Beyond Dashboards: Reflecting on the People Side of Performance Data

Nick Haap:

If you think about an individual’s perspective, that’s how they feel. That’s their reality. And so we’ve got to make sure that we understand how we’re feeling instead of just looking at the cold hard numbers because they don’t tell the full story.

Deanna LaPierre:

When we redesigned our performance management process, we focused on creating a system that facilitated those conversations, making them more constructive and impactful.

Margaret Keane:

At the end of the day, from a customer perspective, it is about partnerships and relationships, and I think you don’t want to let the AI take over, if you know what I mean. I think that human element has got to be held high.

Michelle Gouldsberry:

Hi, and welcome to the Betterworks People Fundamentals podcast. I’m Michelle Gouldsberry, senior content marketing manager. Betterworks core belief in people fundamentals revolves around helping HR lead through constant change by focusing on core values like fairness, support, balance, and enabling growth opportunities for employees. These tenants empower everyone in the workforce to strive for excellence, to foster creativity, and to acknowledge each other’s contributions. Betterworks believes that strategic HR leaders can translate these principles into action, shaping their workforce for the better, and helping drive meaningful business outcomes. And in this show, we’re diving even deeper into these principles by listening to experts share how you can make them come alive at your organization.

As we wrap up 2025, I want to step back and look at the conversations we’ve had this year at Betterworks from our Empower HR 2025 virtual summit to this podcast. It’s useful to service the ideas that keep showing up again and again. This season focused on data, but what stood out was how often leaders talked about using data, not just to measure performance, but to understand people. You’ll hear how leaders are reframing performance data as a tool for growth and why context and storytelling matter as much as metrics. You’ll also learn more about how AI changes what leaders should measure, why adoption is often the most important data point in transformation and how trust ultimately determines whether data leads to real business outcomes.

To start, we’re going to hear from leaders who challenged the idea that performance data is just about evaluation and instead reframed it as a tool for growth and enablement. Speaking at Empower HR, Deanna LaPierre, senior director of People Development and Total Rewards at LivePerson, shared how her team redesigned performance management around conversations instead of ratings. You’ll also hear from Nick Haap, director of Talent Management and People Analytics at KeHE Distributors, who echoed this same shift.

Deanna LaPierre:

When we redesigned our performance management process, we focused on creating a system that facilitated those conversations, making them more constructive and impactful. We gave managers the tools and responsibility to take charge. We’ve empowered them to lead conversations that guide and coach their teams. We shifted from a process that felt like, hard to say this, an obligation, to one that enables employees and manages to engage in meaningful discussions and foster real connections and focus on outcomes. Ultimately, the system was designed not only to track performance, but to encourage the kinds of conversations that drive development and align with our goals as a company.

Nick Haap:

As I was starting to dig into this a little bit more and conduct retrospectives and focus groups with internal team members to really understand what their perspective was around the performance management process, was it accomplishing anything more than giving compensation, a rating that they could use to anchor their merit and bonus to, or were people really getting a lot of value out of it? And the answer is probably what you would expect is people didn’t look forward to it. And that was a light bulb moment for me because I thought, how am I really contributing value to the organization beyond just giving ratings from my group over to compensation when I could instead be figuring out ways to drive behaviors among leaders and team members that would ultimately unlock their own potential and make them more effective at what they do.

And so that’s what really kind of set me down this path of transitioning from traditional performance management to what we call performance enablement, which again, is really geared towards unleashing individual potential. And how you do that is through regular conversations on the topics that matter most, the things that matter most and making sure you and your leader are aligned on what the go forward tasks are. So that’s critical. And so what we ultimately want our team members to see these practices as being more of tools and habits that are going to help them succeed, things that if they actually implement them and follow through on them is going to improve their overall chances of success by the end of the year. And instead of an HR mandate that they have to go in and do this within this particular timeframe.

Michelle Gouldsberry:

Once leaders start collecting better performance data, the next challenge is how to use it responsibly. To explore that, you’ll hear again from Nick, followed by Annie Cosgrove, director of Analytics and Insights at Density. They explain why data without context fails to move people or sustain change.

Nick Haap:

If you think about an individual’s perspective, that’s how they feel. That’s their reality. And so we’ve got to make sure that we understand how they’re feeling instead of just looking at the cold hard numbers because they don’t tell the full story. You’re still hearing things as a leader on the floor when you talk to your employees, you have informal conversations. They want to make sure that you are taking note of that and taking stock of what you could potentially change and what you could change the impact to make the employee’s overall experience even better.

