How Continuous Performance Management Supports Organizations During Rapid Growth

Growth isn’t just a metric—it’s the measure of organizational vitality. In today’s competitive landscape, rapid growth is a signal that your strategy is working, your people are executing, and your organization is building momentum. Boards demand it. Investors reward it. Employees are energized by it – driven by the promise of career mobility, meaningful contribution, and long-term stability. But sustaining continuous performance management during rapid growth is no small feat. It requires intention, adaptability, and systems that scale as quickly as your business does.

Executing well during a period of fast growth is tricky. From an HR standpoint, it can quickly outpace your people processes, overwhelm your managers, and dilute your culture. As McKinsey points out, 65% of failures in high-growth companies stem from people and organizational challenges.

So, how do you scale with intention? How do you preserve alignment, clarity, and cohesion in your workforce as you expand?

The answer lies in a reimagined approach to performance: one that goes beyond annual reviews and rigid hierarchies of traditional performance management. Continuous performance management (CPM) – also known as performance enablement – equips fast-growing organizations to navigate complexity, unlock agility, and elevate human potential, all while fueling sustainable growth. 

7 pitfalls that can disrupt rapid growth

While there are many aspects of rapid growth that are outside the domain of HR – such as finance and customer experience – there are numerous workforce-related issues that HR can address to help their organization succeed in high-growth periods. 

1. Talent acquisition and workforce planning gaps

As growth accelerates, outside hiring can become reactive, redundant, and expensive. Without insight into existing skills or potential successors, companies will struggle to see how they can grow their current employees. Strategic workforce planning becomes guesswork without tools that illuminate capability gaps and surface internal talent ready for development or promotion.

2. Cultural dilution

Rapid growth can dilute your culture if expectations, ways of working, and values aren’t reinforced with newly hired employees. Without a structure for communicating and rewarding behaviors, culture can fragment and teams can become misaligned. Fast-growing companies must create clarity around behaviors and values and actively embed these into day-to-day work.

3. New managers lack support

Rapid growth means more first-time managers, but few companies have time for formal training, especially when they’re strapped for bandwidth. These new leaders often struggle with goal-setting, feedback, and coaching. Even experienced managers may struggle as their team size and complexity grow.

4. Managing change and communication breakdowns

In fast-growth phases, change is constant, but communication can’t always keep up. The organization wants new employees to ramp up quickly, immerse themselves in the organization, and understand the values and behaviors that make the company unique. Without structured feedback loops and clear messaging, misinformation and a lack of clarity can spread. 

5. Strategic misalignment

As teams grow, goals can diverge. People pursue projects that don’t support core business objectives. Maintaining alignment requires flexibility, frequent reorientation, and visibility into how team and individual goals ladder up to shifting strategic priorities.

6. Operational complexity

Growth brings layers – more teams, more objectives, more ambiguity. Leaders are stretched thin, struggling to track ownership and accountability. Without the right tools, it’s difficult to manage distributed teams, clarify who’s doing what, and eliminate redundant or conflicting efforts.

7. Outgrown systems and processes

Legacy tools can’t necessarily keep pace with a fast-moving enterprise. Manual processes, disconnected systems, and outdated workflows slow everything down and make critical data either difficult to access or completely inaccessible. Technology becomes a growth inhibitor instead of a growth enabler, frustrating everyone from the CEO to the individual contributor.

The role of performance enablement in fast-growing organizations

Betterworks’ continuous performance management software gives organizations better insights into their workforce, reinforces culture, and connects individual goals to company strategy, all critical during periods of rapid growth. It supports managers, provides the insights needed to combat increased complexity, and focuses on coaching and feedback to create clarity, ownership, and forward motion across the organization.

Enabling workforce insights at scale

Performance enablement gives you visibility into your workforce like never before. With Betterworks, you get a continuous stream of rich performance data that reveals who’s achieving goals, where skills gaps exist, and where leadership potential lies. These insights help HR and business leaders make smarter, faster talent decisions, powering strategic growth from within and enabling companies to avoid costly recruiting and unnecessary external hiring.

Promoting cultural integration

Culture must be reinforced, not assumed. Betterworks helps organizations articulate and activate culture through real-time feedback, structured check-ins, anytime conversations, and recognition. Managers and employees alike have ongoing discussions about values, behaviors, and team norms, creating consistency, clarity, and connection across a growing, diverse workforce. Positive behaviors are reinforced when employees are recognized for their work and collaboration. Using Betterworks engagement surveys, HR can also measure sentiment and identify cultural pain points in real time, before they escalate. Learn more about performance management culture for enterprise companies.

Supporting managers in the moment

First-time managers are learning as they lead. Even experienced managers sometimes need help with development and performance coaching. Supporting them with embedded tools, AI guidance, and structured conversation templates is essential to quickly building confidence and capability. 

Betterworks AI Goal Assist helps with creating strong goals. AI Feedback Assist and Feedback Summary guide managers to provide personalized, constructive, and unbiased feedback for employees and simplify performance reviews. AI Conversation Assist improves the quality of manager communications and coaching. HR can use Betterworks Guides to provide written and video tutorials, tips, and playbooks, delivering topical support to managers exactly when needed.

These tools provide actionable prompts, context, and training – not just tasks – so managers can build skills while driving team performance and success. Built-in guidance removes the need for separate training programs, easing the load on HR.

Simplifying communication

Growth doesn’t permit time for confusion. Organizations need systems that maintain transparency, reinforce direction, and allow employees to surface concerns and stay connected.

Betterworks promotes ongoing communications between employees and managers with structured Conversations, 1:1s, Feedback, lightweight performance reviews, and nudges to remind managers and employees when action is needed. These frequent touchpoints prevent misalignment and help employees stay clear on goals, expectations, and performance, all without waiting for a formal review cycle.

