Problem

Only digitization didn’t drive collaboration

The downside of disconnected processes

Though Pipefy digitized their processes through 2 different platforms to manage goals and reviews, the issue involved a disconnect between the two. This caused HR leaders and people managers to manually invest additional time and effort in aligning them at the end of the year. Even with the goal management platform, team members lacked visibility into what others were working on, despite their work being interdependent.

"It was a huge problem for us that people didn't know how things were connected. We couldn't communicate to employees that performance evaluation & goal achievement are two parts of a singular integrated process."

Set & forget approach to goals

Mainly top-down formulation and lack of visibility and timely check-ins stifled progress

Furthermore, a top-down goal-setting approach was implemented, which lacked nuance and granularity. These goals were generally established at the beginning of the year, subsequently forgotten and teams didn’t have equal visibility into them. This resulted in people putting high effort to low priority goals, or just being unsure of where to put their effort. The lack of visibility also made it challenging to comprehend how these goals aligned with the company's larger purpose and where precisely the needle had moved towards it. 

Heavy administrative burden

Lack of integrations led to the redundant effort of updating data across 3 different sets of tools

People managers had to spend time and effort to enter data from their business tools into the goal management tool to show progress against their team's goals - which felt like an administrative burden. During the transfer process some data was overlooked, underplayed or progress was not captured accurately. 

At the end of the year, while doing performance evaluations, we used to tell employees, hey, your achievement is 80% or is 100%, or it's 130%. And the first reaction always was, how come I didn't see this the entire year?

Lack of Feedback Culture

Only year-end feedback led to surprising messages and no chance of timely improvement for people

Lastly, the feedback process at Pipefy was inadequate and surprising as employees received feedback only at the end of the year. This rendered it futile as people didn’t get a chance to act on it and improve. 

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Solution

Uniting Goals and Performance Management

One platform to provide visibility into objectives and their progress

Moving to Mesh meant Pipefy's goal and performance management was happening on one platform. This allowed better interdepartmental visibility into objectives and their corresponding strategies, essentially the "what" and "how" of the company's goals. What do we want to do, and how do we get there? This made collaborating a breeze and helped in promoting a cohesive organizational identity.

Individual Goals for Better Results

New bottom-up approach empowered year-round visibility and a continuous focus on priorities

The new bottom up approach to formulating goals ensured every employee was assigned a minimum of six goals per year and an average of eight goals. This provided complete visibility to employees and leaders, allowing them to see how their efforts impacted the company's goals and managers could act agilely by getting "off-track goals" identified and prioritized with little to no delay.

Improved Efficiency and Communication

Automated workflows cut redundant check-ins and freed up time for meaningful conversations

Integrating Mesh's automated workflows with Pipefy's existing business tools improved efficiency as redundant check-ins between multiple platforms stopped. All goals were kept updated in real-time - saving them over 1280 people-hours from the previous year. This freed up bandwidth for meaningful conversations with managers and reports on performance improvement. 

Building a Culture of Feedback

‍Slack integration drove regular requests and valuable insights for self-improvement

Detailed praise and acknowledgement of one's work started flowing on the dedicated Slack channel, and employees began to understand what it meant to perform well at Pipefy. On average, each employee shared six instances of continuous feedback throughout the year. This provided unbiased qualitative information regularly on their work rather than only during annual performance reviews - giving people multiple opportunities for self-improvement.

Data-Driven Insights Strengthened Reviews

‍ Incorporating goal tracking and feedback led to an equitable and transparent process

In this regard, performance reviews were no longer viewed as separate from goal management but seen as two sides of the same coin. Insights from goal tracking and feedback received strengthened the review process for everyone. Completing reviews had  minimal reliance on memory, as all the data regarding their goal achievement and feedback was visible at the time of concluding the reviews, leaving no room for biases to occur. 

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Outcome

Mesh was able to transparently scale goals across people by 150%, after removing the goal management tool.

The company exchanged more than 1500 continuous feedbacks throughout the year, averaging about 5-6 pieces of feedback per person, which translated to a 40% improvement in feedback culture. 

The elimination of unnecessary check-ins saved 1280 people-hours.

Lastly, 70% of high performers were retained in Pipefy after their performance cycle, and an astounding 22% of people improved on their performance rating, compared to the previous year’s assessment.