HRTech Interview with Debra Squyres, Chief Customer Officer at Bonusly

Debra Squyres, Chief Customer Officer at Bonusly chats about the benefits of performance enablement solutions in this catch-up with HRTech Series:

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Hi Debra, tell us about yourself and your role at Bonusly.

At Bonusly, I work directly with our amazing customers to help them use Bonusly to Make Work Better and build high-performing, thriving teams. I’m responsible for understanding the customer experience and working across people, process, and product to make strategic decisions and investments that help us improve the impact we have on thousands of workplaces across the globe.

I also spend time researching, designing, and sharing next practices to help HR teams and managers build high-performing workplaces. As a manager myself, I have the opportunity to practice what I preach by coaching and developing my team to be their best every day. It’s an incredibly rewarding and fun role, and one that allows me to realize my personal mission of making work, and the world, better. 

We’d love to hear more about Bonusly Achieve and how it can positively impact HRTech end users.

We’ve known for years that traditional performance management processes don’t work. They are burdensome, backward looking, demotivating, and compliance-oriented. And, what’s so dysfunctional is that 98% of CHROs don’t believe they work to improve performance.

With traditional approaches, mid-year and annual reviews are the only checkpoints for how employees are doing (and feeling), leaving little-to-no room for employees to improve–or for managers to actually connect with their teams. We recognized a need to bring performance into the flow of work–and into the hands of employees–to empower managers with organic, real-time insights that improve their ability to coach team members to their highest potential.

Bonusly Achieve builds on what we do with recognition and feedback and brings in the performance aspect, but in a way and through a tool that managers and employees love, trust, and rely on every day. It’s the first in a new category of tools called performance enablement solutions. It gives managers and employees a 1:1 meeting framework that builds relationship and trust, serves up real-time recognition and feedback data to provide an inclusive, unbiased view into performance, and offers in-app training and best practices to help managers have effective conversations that inspire and elevate (not just manage) performance.

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Why should more team leads and managers use performance enablement solutions as part of their performance assessment stacks today? 

Simply put, performance is the basis for really important decisions around compensation, employee mobility, corporate investment, and hiring/termination–all of which significantly impact employees’ lives and the ultimate success of organizations.

Performance enablement solutions ensure that each and every employee has the opportunity to achieve their best, managers have the tools and processes needed to be successful leaders, and organizations have an unbiased and consistent framework for decision making as it relates to performance. They allow for a more frequent, continuous conversation between managers and their teams to highlight and double down on strengths, pinpoint development opportunities, course-correct where needed, and identify concerns before they become larger problems.

Can you talk about some of the biggest struggles modern-day team leads and managers face when assessing employee performance and driving optimum output from their teams? 

The biggest challenge is a systemic one. Most employees are promoted into management roles based on their performance as an individual contributor–or their ability to do the work–rather than their aptitude or desire to be a people leader.

From there, the problem compounds. Companies largely under-invest in managers, historically not providing proper training, tools or processes to develop their leadership skills properly nor create leadership consistency.

Day to day, the biggest challenge is TIME. Managers are tasked with their own responsibilities in addition to overseeing and developing their teams. This means they’re often pulled in many directions without sufficient time or support to carry out all aspects of their role well.

And yet, a successful manager will directly improve employee retention by 50%. There’s a huge gap here that Bonusly is addressing by creating this new category of performance enablement solutions. 

Please share five best practices when it comes to employee assessment and performance models (what works and what doesn’t in B2B SaaS), before we wrap up.

• Performance enablement should be holistic. Managers need to understand the full scope of work and impact of their team members as well as how other employees view and value their team members in order to deliver a comprehensive, unbiased assessment. That takes recognition and feedback data at your fingertips. Performance shouldn’t be viewed in isolation by one person or from one vantage point (i.e. top down), once or twice a year.
• Performance should be a frequent, continuous conversation – think of it as an ongoing process, not an event. Managers need to have regular performance and coaching conversations, not just hold formal performance reviews. This brings performance and coaching into the flow of work and also provides feedback and coaching in a timely manner, giving the employee the best opportunity to incorporate feedback to meet or exceed objectives.
• Performance should be viewed as a work in progress. While performance reviews summarize past performance and managers give a rating, performance enablement leverages ongoing conversations to reinforce positive behaviors, uncover opportunities for growth as well as adjustments that will increase impact, and provide time for employees and managers to truly connect.
• Performance should be assessed consistently across managers and employees. Organizations can enable this by giving managers the same performance playbook, including tools and processes to make it intuitive, impactful and less abstract.
• Performance data needs to be tracked and analyzed. Employee performance data is important to capture, but organizations should go a step further and use that data to analyze manager effectiveness across their company, hold managers accountable for having conversations, understand strengths and gaps in skills and capabilities, and even be used to create new best practices.

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