Annie Cosgrove:

My team at Density has incredible access to a really objective lens on workplace usage and performance. So Density is an occupancy analytics company, and we use sensors that anonymously track how people use space. And so we partner really closely with which large companies that are trying to understand how their workplaces are performing and really trying to match their employee needs to their behaviors.

And so yeah, so like you said, knowing how much your space is used and when and for how long, and all of the good stuff that we can get from devices like sensors in the workplace, it can tell you a lot about how it’s going, but it doesn’t give you the whole story. What’s really important is pairing sensor data, card swipe data, just sort of measures of how much the space is used and when with qualitative insights, actually talking to your employees, figuring out the why, like you said, to go along with that.

And I think together these qualitative and quantitative insights can really give a full picture on how your workplace is doing, what you might need to change, and where there might be pain points for your employees.

Michelle Gouldsberry:

AI came up in nearly every conversation this year, but faster insights don’t automatically lead to better outcomes. What matters is how leaders use AI and what they choose to measure. First, we’ll hear from Jeff Jolton, leader of Data and Insights in Spencer Stuart’s leadership advisory services. He unpacks the difference between job enlargement and job enrichment and how leaders can use AI to encourage meaningful work. Then Margaret Keen, former CEO of Synchrony and now CEO of Cisive, explains why AI’s value isn’t just efficiency or cost savings. It’s also about delivering better outcomes while protecting the human element of work.

Jeff Jolton:

At the leader level, I think we want leader to become more data centric. I’m not saying leaders need to be data scientists, but what I mean, I want them to be data centric, I want them to ask better questions. I want them to connect AI to value. Really, when we talk about job enlargement, it’s just like adding to our job, but just doing more of the same thing. So if you’re working in a call center, that is we’re doing more calls or if we’re writing reports that we have to write more reports or we’re getting more of the same things done. And what we find with enlargement, it’s not particularly motivating or engaging. And if we enlarge the job too much, we just pile on more of the same work, it actually starts to lead to burnout.

You can imagine even something like nursing or something, it becomes too much, it’s just too much of the same thing. People like variety, people like being challenged, they like autonomy, and that’s where enrichment comes in. That’s where we are adding a certain value to the job, whether is that autonomy or variety or some sense of ownership and purpose. When we tie a job to the vision, to the strategy, when we give people a sense of end to end ownership, that’s when we start enriching the job and it’s giving them something new to work on, something challenging, something to build on, then it’s more exciting. And you kind of think about your own work, what really engages you, it’s when your leader asks you to try and figure out something new or work on a challenging project, so that’s enrichment.

Doubling up on the number of reports you have to get out next week doesn’t really engage people, doesn’t feel like it’s really enriching. So that’s why I talked about enlargement and enrichment. And when we focus on AI from that operational or efficiency perspective, we tend to run that risk of piling on.

Margaret Keane:

I think like every new technology that comes out, there’s always hype, but this one feels a little more real that it is coming. And I think for me, the question is how fast does it all come? One, can it get cost out?

Two, can it make our processes better and more efficient for our partners and are we giving better answers to our partners and making their needs better met by what we’re delivering for them? So I think that’s really important. That’s probably even more important than the cost out piece because if we’re delivering a better product, a better solution, a faster solution for our partners, it’s a win for them, which means it’s a win for us, in my opinion.

And then I think the third is, how do we ensure … This is still an unknown for me, so I’m just going to say, I think we got to be careful that we don’t lose the human element to partnering and engaging with our employees and our partners as we all go through this new technological advancement, right?

Because at the end of the day, from a customer perspective, it is about partnerships and relationships. And I think you don’t want to let the AI take over, you know what I mean? I think that human element has got to be held high.

Michelle Gouldsberry:

At this year’s Empower HR, leaders talk candidly about why transformations fail even when the data looks good. Abbas Syed Ali, VP of People at HelloFresh, shared why adoption breaks down when leaders focus on metrics without first clearly defining the problem they’re trying to solve.

Abbas Syed Ali:

The statistics of 70% of transformations failing also applies to sort of major system rollouts. A lot of them also fail. And surprisingly enough, the results or the root causes of this failure or this widespread failure of these sorts of initiatives is actually quite common. I think a lot of times what happens is people go into transformations or major system buys and rollouts with a very financially focused use case, and there is not enough due diligence and homework done before sort of taking the decision.

So if I think about a very basic sort of playbook of a few things that you should always think about. One is, where are we as a business and what are we as a business? Are we a customer focused B2C company? Are we an enterprise focused B2B company? Are we a global Fortune 500 company? Are we a midsize company that’s focused in one region? Are we a small company that’s still in hyper growth mode?

