daily routine.

Using cross-module analytics for strategic decisions

For years, Betterworks’ customers have been accumulating data and using it to improve employee performance within specific modules, such as goal tracking, performance reviews, and employee recognition.

Then, new customer requests suggested that integrating cross-module analytics would benefit certain workflows and help look at data from a strategic perspective, whether it concerns diversity and inclusion, learning and development, or manager efficacy. 

This also aligned with Betterworks’ vision of a more continuous performance management process.

As Grunwald described it, “we were sitting on a goldmine of data. We had tens of millions of goals, feedback check-ins, and calibration conversations. Our customers wanted to not only report on that data but ask strategic questions.”

To do that, the product team at Betterworks started looking at the options available to them to build the new analytics functionality.

Partnering with Visier to bring HR analytics forward

At first, Grunwald considered building a solution themselves. With an internal data platform team and an internal analytics team that built data analytics, the way forward seemed obvious. 

However, as soon as Grunwald sat down with engineers and started scoping the project, they realized the time and risks involved were too much to ignore. It wasn’t just building, but also testing, supporting, and updating a new product for years to come. They would have to hire extensively to support this new project, the success of which was only a hypothesis at that moment. Plus, they didn’t want their customers to wait more than 5-6 months for a working solution. 

That’s why, after a careful SWOT analysis, they turned to Visier. 

Grunwald explained his reasoning, “with Visier, you have a tool that’s tried and tested, alongside the experience from people who’ve done it before and who can guide you through the journey and deliver results in a matter of months instead of years if you build it internally by yourself.”

When asked why Betterworks preferred Visier over other vendors in the same space, Grunwald said, “at the end of the day, it’s data, data models, data transfers, and data visualization. There are a lot of tools that can do it. What really made a difference was the people. Because with other analytics solutions, you buy the software and then you have to figure it all out by yourself. They have documentation and support, but you’re mostly on your own.” 

Grunwald continued, “Visier people talk people analytics language. They know what an org chart is, what a matrix manager is, what an OKR is, what feedback goals are, etc. That created an incredibly smooth ramp up into the project. They had a proven model we could see, hundreds of enterprise customers, and dozens of embedded analytics customers like us.”

Working on new solutions with Visier

Betterworks chose to go with Visier Embedded Analytics, having the analytics solution integrated as part of the Betterworks product. From the overall look and feel to the functioning of graphs, the foundations are the same. Even Visier data models were tweaked to accommodate specific data-processing calculations of Betterworks.

Now when customers go to betterworks.com, they have two solutions integrated into the same user interface. They can do what they’ve always done — provide people feedback, update goals, have a check-in with a manager — but they also have a new insights tab with the power of Visier. 

It’s a single sign-on, with all permissions and workflows preserved. So when a new Betterworks customer signs up, their Visier account with all their users is created automatically, without additional configurations. 

The whole integration process was worked on together with a project team from Visier. Grunwald said, “I appreciate that they aren’t counting their hours. You can feel that they want to deliver value for us and want us to be successful. We are more partners than we are in a customer-vendor relationship. No matter the number of workshops or additional questions, or program tweaks I ask for, it’s always a yes. So that’s a big positive.”

Final Thoughts

Partnering with Visier allowed Betterworks to create a new complex analytics product their customers have been asking for in just a few months and at a fraction of the cost compared to the internally built option.

Reflecting on the project, Grunwald highlighted the Visier project team once again, “The experience with the team has been excellent, from the sales process to onboarding, to project planning, to project management. Also from the top, Ryan, the CEO, down to the project team with whom we worked on a daily basis.”

When asked to summarize the way Visier works in one word, Grunwald smiled and said, “I would go with the word you use for your annual customer conference — outsmart.”