“In today’s fast-paced work environment, managers seldom focus their energies on coaching employees continuously, yet feedback and recognition are most effective when they’re given instantly with appropriate context and specificity,” Kris Duggan, the CEO of BetterWorks, tells Fast Company. The enterprise software company builds employee work profiles, known as “Work Graphs,” based on data from integrations with Google Apps, email, and Office 365, as well as Salesforce, JIRA, and Slack. The machine-learning algorithm specifically tracks each employee’s goal progress, goal alignment, comments, cheers, nudges, cross-functional collaboration, recognition hashtags, and more, according to Duggan. “BetterWorks then uses the Work Graph to prompt feedback and recognition from the relevant people, whether it’s managers or peers,” he says. “We want to bring feedback and recognition into the weekly workflow of managers, making it more natural and ingrained in their relationships with their reports,” adds Duggan.
