What was Kitabisa looking to get out of a performance management tool? 

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A fully configurable and automated Performance Management System 

Kitabisa’s earlier performance reviews were run on excel sheets making them ineffective and opaque. It wasn’t scalable and the manual work required was very time consuming. Hence, they set about looking for a solution that can be fully configurable and automate entirety of Kitabisa’s performance management processes. The right solution would support the existing processes (as opposed to redefining them to fit the solution) as well as be able to facilitate efficient performance reviews. 

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Single truth for employee development

Absence of an internal system to track performance made it difficult to identify best performers, areas where employees are lagging, etc. The team wanted every employee to understand how they’re performing, what their growth prospects look like and at what junctions they should seek help. This was only possible when all parts of the performance management process were connected with each other. 

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Continuous feedback and recognition

Kitabisa wanted to introduce continuous feedback and make it into a regular activity that both employees and managers can embrace. A structured and transparent process that can be facilitated by a tool which isn’t limited to one-off feedback exchanges or appreciations.  

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What were the challenges Kitabisa was facing?

The major bottleneck for Kitabisa was performance reviews which had traditionally been a very time consuming exercise for them, requiring lots of manual efforts from the HR team. So they were looking for a tool that can, above everything else, drastically improve their performance reviews.

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The entire manual process of performance management

Handling performance management manually on Google sheets and docs was a very limiting and time consuming process. They made it impossible for managers to refer to past employee data, more so in the case of internal transfers or manager changes. Fiddling through all the information scattered in different folders and drives made it a very unprofessional process, not sustainable in the long run.

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Difficult to align and then meet timelines without a system

Rolling out people processes, calibrating reviews and deciding on employee benefits in a timely manner had proven to be very difficult due to the absence of an internal system. Given that employees have certain expectations with respect to benefits during their performance reviews, it’s never a good idea to have these cycles exceed the stipulated timeline. And the lack of a proper system only aggravated this issue.

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Incorrect employee data floating around due to lack of a reporting system

Somewhat linked to the first challenge, manual reporting was not only a time consuming process but also resulted in errors in employee performance data. Because when there’s no system for clear visibility, even employees aren’t always satisfied with their ratings. This then required multiple follow-ups and crosschecks, compounding the overall time taken.

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How did Mesh help Kitabisa achieve its objectives?

During the product demos, the one thing that Kitabisa loved the most about Mesh was its ability to templatise almost every HR process and as a result, reduce the time to more than half of what it’d usually take if done manually or from scratch every time. Given that a lot of their needs were around process automation and intelligent reporting capabilities, Mesh became an unparalleled choice for them also due to its ability to integrate with any external software solution. 

In particular, following are some of the things Mesh helped Kitabisa,
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Provide a systemised approach for regular HR processes

At the start, Kitabisa and Mesh’s Customer Success team worked together to define processes and setup industry standard templates to automate the recurring tasks. Given the flexibility of the tool, it was easy for them to map the tool as per their requirements. The fact that every module on Mesh seamlessly speaks with each other, they found it very easy to run review cycles basis the OKR performance of employees - something most other platforms that they reviewed fell short on.

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Reduce time taken for annual performance review cycle by over 40%

From the very first performance review cycle that Kitabisa ran on Mesh, the immediate result came in the form of time taken. The team was able to complete the review cycle for all of 400+ employees in the record time of 6 weeks. This earlier used to take 10-12 weeks. People didn't face any adoption issues due to the user friendliness of the product and the HR team received many appreciations from both employees and managers alike, for their decision to go with Mesh.

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Simplify reporting on employee performance data

The biggest time consuming aspect of Kitabisa’s performance review cycles was the manual creation of review reports for every single employee. (That's 400+ employees!!) Mesh quickly turned the reporting game on its head through 1-click report generation for everyone in the company, while still giving the managers and admins end-to-end control over calibrating reviews, what to publish, when to publish, review status, reminders and everything in between.

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Provide a holistic view of employee performance through goals, feedback, reviews and 1:1s

Given Mesh’s ability to have goals at the center of everything and have them cascaded upwards as well as downwards, it helped Kitabisa paint a holistic picture of every employee, accessible to everyone at the leadership level in the company. Apart from the visibility on who’s working on what, the IDP (individual development plan) conversations have also been received very positively by everyone. Even setting up feedback and 1:1 conversations on Mesh was easy and the result was that the managers started engaging with their team members in a much more informed and structured manner. 

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How Mesh helped Kitabisa setup the right processes?

Prior to onboarding Mesh, Kitabisa never had a performance management tool so the expectations regarding implementation, adoption, process improvement and time were naturally very high. 

Some of the things that Mesh helped Kitabisa institutionalize were,

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For running performance evaluation,

• Setup easy to use templates so that the team can vie to further improve the timelines and bring regularity in not just reviews but other aspects of employee development as well
• Before starting any review cycle, build and automate notifications communications to ensure a higher rate of timely participation
• Ratings calibration to be carried out on the Mesh platform only

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For running overall performance management,

• Completely move away from data curation on excel to Mesh
• Eliminate the need for managers to consult the HR team for any employee performance data as everything is easily viewable and downloadable from Mesh
• Getting 1:1s from a mere suggestive and good-to-do exercise to a regular activity
• Given the ease and quick turn around of Mesh’s feedback module, the company has started encouraging more employees to engage in both sharing and requesting feedback

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Mesh's impact on Kitabisa

Performance Review

With Mesh, Kitabisa was able to complete their annual performance review process within 6 weeks, with 100% participation from 426 employees. The below table outlines the stage-wise distribution of the participation with their respective completion times.