Most, if not all, employees do not look forward to biannual or annual performance reviews. Such sessions are nerve-racking and may not be that valuable. A Gallup study reveals that employees think traditional performance reviews are inaccurate (75%) and that they have received unfair ratings (70%). This is expected as humans are inherently biased and because the feedback provided is for past projects, which may not help employees in future tasks.
“Traditional performance review methods build records, not habits. They're usually top-down, bureaucratic, and suffer from bias and recency effects. They don't encourage ongoing feedback because they happen twice a year at maximum. Therefore, most don't drive real behaviour change but short-term tweaks to keep up perception. Who hasn't been in a situation where you try hard to look productive and effective just before review season?” says Projjal Ghatak, CEO and co-founder of OnLoop.
Based on the idea of collaborative team development, OnLoop is a mobile-first app that gathers employee feedback and goals regularly to give leaders better insights into how individuals and their teams are doing. As such, it builds the habit of reflection, feedback and learning to help everyone develop their strengths.
More than 25 diverse organisations globally are currently using the app. OnLoop has also raised US$5.5 million ($7.22 million) in seed capital in 2020 and 2021, co-led by MassMutual Ventures and Square Peg Capital, Hustle Fund, and a group of angel investors.
Ghatak shares with DigitalEdge how OnLoop can help organisations build a less biased and more productive workplace culture.
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How can your concept of collaborative team development address the shortcomings of traditional performance appraisal methods?
Collaborative team development (CTD) is a framework to create less biased, less anxious, and more productive workplace cultures through day-to-day feedback that compounds. It was built to ease modern teams' pain in today’s hybrid working environment. We realise that work today is designed to get things done – instead of making people better – and we are determined to change that through the OnLoop app.
Currently, work is often focused on the input (which is usually determined by how long the employee works or sits in front of a laptop daily) and the output (in terms of the number of documents created or emails sent), but not the outcome and achieving a clear goal. There’s a misguided emphasis on getting tasks done, not having an impact. Therefore, despite working hard for many years, people don't get a clear picture of their development.
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Some companies are starting to embrace 360 reviews. Is that method similar to CTD?
Embracing 360 reviews is a good step in the right direction by trying to get feedback from not just a manager but also other colleagues, peers, and stakeholders. But it still is just a static snapshot and doesn't depict someone's journey and progress throughout the year. Like a survey, 360 reviews are sent out, completed, reviewed, and easily forgotten after the review season has passed.
In contrast, day-to-day feedback captured in OnLoop compounds over time — it is not a one-off snapshot but an ongoing process of professional and personal growth based on feedback. It also gives managers extra insights into each team member more frequently than the usual once or twice per year.
How does OnLoop work to help organisations ensure a fair appraisal?
Progress feels unclear in today’s remote/hybrid world. It is hard to know what great looks like and how to harness it. OnLoop gives direct, actionable insights for each team member concretely and practically.
The app allows managers and leaders to track their team’s wellness through weekly check-ins, set goals, and capture their strengths and blind spots that require improvements. OnLoop can also automatically create summaries that tie all that information together in a multi-layered and individualised report. It uses artificial intelligence technology from OpenAI to summarise all the data tracked into simple yet useful performance summaries. In short, OnLoop can generate a summary based on feedback, goals, and data tracked, saving a manager time that is usually taken to write a performance review manually.
Keeping feedback regularly in OnLoop sounds tedious, so what does it take to make it a habit in the workplace?
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We believe four things must happen for humans to build new habits. External triggers prompt us to act (like setting new goals), we take action, there is a reward unpredictable in timing and size, and we build commitment by doing the work. Based on this habit science, we deploy a quarterly operating model for CTD with specific nudges and interventions that makes the habit stick. OnLoop also has integrations with tools like Slack to make it easy to use and avoid doubling systems.
Besides performance appraisal, how else can organisations use OnLoop to improve their teams?
OnLoop is much more than a tool to generate Prism, the AI-powered performance reviews using OpenAI’s GPT-3 system.
Firstly, periodic wellness check-ins allow team members to record how they’re feeling, opening the doors to helping them be the best version of themselves. We believe performance will last only as long as the team is proud of their work and the people around them.
Secondly, setting and tracking goals ensures there are commitments between managers and their teams through clear priorities, direction, and goals. Thirdly, by celebrating success and capturing everyday wins through self-reflection and feedback from others, managers empower team members to refine skills and uncover real superpowers. Awareness of blind spots also provides a deeper understanding of how an employee and his team members can improve over time.
Finally, together with bite-sized learning content at precisely the right time, all these provide actionable insights so that team members take action, learn and develop together.
What's next for OnLoop?
There is a lot of excitement around OpenAI’s ChatGPT right now, and we’ve been using OpenAI to power our Prism summaries. We strongly believe in leveraging generative AI to drive manager and team effectiveness, especially around tough conversations, regarding giving and receiving feedback, coaching and more.
We’re making continuous improvements for both user experience and backend systems to handle our growth while building features — such as customised dashboards, user management portals, and single sign-on — to work better in large enterprise organisations. The team is working hard on more effective productivity measurements driven by OnLoop to help managers focus their time on where they can have the most impact. We are investing aggressively to meet revenue and product milestones to raise additional capital to fuel our growth.
