Reflektive

Reflektive

Creating a culture of real-time feedback, between peers and top down or bottom up, has been established as a key element in the formula of high achieving teams and businesses. In fact, teams that have a systematic approach to feedback rank higher on individual engagement and sense of enablement (TW 2016). The important piece to sustaining a feedback culture is to ensure there is communication around how the feedback is used, how it's valued within the businesses, and how it impacts success. When individuals put time into developing a feedback culture, such as training themselves on how to conduct the sometimes difficult conversation, preparing for the conversation,  scheduling, logging the feedback in a form, reviewing the feedback etc., there must be clear value for the effort. Understanding the value of feedback is crucial to ensure repetition. For example, what are the action items a manager or team is going to take on based on feedback provided? Has the organization established specific objectives based on employee and manager feedback? 

Reflektive started out in 2014 as a platform to enable real-time feedback between managers to employees as well as employees to employees, and employees to managers. Over the last 18 months or so, they have focused hard on building a more comprehensive performance management platform with performance evaluations or check-ins, employee surveys, real-time feedback, and development modules. The platform has integration capabilities, mainly with Slack, gmail and outlook for scheduling purposes. Utilizing any type of feedback or performance management tool should be accompanied with training on how to deliver feedback and document properly. These two pieces are crucial to developing a high performance culture but are also essential for corrective action and risk management.

RATINGS: 3.75 OUT OF 5 STARS.

Strength: Reflektive is an easy to use, mobile-enabled platform for businesses looking for a simple, affordable tool to develop feedback, recognition and check-ins or performance evaluations. It's a slick tool and much more user friendly that many existing traditional performance management systems on the market. While Reflektive can't be integrated in the regular work-flow of employee and manager, being able to give feedback on-the-go or during a quick break through the mobile app is hugely valuable to developing a culture of real-time feedback and engagement. Finally, through a 2016 update, Reflektive can now integrate with third-party Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS) where employee information is stored (start date, role, manager etc.). 

Weakness: HR and non-HR users state admin access and ability to customize reports is lacking. In addition, the tool doesn't prompt users to use it as part of their regular work. It's limited in that employees can't do any regular work or manage any non 'HR' process through this platform meaning that this is strictly for HR processes. This has historically been the issue with most 'performance management' systems, it's a third party application that isn't integrated in all of the work being done, the reporting and results that exist outside of the system. 

Best Use: Reflektive would suit a business with 10-300 FTEs well. Above this number of employees, an organization would be better suited investing in a pricier solution that includes other capabilities such as non-HR project management to ensure performance management is part of a larger system rather than a stand alone process. Any business looking at investing in a performance management platform needs to first determine how it will fit in the current culture and current 'ways of working' to plan how a new  platform and process will be engrained in the status quo. Furthermore, defining 'what success looks like' after implementation both from a business performance and a culture/employee behavior standpoint, 60/90/120/365 days post implementation will be important to overall impact and effectiveness. A platform or system doesn't actually improve culture or business performance; best case, it supports leadership efforts of real-time feedback, goal alignment communication, career development alignment etc., but in the worst case, it becomes a timely, ineffective, disliked or unused process of little to no value.