Betterworks Announces New Generative AI Capabilities to Help Make Managers More Effective

The solution enables better, less biased employee feedback

MENLO PARK, Calif. — October 5, 2023 — As the world grapples with the demands of an evolving workplace, Betterworks has taken a significant step in its mission to rethink performance management and help companies cultivate more productive employees and teams. Today, the company announces the next generation of its Intelligent Performance Management solution featuring three new generative AI capabilities that make creating clear goals, giving impactful employee feedback, and having meaningful and productive performance conversations easier than ever before.

“Generative AI accelerates the realization of our vision to make the performance process efficient, effective, and fair and enable everyone in an organization to work at their highest potential,” said Doug Dennerline, chief executive officer of Betterworks. “We’re completely revolutionizing the traditional approach to performance management and making it easier for managers to be the kind of exceptional coaches who produce top performers and strong business results — both by relieving an administrative burden and by turning employee performance data into accurate and actionable insight with AI. This next generation of our solution is transformative for businesses that want to cultivate a high-performing workforce and achieve their business goals.”

The first phase of generative AI capabilities Betterworks plans to bring to market includes three tools designed to improve the quality and specificity of communications while also reducing the time, stress, and complexity associated with performance management activities.

• Goal Assist draws on an employee’s performance data from Betterworks modules to help employees quickly write clear goals that are aligned with their team’s and company’s goals, saving time and effort and promoting achievement.
• Feedback Assist provides leaders with personalized, constructive, and unbiased feedback for employees, leading to greater trust, focused career planning, and better outcomes. The tool summarizes feedback over a selected period of time to provide a comprehensive view of an employee’s accomplishments.
• Conversation Assist improves the quality and clarity of manager communications by drawing on employee goals, feedback, recognition, and other data to help managers clearly and confidently coach, express their expectations, and provide actionable takeaways for employees.

“We consulted with our customers and looked at the areas of performance management that created the biggest challenges for people leaders and asked, ‘How can we make this less painful and help managers be more effective at the same time?’” said Betterworks’ Chief Product Officer, Arnaud Grunwald when describing the approach to designing the feature set. “Time savings are important, and our new capabilities offer that — but even more critical is a manager’s ability to give constructive feedback that reduces the risk of bias and helps the employee achieve their goals. Our initial feature set zeroes in on how to best support the people doing the coaching. We’re excited to continue building on these and exploring how to maximize generative AI’s potential.”

Core to Betterworks’ strategy is its commitment to a ‘responsible AI’ approach grounded in transparency, human-centricity, privacy, and stringent governance. This includes enhancing user trust and understanding by marking all AI-generated outputs clearly and explaining the AI’s recommendations. It also emphasizes a human-first design philosophy to preserve the critical role of human insight in decision-making while also helping reduce bias and increase accuracy. Betterworks prioritizes privacy through robust infrastructure, preventing the unauthorized disclosure of sensitive customer data, and maintaining clear communication about data practices. Users can activate AI capabilities at their own discretion, and the company plans to keep AI-assisted features in beta as long as necessary to refine reliability and performance.

The first of the features announced today will be available for customers this month. For more insight into the future of generative AI for HR and performance management, be sure to check out Betterworks’ recently launched podcast, People Fundamentals, available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

About Betterworks

Founded in 2013, Betterworks is the pioneer in intelligent performance management solutions that help workforces and organizations achieve their highest potential. Betterworks reimagines performance management for all with an enterprise-ready platform that fosters greater manager effectiveness and employee performance, leading to higher satisfaction and retention and better business outcomes. It combines generative AI and data analytics that enable organizations to make smart, data-based decisions with a comprehensive solution that incorporates conversations, check-ins, feedback, employee engagement, and recognition — all accessible in the applications employees use daily. 

Our customers’ employees are proven more engaged and satisfied in their roles, which is why industry leaders like Colgate-Palmolive, Intuit, Udemy, Freddie Mac, Kroger, Vertiv, and the University of Phoenix rely on Betterworks to manage and enable excellent performance. Betterworks is backed by Kleiner Perkins, Emergence Capital, and John Doerr.