Driving goal alignment

Ensuring that everyone in the organization marches in the same direction is fundamental to success, especially during periods of rapid growth.

With Betterworks Goals, strategic objectives can cascade from leadership down to teams and can be laddered up by employees through a flexible, OKR-based or other goal-setting framework. Employees understand how their work connects to the broader mission, and managers reinforce this alignment in every check-in, keeping strategy visible and adaptable even as priorities evolve. Betterworks Conversations, 1:1s, and Feedback enable quick course corrections and clarity through frequent, light-touch discussions and check-ins. 

Managing operational complexity

The antidote to complexity is structure and repeatable processes.

Betterworks simplifies the chaos of growth. As operational complexity increases, the platform provides structure, visibility, and AI-powered support for leaders managing larger, more dynamic teams. Whether they’re overseeing cross-functional projects or dispersed workforces, leaders can maintain productivity without burning out or losing clarity. Betterworks Advanced Analytics helps HR drill down into workforce activity that promotes and detracts from alignment to reinforce positive practices and address problem areas before they mushroom.

Scaling without breaking

Companies need agile, scalable performance platforms to handle increased volume, complexity, and speed, without sacrificing clarity or connection.

Betterworks is built for scale. Its enterprise-ready platform integrates seamlessly with legacy tech stacks, supports global workforces, and adapts to complex structures. From configurable performance cycles to AI tools and deep analytics, Betterworks grows with your company, ensuring performance never becomes a bottleneck to success.

Betterworks for rapid growth at a glance

Challenge	Need	Betterworks solution
Talent acquisition and workforce planning gaps	Gain insight into workforce skills, gaps, and leadership development opportunities.	Goals, Conversations, Feedback, and recognition integrations provide rich and current performance and development data for better insights and decision-making.
Cultural dilution	Reinforce values, expectations, and behaviors.	Conversations, Feedback, and recognition integrations promote trust, and collaboration, strengthen values, while Engage enables HR to evaluate impact.
Managers lack support	Give new managers training tools in the flow of work, and help experienced managers with large or complex teams.	AI Goal Assist, Conversations, Feedback, and Feedback Summary, along with in-app Guides, give managers tools in the flow of work to improve communication and coaching.
Managing change and communication breakdowns	Prevent misinformation and a lack of clarity to help employees remain connected and on track.	Betterworks Conversations, 1:1s, Feedback, and nudges enable frequent, lightweight communications that help everyone stay aligned.
Strategic misalignment	Maintain visibility and clarity by keeping goals connected to strategic business needs.	Betterworks Goals, Conversations, 1:1, and Feedback work in concert to establish and maintain alignment.
Operational complexity	Reduce complexity to maintain accountability and eliminate inefficiencies.	AI Assist features for Goals, Conversations, and Feedback provide a structured and light-touch way to help managers and employees maintain visibility and momentum. Advanced Analytics helps HR to assess actions that facilitate growth.
Outgrown systems and processes	Upgrade to automated processes and interconnected technology that will scale for continued growth.	Betterworks’ performance management suite provides a balance of structured light-touch processes, flexibility, and visibility to help fast-growing companies move quickly and precisely.

HelloFresh delivers scalable human-centric performance management to facilitate rapid growth

HelloFresh’s rapid global growth exposed fragmented performance processes, including spreadsheets, siloed tools, and inconsistent timelines, that left HR with unreliable data and leaders without a clear view or the ability to make coherent talent decisions. With Betterworks, the team has centralized and reimagined performance, making it part of the natural rhythm of work. 

In just six months, HelloFresh retired three legacy systems and rolled out Betterworks to 7,000+ employees, seamlessly embedding performance in the rhythm of everyday work. Managers and employees now have more meaningful, transparent conversations with far less administrative drag. Managers are better able to provide and document growth-focused development feedback and Betterworks AI tools make it easy for managers and employees to craft inclusive and meaningful feedback and reviews. Goal-setting clarity and cross-team alignment have also improved. 

Crucially, the partnership balances AI innovation with a human-centric approach. HelloFresh didn’t just digitize old steps; it redesigned them to build an inclusive, feedback-driven culture. Looking ahead, the company is focused on standardizing and sustaining a continuous, strategic performance engine that accelerates internal mobility, development, and business results.

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Making rapid growth easier for HR

Rapid growth doesn’t have to mean chaos. With Betterworks, HR teams and employees are empowered, not overwhelmed.

Flexibility and configurability

Betterworks adapts to your organization’s needs. You can configure performance cycles, design conversation and feedback templates for different departments, and launch dashboards or surveys on the fly without needing IT. You get a consistent framework for performance, plus the ability to support unique departmental needs.

Simplicity and adoption

Betterworks combines a consumer-grade UI with AI-powered assistance, making it intuitive and enjoyable for everyone, from new hires to seasoned executives.

Employees adopt it. Managers use it. HR leaders love it.

Expert implementation and support

Betterworks Professional Services team partners with you every step of the way. With a 95%+ on-time implementation rate and a customer NPS of 90+, Betterworks delivers more than software – we deliver confidence.

Grow smartly with Betterworks

At Betterworks, we don’t just help you manage performance – we help you enable it. When your people perform at their best, your business does too. Our enterprise-ready platform gives you the structure, tools, and insights to scale growth with clarity, agility, and confidence.

If you’re a CHRO navigating rapid expansion, let’s talk. We’ll help you align your workforce, empower your managers, and bring out the best in every employee with a performance management process for your rapidly growing organization so you can grow smartly, not just quickly.