Udemy Increased Feedback, Goal-Completion, and Transparency With Betterworks

The Business Challenge

Like many startups, Udemy began as a small team of motivated individuals. “We started out with Small Improvements for our performance management, but by the time our team grew to 500 employees, we knew we needed a tool that would scale with our expanding team,” said Cara Brennan Allamano, Senior Vice President of People at Udemy. The company now boasts over 1,100 employees worldwide.

The People team at Udemy wanted a platform that would help them transparently align their company’s top goals to the goals and objectives of teams and individuals. The team also needed a platform that was easy to use and prioritized measurable data-driven objectives, and key results.

“We’d done a good job of developing goal-setting practices within our teams, but we needed to take things a step further and connect our OKRs to align all of our work to the overall needs of the organization,” Cara said.
After six months of careful deliberation, the team chose Betterworks for their performance enablement.

The Solution

“Onboarding with Betterworks was easy. The platform is intuitive and we’re a company that values learning and progressive change,” said Cara.

The team enabled the Betterworks performance management, OKR, and transparent goal-setting toolsets. Now, all of the team at Udemy has access to company-wide goals, the goals of Udemy’s CEO, all the way down to team goals and the goals of individual team members.

Additionally, Udemy implemented a twice-a-year feedback and conversation cycle – using that time to assess the trajectory of the team and individual goals, analyze what adjustments may be needed in order to reach goals or personal development milestones and foster alignment and understanding.

The Impact

With Betterworks, the Udemy team now has full visibility into the company, team, and individual goals, and is able to leverage feedback in order to align and support team members.

“Because everyone has a high level of visibility, we saw a huge jump in platform adoption and participation. Now managers can see who is updating their OKRs, requesting feedback, and following through with their goals,” said Cara.

“Prior to adopting Betterworks we used to have about a 65-70% participation in feedback cycles, now we’re seeing a 92-93% response rate,” said Cara. “Additionally, 85% of OKRs and goals are being met and completed in full.”

Additional Information

Udemy is both a customer of Betterworks, as well as a partner. The Udemy for Business integration enables L&D teams to provide customized learning courses that strategically align with their organizations’ overall business objectives. Learners can search, discover, and launch Udemy for Business content from within the Betterworks interface, and link course progress to relevant OKRs. Detailed course progress will be tracked back to Betterworks and is updated as a key result within an OKR.