And then sort of looking at doing our homework internal and external. What are we trying to solve internally from a business perspective, from a people perspective? And what are other people doing externally and how can we learn from them to not reinvent the wheel, but also make sure that we have the best information possible to make our decisions rather than get the information from just one or two sources or from a consultant we bring in from the outside. And only once you’ve done all of that and done all that homework, can you really go into the planning phase of saying we need to sort of plan a certain transformation or system buy and roll out. And then it’s much easier to sort of say, okay, maybe we know which part of the market we want to focus on or what area of the business we want to transform, how we want to do it, what the key results are that we want to achieve out of it.

And then finally comes the business case and all those other things, the due diligence, the sort of demos and all those other things that we do in that cycle. And on top of all of that’s when you start to do your change management, project management, and all those other disciplines we talk about, and then you roll out and measure and measure and improve. So I think it’s the classic engineering trope of 80% of problems in anything you do, any product you create come from design problems, not operational problems.

So I think a lot of transformations fail because not enough attention is paid to the design stage, the why are we doing this and what exactly do we need to do and what results do we want to achieve?

Michelle Gouldsberry:

Finally, as data, AI, and transformation reshape work, leaders have to make their intent visible. Here’s Margaret on why clear and honest communication builds trust. Then, Nick adds his perspective on how data can be used to validate whether performance management improvements are working, and the link between awareness of those changes and opinion.

Margaret Keane:

Look, I’m a big believer in that employees have to feel good about coming to work every day. And I think with that, you get a couple of things. You get, I think, a better customer experience because if they’re feeling good coming in and feeling like they’re valued, they’re going to treat that customer if they’re a call center person, for example, on the phone in a good way, in a different way, and really feel good about their job. I think the others, it measures leadership and how leadership is doing in terms of their behaviors and how they’re treating their employees. And then all of that really, the real win is you get less turnover. So you have a highly engaged workforce who are delivering for your partners, which is most important, and less turnover, which saves you money. So I think to have a happy workforce is not an easy thing because there’s so many things coming at people, but I think you can, but it requires work and focus.

I think you got to just keep being out there and communicate to employees what is happening, what’s going to happen, when it’s going to happen. You have to be transparent. I’ve learned this in my career. I think first of all, people sitting in jobs today are sitting there questioning, “What’s going to happen to my job?” So for you as a leader not to be talking about these types of things, I think is unfair to the employees. So I think you just need to be as transparent as you can.

Nick Haap:

Within our current quarterly vibe, so the continuous listening survey that we send out, we’ve incorporated a question around how valuable was that checking conversation. And so far it’s looking quite positive with upwards of 90 plus percent of people finding it or agreeing with the statement that it was valuable for them. We wanted to make sure that not only having the check-in conversation, but they understand the value of it and they’re more willing to have it. And so that’s a way of us confirming that we’re on the right track with the way that we’ve trained our leaders to have the conversations, the guidance that we’re giving them, and then that the team members feel like they’re leaving with something of note that they can use going forward. So the importance of having a check-in conversation on overall favorability, the quality of the conversation on overall favorability.

And then longer term, I think the hypothesis, of course, would be that those people who are having regular check-in conversations, having quality check-in conversations are going to be on average performing better than those that are not. I know I keep leaning on the engagement data quite a bit, but it’s because it’s so telling. And we have looked at action planning. Again, action planning is what our more senior level leaders do after they get their vibe or engagement results. For those team members who recognize the actions were actually being taken, they had a 36 percentage point higher level of favorability than those that didn’t recognize any actions being taken. So I think that was just a really big flag for us that we need to make sure that team members recognize the actions are being taken and we need to be closing the feedback loop with them because it’s clearly related to favorability as we would’ve anticipated. And so being able to see that kind of all in one place would made it very easy.

Michelle Gouldsberry:

As we look across these conversations from the past year, a clear pattern emerges. Data is becoming more powerful, but its impact depends entirely on how leaders choose to use it. We heard that performance data works best when it enables growth, not evaluation. That data without context doesn’t drive change unless leaders take the time to explain what it means. That AI creates value when it enriches work, not when it simply asks people to do more faster, and that in any transformation, adoption and trust matter more than perfect metrics.

What these leaders reminded us is that data doesn’t replace leadership, it sharpens it. Data helps leaders ask better questions, spot patterns earlier, and understand what people are really experiencing, but it’s leadership that turns insight into action, builds trust, and guides organizations through change. The challenge isn’t collecting more data, it’s using it with intention, clarity, and humanity.

That’s how HR leaders build organizations that are more resilient, more engaged, and better prepared for what comes next. That’s a wrap for this season. Be sure to subscribe to the People Fundamentals podcast to check out our previous conversations with HR leaders, practitioners, and experts. You can hear everything on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube Music. Thanks for listening.