Is your performance management system fit for purpose? Most of what we see now was designed for a time when managers could directly observe contributions, and human judgment could bridge gaps left by disconnected data and infrequent reviews. Now, work is fast, cross-functional, and digital, unfolding across time zones, tools, and teams — and far beyond what any one person can see or remember. The result is a growing disconnect between actual performance and how it’s managed and measured.
Keeping up requires not just data, but a system that connects performance signals as work happens and makes sense of them in the moment. While companies expect AI to fill the gap by supporting coaching, evaluation, and workforce decisions, it can only add value when it has the right performance signals: governed, contextual, and continuous.
Betterworks NextGen is designed to transform performance enablement from fragmented snapshots to a live, intelligent system of insight. Reimagined from the ground up, it is a solution purpose-built for the realities of modern work: fast, complex, distributed, and human. It’s the launchpad for a new era of performance enablement.
“With Betterworks NextGen, we’ve reimagined performance enablement for the AI era,” says Cheryl Johnson, Betterworks chief product and technology officer. “NextGen brings together goals, feedback, and development to give employees, managers, and HR leaders the intelligence to move forward with clarity and purpose — enabling performance that’s adaptive, personalized, and in the moment.”
Built for the realities of the modern enterprise
We’ve made hundreds of improvements, including over 100 new features to drive alignment and business execution, add manager capacity, promote retention through continuous growth, and improve decision-making to maximize return on performance investments.
Next Gen is designed to enable business transformation through:
- Outperforming workforces: Performance and growth priorities stay front and center, bringing performance into the applications employees use daily and shortening the distance between learning and applying.
- Stronger manager impact: Leaders can turn real-time insights into better coaching, faster decisions, and stronger team performance, with clearer visibility and the context to act quickly and fairly.
- Higher retention: Performance, development, and calibration become more transparent, fair, and continuous, giving employees stronger reasons to stay and grow.
- Program effectiveness and ROI: Leaders gain real-time visibility into how their performance programs are working — making it easier to optimize resources, strengthen accountability, and demonstrate ROI across the organization.
The solution offers a modular AI-native architecture, real-time intelligence to support decisions, and a consumer-grade user experience to drive adoption
Let’s take a look under the hood at some of the key features designed to scale performance across every layer of the organization.
Performance anywhere
When performance is embedded in the tools employees use every day, adoption becomes effortless. Priorities stay visible and aligned with business strategy, coaching becomes timely, and progress becomes measurable. Betterworks seamlessly integrates with a host of applications, delivering performance “in the flow of work.”
Docebo and other learning platform integrations
With seamless integrations to learning platforms like Docebo, Udemy, and LinkedIn Learning, employees can link courses to development goals. Betterworks AI recommends learning opportunities, tracks completions, and updates goal progress — connecting development directly to performance.
External feedback
The value employees deliver often extends beyond the walls of the organization — to partners, clients, and vendors. With external feedback now built into Betterworks, that value can be captured, measured, and acted upon, tying employee performance to real-world business impact and outcomes. External contributors can be invited to provide feedback securely and without requiring user authentication.
Enterprise-ready
Enterprises need flexible performance solutions that manage visibility across teams and regions — and scale AI responsibly.
Responsible AI controls
Betterworks continues to reinforce responsible AI principles with NextGen. Administrators can enable or disable AI features by group, geography, or department, making it easy to pilot new AI capabilities before deploying broadly. Governance is built in, allowing organizations to scale AI responsibly, with transparency, control, and reduced risk.
Tailored, auto-triggered, and translatable templates
Conversations and feedback templates can be customized to specific departments or employee segments, such as engineering or new hires, providing HR and department leaders with finely tuned data and insights into the needs and progress of specific employee groups. Templates can also be auto-triggered based on events like onboarding, development milestones, and performance improvement plans, improving HR’s efficiency.
Templates are also translatable across the 30-plus languages Betterworks supports. For example, a manager who speaks Spanish can send one template that automatically reaches employees in their native languages. This reduces the administrative burden on HR by streamlining template creation for performance conversations.
“Instead of managing 28 versions of a template, an HR admin manages one,” Cheryl explains.
Global enterprises operate with multiple business units, geographies, and compliance requirements. NextGen is designed to handle this complexity with simplicity and speed.
AI-native intelligence
AI is no longer an add-on — it’s an essential performance layer. NextGen’s AI-native architecture interprets signals across goals, feedback, conversations, and development to provide real-time insights and guidance that are timely, contextual, and personalized.
AI-Assisted Performance Summary
Writing reviews can be time-consuming and inconsistent. Now, managers can generate accurate, data-rich summaries in minutes, not hours, days, or even weeks. Betterworks AI-Assisted Performance Summary consolidates an employee’s goal achievement, feedback, conversations, and recognition. The result? More consistent reviews, less bias, more time spent on meaningful coaching, and far greater manager efficiency and confidence.
Embedded AI across modules
Whether suggesting goals, improving feedback responses, or drafting 1:1 summaries and action items, AI is embedded throughout the solution to empower employees and managers to work smarter and faster. AI surfaces key themes and provides employees and managers with a concrete record of progress. Managers gain clarity and confidence, and can spend more time coaching for performance and development.
Connected data
Performance isn’t just about moments. It’s about momentum. Every interaction in Betterworks adds to a living system of performance intelligence.
From goals and 1:1s to feedback and skills, NextGen captures and connects every signal. This unified data model fuels AI, enriches reporting, and keeps guidance relevant and up to date.
As usage increases, the solution becomes smarter, surfacing patterns, recommending actions, and making every performance moment more valuable than the last. This is how insights stay fresh, and decisions are made quickly and with less friction.
Manager Command Center
The Manager Command Center consolidates disparate data into a single, unified dashboard that shows team performance — goal progress, feedback, conversations, development activities, and reviews. Managers can easily and quickly understand performance across large or distributed teams, gain new insights, spot risks, follow up on overdue actions such as check-ins, and take action without toggling between tools. The command center reduces manual effort and context switching, enabling managers to efficiently and proactively manage team performance.
Complexity made simple
Modern enterprises are complex. Matrixed reporting lines, multiple geographies, local compliance requirements, and AI restrictions. Betterworks NextGen can manage all of it while also providing everyone in the workforce with a consistent and intuitive experience, reducing mental load and accelerating workflows.
Unified performance view
Managers can see conversation questions, employee responses, and employee data like goals and feedback on a single screen. Similarly, employees have a single view of their goals, completion rates, and feedback when writing a self-review.
This kind of simplicity drives adoption and results.
Goal cascading
Among the changes to our Goals module is the ability for managers to cascade or clone goals across their organization with just a few clicks — automatically creating aligned goals for teams or individuals while preserving links to parent objectives. Managers can adjust owners, due dates, and metrics while maintaining alignment and roll-up visibility.
Performance without boundaries
Betterworks NextGen redefines performance for the modern enterprise — moving beyond review season to support growth in the everyday rhythm of work. It’s intelligent, adaptable, and designed to evolve alongside your people and your business.
With a modern, intuitive experience embedded directly into the tools your employees already use, NextGen meets people where they are. Managers get a unified view of goals, conversations, and feedback. Employees gain clarity into their progress and growth. And HR can deploy scalable programs with precision and trust.
This isn’t performance management as usual. It’s performance enablement — turning data into direction, feedback into forward momentum, and strategy into action. At speed. At scale.
Ready to shift from managing performance to enabling it?
Delve into about the strategic value of the NextGen solution.
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