How Ingenio turned goal visibility into better alignment and stronger performance conversations

Ingenio is a global company in the spiritual wellness space, connecting customers with intuitive guides across brands including Keen, Purple Garden, Kasamba, Questico, and others. The company operates across the United States, Germany, France, Israel, Ukraine, and other markets.

Ingenio’s performance management needs changed as the company changed.

Earlier in its growth, Ingenio had been a much smaller organization concentrated in San Francisco. Teams were close-knit, and some could manage goals through everyday conversations or tools they already used. As the company expanded globally and added more business units and matrixed functions, that approach made it difficult to see how work connected across the organization.

Some teams tracked work in spreadsheets. Others used Jira. Some didn’t formally document goals because employees and managers felt they already knew what everyone was working on.

That might work inside a small team. It becomes harder when those teams depend on one another.

Ingenio needed a common place where people could see goals beyond their immediate group, understand how work aligned across functions, and create a more consistent performance experience across a global workforce.

Ingenio wasn’t only looking to replace a system. The team wanted a performance platform that could support the program it had today without limiting what it could become.

At the time, Ingenio’s core needs centered on goals, midyear check-ins, and year-end reviews. But the team already expected its performance strategy to expand. Flexibility and simplicity therefore mattered alongside the breadth of capabilities available.

Betterworks also stood out during the evaluation for a different reason: Breanna felt the team was unusually clear about what the product could and couldn’t do and took the time to understand whether it would fit Ingenio’s structure.

That mattered because, as Breanna put it, software evaluations can leave a gap between what’s promised during the sales process and what’s actually delivered after signing.

Ingenio initially centered its Betterworks program on goals and conversations. From there, the company began adding new ways for employees and managers to use the same performance environment throughout the year.

For a global organization with multiple business units and matrixed functions, goal visibility has become one of the most important benefits of the program.

Ingenio can designate its highest-level company goals and connect supporting goals underneath them. When progress changes on connected goals, that progress rolls through the alignment structure, giving the organization an at-a-glance view of how work across teams contributes to company priorities.

For managers who were initially skeptical that they needed a formal system to track work their teams already understood, that broader visibility changed the value of the process.

After several goal cycles, Breanna says managers told her they saw value not only in tracking their own goals but in seeing what other teams were working on. Looking back at previous goals also gave them a clearer view of their team’s strategy and direction.

The difference is bigger than moving goals out of spreadsheets. It gives employees and managers a shared way to see work beyond their immediate team — something that became increasingly important as Ingenio grew.

Better visibility is doing more than helping teams stay aligned. It also gives Ingenio’s HR team a clearer view of where the performance process is working, where follow-up is needed, and where managers or teams may need more support.

Breanna can quickly see how goals are progressing and drill into adoption by team or department. During performance cycles, she can also identify who hasn’t started an activity, who is in progress, and where follow-up is actually required.

Previously, more of that time went toward chasing completion.

Now, Ingenio is using what it sees in Betterworks to identify areas where teams may need help. The company introduced goal and strategy workshops targeted to those needs and has used performance insights to shape manager training and content for an upcoming manager offsite.

That is where Breanna sees some of the clearest return on the administrative side. Better visibility helps her spend less time figuring out who needs another reminder and more time helping employees and managers improve.

Ingenio has also worked to make performance conversations feel more useful and less intimidating for employees.

With Betterworks Conversations, employees can complete their own check-in and review responses while managers prepare their side of the conversation. Managers can then share responses before the 1:1 discussion, giving employees time to process the feedback and come prepared.

For Ingenio, that supports the broader goal of building a culture where feedback happens across more than a single review event.

As the core program became more established, Ingenio began expanding beyond goals and formal performance conversations.

The company introduced recurring 360 reviews using peer feedback. It also began using Betterworks peer feedback to support nominations for TOPS, Ingenio’s quarterly employee award. Because the nominations stay with the employee’s history in Betterworks, employees can retain a record of that feedback rather than having it disappear after the award process ends.

That same philosophy is beginning to show up across Ingenio’s broader feedback program. Breanna says employees are becoming more engaged in goal setting and feedback, with more people completing goal, check-in, and review activities early as each cycle progresses.

The move to Betterworks’ newer experience has addressed another challenge created by Ingenio’s global growth: language.

Ingenio has employees who are more comfortable reading and responding in languages other than English. Previously, an employee in Germany might see the broader performance platform in German while the actual check-in questions remained in English. Ingenio created separate guides to help international employees navigate the process, requiring them to move back and forth between materials.

Following Ingenio’s Betterworks upgrade, the team gained the ability to provide translated check-in and review questions directly in the experience.

That removed a point of friction from a process employees already considered easy to use and gave international employees a more consistent way to participate in conversations in the language they’re most comfortable using.

For Ingenio, consistency doesn’t mean forcing every team or geography to work exactly the same way. It means giving employees a common performance experience that works across the complexity of the organization.

Employee engagement is another area where Ingenio has seen measurable participation gains.

The company had previously used Culture Amp for employee surveys. When that contract came up, Ingenio evaluated its options and chose Betterworks Engage, in part because the survey-taking experience was simple for employees and because the team already had confidence in Betterworks as a partner.

Participation increased noticeably after the move.

Breanna estimates Ingenio’s highest survey participation with its previous platform was about 73%. Since switching to Engage, participation has risen survey over survey, with the company’s most recent engagement survey reaching 93%.

For a global company, higher participation gives Ingenio a broader base of employee input to work from. Breanna can also filter survey results by dimensions such as country or manager status to understand where employee experiences differ across the organization.

Ingenio’s relationship with Betterworks has grown alongside the company’s performance strategy.

What began with a need for clearer goal visibility across a growing global organization now supports conversations, peer feedback, 360 reviews, employee recognition, and engagement surveys. Breanna says that without Betterworks, Ingenio would likely still be focused largely on goals rather than creating a more connected experience across the different ways employees receive feedback, recognition, and support.

The partnership has been another constant as the program has expanded.

Breanna gave Betterworks a Net Promoter Score of 10, citing both the product experience and the support Ingenio continues to receive from the Betterworks team.

For organizations at different stages of performance maturity, that ability to grow the program is also central to her recommendation.