For almost a decade before founding Intelogos, I was the founder and CEO of a software development agency. In January 2022, the agency was acquired along with a team of 25 remote workers from around the world. I cherished my time leading this talented group of individuals and believe that the success of the business came because of their amazing effort. But despite having a fantastic team, running the company was not always easy. We faced challenges such as staff departures at critical times, subpar work from employees, and my own struggles with providing effective feedback.
What I found to be the biggest issue was the lack of an easy way to collect and comprehend information about the various aspects of our team. For example, when a developer not directly under my supervision asked for a raise, I had no objective method of evaluating the request. The only way for me to assess the situation was to ask for subjective opinions from those who worked more closely with that person. This not only relied on potentially subjective and incorrect information, but also wasted the time of many individuals.
I wondered if others faced the same problems I did, so I spoke to heads of companies of a similar size. They all had the same issues. Then, I talked to individuals from larger companies, including the largest online furniture store, a large East coast US bank, and a senior engineer from one of the largest US companies. Despite having different processes, they all had similar challenges in gathering reports and feedback from employees. The engineer from the largest US company mentioned their solution was to ask daily questions when employees open their computers, but even he had been randomly answering them for the past 2 years, as he found them to be silly and disconnected from anything important to him.
Finally, I discovered an incredible study by Gallup that examined the handling of performance management in companies. Using data from 60 million employees, the study confirmed my long-held beliefs:
“Traditional performance management systems are broken. They are characterized by insufficient metrics, infrequent performance reviews and ineffective feedback, leaving most employees underutilized and unmotivated.”
This summarizes the issue well: a lack of understanding about the performance of team members can have negative impacts on both employees and companies.
This inspired the creation of Intelogos, an automated people analytics and performance management system that seeks to help companies and employees grow. If this interests you, I would be happy to discuss it further as part of our closed beta.