Customers Take Center Stage Betterworks Honors Five Companies for Innovation in Performance Management

By Business Wire On May 5, 2023

Betterworks, the leader in modern performance management, announced its 2023 Customer Award winners recognizing five companies for their outstanding achievements over the last year in driving better performance and empowering their people at work. Honorees included University of Phoenix, Best Western, Amwell, ATB Financial, and Posadas along with their respective human resources leaders.

“It was a special day recognizing them for all they are doing to make the experience of work the best experience it can be for their people. We commend them for putting in the work and embracing performance management processes that truly change and enable performance.”

“Our customers help drive everything we do at Betterworks,” said Betterworks Chief Operating Officer Andrea Lagan. “It was a special day recognizing them for all they are doing to make the experience of work the best experience it can be for their people. We commend them for putting in the work and embracing performance management processes that truly change and enable performance.”

University of Phoenix: People Award

The recipient of the 2023 People Award not only prioritized their people throughout the pandemic, but was also able to build, maintain and grow a company culture that attracts and retains high performers by putting them first. This includes a focus on learning and development and improving feedback and recognition throughout their organization.

University of Phoenix is continually innovating to help working adults enhance their careers in a rapidly changing world. Flexible schedules, relevant courses, interactive learning, and Career Services for Life® help students more effectively pursue career and personal aspirations while balancing their busy lives.

One way the University of Phoenix Learning & Development team helped enhance their company culture was by hosting a “Fall in Love with Learning” campaign. This year, they initiated a Peer Feedback Challenge, which encouraged employees to use the Betterworks Feedback module to request feedback from at least one person prior to their quarterly check-in conversation.

They then used the Feedback Challenge to have a meaningful conversation with their manager about the feedback and then create a Betterworks development goal to implement the feedback.

The school made sure employees had what they needed to be successful in this campaign: They offered online, facilitated training to teach people how to write quality feedback and provided a quick demonstration of how to easily do so. The Peer Feedback Challenge was hugely successful: 76% of the employees who requested feedback received a response back from a peer, a massive increase over what HR had seen historically.

Best Western Hotels & Resorts: The Impact Award

The recipient of the 2023 Impact Award has made the biggest impact on their organization, attributing some of that success to the implementation of Betterworks.

Best Western Hotels & Resorts, headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, is a privately held hotel brand with a global network of approximately 4,500+ hotels in over 100+ countries and territories worldwide. Its technology management division partnered with Betterworks for a pilot in 2018 to develop a fluid goal-setting process. Later, it added structured and unstructured manager-employee conversations with Betterworks, which proved to be a game-changer.

The HR team bumped up the manager-employee check-in cadence to quarterly from once or twice a year after receiving overwhelmingly positive feedback from managers and employees. The division’s HR team then connected Betterworks Conversations module to its employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) by asking employees about their biggest challenges. This practice evolved into more targeted questions that managers could use to start quarterly conversations.

Best Western HR leadership also added games and hypothetical scenarios to Betterworks’ OKR infrastructure to help employees understand how to set effective goals — contributing to a more dynamic process than the previous static scorecard. Incorporation of regular, frequent conversations has resonated so powerfully that Best Western’s technology management division consistently has near 100% conversation completion rates. The impact goes well beyond participation: The division monitors weekly progress toward goals and is meeting its team objectives while still being able to pivot as needed.

Amwell: The Strategy Award

The recipient of the 2023 Strategy Award has seen and reacted to the need for performance, communication and goal setting in their organization and is ready to dominate a hybrid work future.

Amwell is a leading global digital care delivery enablement platform with a virtual-first working environment. For more than a decade, Amwell has powered digital health solutions by connecting and enabling providers, insurers, and innovators to deliver greater access to more affordable, higher quality care to patients. Its customers comprise over 2,000 hospitals and 55 health plan partners with more than 36,000 employers, covering over 80 million lives.

The Amwell team has driven growth in collaboration with Betterworks by blending effective OKRs with a performance management program that includes one-on-one conversations, feedback, and ratings. Over the past two years, Amwell has increased employee productivity by implementing a structured process that allows managers and individual contributors to continuously check-in on business needs and progress. In 2023, it’s adding Betterworks Calibration to provide the ability to fairly calibrate employees.

Amwell has driven business results through a culture of learning and development across the entire organization. It has achieved greater alignment with overall business needs while increasing vital cross-team collaboration and communication essential to driving new innovation and future advancement.

ATB Financial: The Results Award

The recipient of the 2023 Results Award illustrates the impact of tying together people and performance programs with goal-setting programs.

With $58.5 billion in assets, ATB Financial is an Alberta-built financial institution that is a catalyst for economic growth in its province. ATB Financial’s 5,000-plus team members deliver exceptional experiences to nearly 800,000 clients through its many branches and agencies, a 24-hour Client Care Centre, four entrepreneur centers, and digital banking options.

ATB Financial knows the value of investing in its team members and it is a top priority. Its vision for performance enablement is to create the conditions for team members to deliver their best work at an individual, team, and organizational level.

To support this vision, ATB partnered with Betterworks, launching the platform in March 2022 with a year-end evaluation scheduled conversation. The goal was two-pronged: encourage meaningful year-end conversations between team members and their leaders and collect performance and talent data for calibration purposes. ATB saw an incredible 97% completion rate. Its human resources consulting team was able to use this data to conduct calibration conversations across business units that informed data-based decisions on incentive pay and high-potential/ succession planning at the senior leader level and in key roles.

Posadas: The Scale Award

The recipient of the 2023 Scale Award has demonstrated unprecedented growth, successfully scaling both people and processes while prioritizing advancement with great agility.

Posadas is the leading hotel company in Mexico, dedicated to providing guests consistently unforgettable moments through its world-class service. Daily work revolves around the principle that strong teams are made up of committed, talented, and focused individuals.

Posadas has worked with Betterworks since 2018, establishing an alliance that has grown and scaled with its business over time. Through this partnership, Posadas has overcome the impact of the pandemic in one of the most affected industries. Since 2020, Posadas has continuously scaled its business, in part by leveraging Betterworks to support nearly all employees in nearly all of its hotels and delivering on its purpose as a company. What started as the biggest crisis in Posadas’ history has turned into a great growth story.

Advocate Award Winners

This award recognizes those individuals who have not just supported Betterworks within their own organizations, but also help tell their Betterworks story to the industry, helping others learn the importance and impact of including performance enablement and goal-setting technology in their organizations.

Jeff Andes, University of Phoenix
Michaela Schoberova, Colgate
Matt Hollensworth, Austin Bridge & Road
Marko Perendija, Kuehne+Nagel
Humera Shahid, Intuit
Monica Cabrera, Grupo Posadas
Armando Smeke, Grupo Posadas
Krystal Queen, Amwell
Irena Behery, Amwell

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