Meet the company that’s revolutionizing performance management systems

Over the last two years, workers have been leaving companies in droves in a phenomenon that’s now known as “The Great Resignation.” As companies find it harder to keep good employees, having the right systems in place to get their talent to stay has never been more important.

One system that’s in the spotlight is performance management, with 80% of organizations considering major changes to their own appraisal systems if they haven’t already implemented adjustments. This was fueled by widespread worker dissatisfaction over current practices, as 95% of employees reported being unhappy with their company’s appraisal process.

These current practices refer to infrequent goal setting – which typically only happens once a year, leading to poor communication when aligning goals – and appraisals with few data points to back them up, says Gaurav Chaubey, co-founder of Mesh, a performance management platform.

“Lots of surprising messages come out because appraisals are based on expectations set 12 months ago,” he says.

Gaurav Chaubey, co-founder of Mesh / Photo credit: Mesh

Because of this mismatch, employees would either get defensive or not pay attention during appraisals because they believe that the company does not notice their efforts, he explains.

This could lead to devastating consequences in business operation efficiency. Poorly implemented performance management systems could cost companies up to US$35 million a year due to lost working hours spent on performance evaluations.

Wanting to help businesses avoid such an outcome, Chaubey and two friends co-founded Mesh in 2020. It provides a software-as-a-service solution for human resources (HR) leaders to digitalize and scale performance management capabilities across their organizations.

Revolutionizing performance management

During its early days, Mesh spoke with HR leaders from companies such as BrowserStack, Mobile Premier League, Grant Thornton, and Drip Capital to learn more about the space.

Mesh’s co-founders quickly found that workers wanted to share feedback in a timely and effective manner. Additionally, companies needed a way to accommodate rapid changes in employee goals.

To solve these needs, Mesh initially started building an automated objective and key results (OKRs) platform. But after receiving feedback from the HR leaders they had reached out to, the team realized that OKRs were only one form of top-down goal setting. People wanted the process to be more dynamic and collaborative.

The platform provides a dashboard for insights into employee performance / Photo credit: Mesh

The company then implemented the ability for workers to provide and adjust their own goals while giving them a dashboard to track ongoing performance, increasing workers’ involvement in the appraisal process. It also added organization-wide goal setting, allowing businesses to constantly update their goals and align their employees through the platform.

This became the final version of Mesh before it was officially launched in January, with the company’s first enterprise customer onboarded in the same month. Since then, it has grown its customer base to more than 20, with firms such as Cred, ShareChat, and CleverTap all using the platform.

Positive reception

Mesh’s clients have experienced sizable benefits from its services. Take ShareChat, an India-based social media platform. The company experienced massive growth after Covid-19 lockdowns and expanded its team to over 1,200 employees in 2020, an increase of roughly 17% from the previous year.

To support its growth, ShareChat needed to scale its performance management systems. But its existing practices of using excel sheets to manually manage OKRs and arranging specific appraisal meetings made it inefficient and time-consuming.

The firm turned to Mesh earlier this year for help, which provided the social media startup with an organized, automated platform for OKR management, allowing it to reduce the time taken for performance reviews by 50%.

Through Mesh’s platform, OKR updates could also be implemented and distributed efficiently. This reduced the time spent for OKR update meetings by half, and in some cases eliminated the need for them altogether. Feedback from employees was positive as well, as they were more involved in their performance reviews and appreciated the platform’s streamlining of the process.

Mesh’s platform helps employees with one-to-one OKR management / Photo credit: Mesh

In sum, the social media platform scaled from a total of 260 to 900 OKRs within one quarter. On top of that, Mesh says that ShareChat successfully completed its performance reviews with 100% participation from over 600 employees in 45 days.

Among its clients as a whole, Chaubey says that Mesh has improved the amount of continuous feedback from employees by 40% on average. Additionally, it managed to help its clients lower the time needed to scale and set goals across their respective organizations by half.

Reaching for the “holy grail”

With success stories like ShareChat under its belt, Mesh is looking to partner with fast-growing companies with employee bases of around 200 to 300, says Chaubey.

Most companies start to feel the pain points of organization-wide performance reviews when there are more than 100 employees, and they begin looking for solutions once this figure crosses 200, he explains.

To increase the company’s client base, Chaubey says that Southeast Asia holds a lot of potential, especially with the region seeing strong growth in its startup landscape. He highlights the number of new successful businesses in the region, with 15 startups managing to enter the unicorn club.

As for its own platform, Mesh constantly engages with its customers to find out how it can simplify the user experience and learn what types of features it should be adding or dropping to improve its functionality. The company is considering using AI to help its platform recognize personalized data, which can be used to nudge employees to further encourage them to set their own goals and adapt as they go along.

“The end idea is that workers don’t like to be managed – they like to self-manage,” Chaubey says. “Continuous self-management is really the holy grail of performance management.”

Mesh is a performance management platform that encourages self-expression, increases self-awareness, and nudges self-management. It provides automated management systems for setting OKRs, plans and tasks, and performance reviews.

To find out more about the platform, visit its website.

This content was produced by Tech in Asia Studios, which connects brands with Asia’s tech community. Learn more about partnering with Tech in Asia Studios.