Kshitij Mohan is the Co-founder & CEO of HuddleUp. With over 9 years of rich experience varying across high-growth startups & consulting, he truly understands what it takes to build successful teams. Before starting HuddleUp, he was part of the founding team at Cashify (India's largest e-commerce platform), leading & building technology products for millions of global users.
In an exclusive interaction with People Matters, Kshitij talks about the latest innovations that HuddleUp is pioneering in the HR technology space. With the vision to deliver the best employee experience, it empowers organisations to listen to their people every step of the way.
What makes employee feedback critical to the more extensive terrain of employee experience? How can technology empower businesses to listen to their people and keep track of the team's pulse?
In today's post-pandemic world of remote & hybrid teams, it's a herculean task to build a stellar employee experience. When we talk about employee experience, it takes into account every interaction that a user does with the organisation in their entire employee lifecycle - right from onboarding to exit. So, if we look at it from a broader perspective, there are a lot of data points - active & passive - that collectively help in understanding what an employee undergoes as 'experience'.
And, hence as a very first step, it becomes critical to collect & process all these feedback data points into something meaningful that HR & People Leaders can act on.
That's where technology comes in - empowering leaders with intelligent insights & recommendations in real-time to support them in every decision-making & moving towards building positive experiences.
Being a leading digital platform designed to build high-performing teams, how is HuddleUp rethinking what’s possible in the employee experience landscape?
Although employee experience is an amalgamation of multiple factors, what we believe the core is - Continuous Actionable Feedback.
Teams need two kinds of feedback to grow: member and group. Unfortunately, most organisations provide two other kinds of feedback: annual reviews and interventions. Because both tend toward the traumatic, employees become conditioned to avoid feedback. And, Managers need feedback just as badly as employees. However, giving & receiving feedback in the right way is hard to come by.
This is what we are redesigning at HuddleUp - to make the entire feedback flow simple, continuous and easy to act on. We power this feedback loop via:
- Conversational AI-driven Check-Ins, to help Managers keep a tap on the team's feedback & remove blockers before it's too late
- 1-on-1s, to have meaningful individual discussions with suggested talking points
- Anytime 360-degree feedback, to enable every employee to understand their strengths & improvement areas and act accordingly
- Peer-to-Peer Recognition, to empower every employee to give positive feedback & appreciate their peers in the daily flow of work in a fun, gamified way
What outcomes can businesses expect today from investing in a continuous feedback platform? How can it align with both their business and people strategy?
Having continuous feedback incorporated into the company culture leads to a myriad of positive business results, including:
- A decrease in turnover: companies that regularly incorporate employee feedback see turnover decrease by an average of 14.9%
- An increase in happiness: 68% of employees who receive meaningful feedback feel fulfilled at their jobs
- An increase in employee satisfaction: managers who give and receive consistent feedback earned an average score of 8.6/10 from employees
As an innovator in employee experience and productivity, what is your advice to our community to look at the EX landscape with fresh eyes?
We all need to start looking beyond the traditional annual/bi-annual reviews and feedback discussions and make them more continuous and people-centric. For example, why should an employee wait six months to get detailed feedback from their Managers/Superiors,/Peers? And then wait for another six months to act & realise its impact?
It's time we start rethinking the feedback mechanisms and incorporating them into our daily flow of work.
Shortening the feedback cycle has immense positive outcomes:
- reduces the amount of feedback (making feedback actionable)
- reduces the gap between action and evaluation (making feedback memorable)
- reduces the stakes (allowing employees to focus on the feedback, knowing it's just another x months before they could try to improve their lot)
I genuinely believe this is an important step in building engaged, productive workplaces.
To know more about HuddleUp’s technology stack and test out their latest product innovations, you get an exclusive opportunity to meet their team at none other than the People Matters TechHR Conference this 4th and 5th of August at The Leela Palace Gurugram.