 So Mesh is a modern performance management system that fits the way hyper growth companies work. It makes it super easy for people and teams to accomplish their goals and get timely feedback. How we decided to start building and reimagining performance management is a bit of a story. So I personally spent well over a decade in human capital consulting, where I worked with funded startups as well as Fortune 500 companies, about 300 land assignments in performance management and employee engagement. And I could see that, you know, while as a consultant, I'd spend six, eight, ten months in a change management journey helping companies adopt more modern continuous performance management practices. The tools and technology they had to scale these practices or institutionalize after a consultant had done their work and left them with the new program. Those were very, very rigid. They were hated by business leaders, by people managers, by employees. In fact, HR process owners themselves had started to hate those tools. And that's where, you know, we saw an opportunity. I got the chance to collaborate with my two co-founders who are seasoned B2B tech entrepreneurs. And the essence really was that the people within an organization now deserve consumer great technology to do and manage the most important aspects of work, which is managing goals, getting timely feedback and getting more fair performance reviews or appraisals at the end of the year. So we decided to essentially leverage cutting edge consumer great technology and introduce it to internal people management. That's really where Mesh was born. So in any organization, you know, a poorly managed performance management system impacts four types of personas. Business leaders struggle to, you know, align their people and teams with the rapidly changing goals and priorities based on, you know, the quarter on quarter strategy. People managers just don't have the visibility on their people's ongoing progress. So they are unable to kind of have timely coaching conversations and feedback. Team members themselves start to get disengaged when they don't have visibility on, hey, what's my company's most important goals and how am I contributing to it? Or even let's say in the lack of timely feedback or recognition from leaders and managers. And HR process owners for them, every time performance reviews come around, it's like a two, three month process, which is a huge headache. And, you know, performance reviews themselves just get done as a check in the box exercise rather than actually improving company performance or giving fairer reviews to employees. So these are the four critical challenges across the four different personas that any organization faces when, you know, they don't leverage modern performance management tools. So truth be told, I think, you know, the pandemic has only accelerated certain things that organizations had realized. So gone are the days where, you know, the top companies were built top-down as these hierarchies and pyramids. Modern organizations are much more flat, their people work from anywhere and, you know, they form teams on demand, they work cross-functionally and most importantly, company strategies are no longer an annual process. The market environment changes so rapidly and 2020 was a prime example and a wake-up call to almost all organizations. Now add to that, you know, the lack of the luxury of physical presence. So really what's happened in this post-pandemic scenario is that there is greater requirement for visibility and transparency in terms of how companies manage their goals or how teams collaborate on the most important goals. And since they're working, you know, from home or they're working as distributed teams, documenting and sharing feedback becomes that much more critical so that you can start having conversations even remotely, which you would otherwise kind of take for granted when you were working next to each other. And finally, the entire piece around even post-pandemic as organizations start coming back to work, what they've leveraged is a global talent pool. So most organizations will continue to have this distributed environment where some people work from home versus some work in the office and in order to have a level playing field for everyone, newer tools and technology that drives visibility or nudge these conversations become that much more important. Basically, leaders need the ability to be able to rapidly align people and teams across the company's changing goals and when they have remote or distributed teams, they definitely need to leverage technology in order to drive visibility and also simplify this entire piece of realigning these themes, you know, say quarterly or even monthly or fortnightly. Managers need technology to inform them and have visibility into their team members' performance and progress so that they can have timely coaching conversations and share feedback before it's too late. And people themselves or team members, they need to have visibility, especially while working remotely on what are the top goals of my organization or my function or my team and how am I contributing to those, which they again require that technology to drive the visibility and also the collaboration on these aspects. And especially when they're working remotely, this visibility helps them exhibit progress and get timely recognition for all the hard work that they're doing which otherwise while working alone from home cannot be visible to the team members and managers. And finally, for HR leaders, especially while working remotely, it's that much more important that leaders, managers, and team members have this transparency on managing their goals and feedback throughout the year so that when the performance reviews come around, there are no surprising messages for team members because if you get a performance review that doesn't reflect all the effort, progress and outcomes you've delivered through the year, then you're that much more likely to leave leading to attrition of top talent in your organization. So those are the four challenges that these four different personas were facing in an organization and they've only become that much more difficult to kind of solve for without modern technology since the pandemic. Great question. All right, so two parts to your question. Firstly, how important is feedback for modern day knowledge workers? Truth be told, if you look at the science or the people science behind what motivates knowledge workers or what engages knowledge workers, on any given day where knowledge workers are able to experience a sense of progress, their engagement on that day irrespective of how good a laptop they use or how little or more they are paid or how great their managers or leaders are. Any given day where I am able to exhibit some progress on my goals or receive some sort of recognition or validation in the form of feedback from other people that I work with, my engagement increases almost by 70%. So that's how important feedback is on a daily, weekly basis for knowledge workers. The other piece, if you look at it, every knowledge worker wants to work for an organization where they believe that the specific skill on which they want to achieve mastery, the specific areas that they consider their strengths and they want to grow as professionals in, they want to experience that they're improving on a daily, weekly basis. And the only way to essentially be able to assess whether you are doing better today than yesterday is by sharing or receiving feedback on your performance. So that's how important feedback really is to modern day knowledge workers. Now, if you also look at when you start receiving or sharing feedback on a continuous basis, i.e., whenever there is a moment of truth. For example, I did something which someone else was able to see. If they have the ability to be able to share and document that feedback, it is best articulated in the moment when I experienced that critical incident. Because if I wait, say for a week, for a month, for a quarter, before a form is generated to collect my feedback about someone, I might forget it, I might have constructed memory and therefore the data that I'm sharing as part of that periodic feedback is biased. Because as humans, as time lapses, there are cognitive biases that start kicking in. And therefore, if you have tools and technology where this feedback or even appreciation, when I say feedback, it doesn't only mean areas of improvement. It means equally or sometimes even more so things that you did well, getting appreciation for things that you were doing well, because that's what tells you that, hey, this is what I need to do more of in order to be appreciated. So both of these, if these are not documented in real time and you don't need a form or a meeting, today on social media, we share feedback with our peers when we pull out the app and we see a notification. That's exactly the kind of experience if you deliver inside of an organization over a period of time as this feedback about Gaurav starts getting documented, both good as well as bad. By the time the performance review comes around, there is no guesswork involved because there is a full picture about the kind of fear or the kind of performance, the things that I did well, the things that I didn't do so well or maybe even improved on is all ready for let's say managers and HR leaders to base performance reviews on. So that's the third reason why sharing and documenting feedback in real time whenever someone experiences the need for that feedback is the best time to document. Now the second part of your question which is how frequently should one do this? Ideally one should do this the moment they have some feedback to share with someone. A good rule there is whenever you have something good to say about someone, share it publicly so that five other people can see and maybe also kind of piggyback on that appreciation because social appreciation or recognition increases knowledge worker engagement especially when they're working remotely. But when you have something as a suggestion for improvement, that's best shared privately and safely with someone or with someone's manager. Organizations typically have say weekly or fortnightly manager one-on-ones. They have tools today like Mesh for employees to be able to share appreciation and feedback with each other in real time. They can do that from within let's say Slack or Microsoft teams don't always have to wait for a performance review form to come around. But if you look at the rituals that organizations are now creating, they'll typically have managers have one-on-one conversations with their team members around coaching and feedback say once a fortnight or once a month at least. They have real-time appreciation, feedback or social recognition amongst peers happening. They'll also possibly do let's say a 360-degree feedback once a quarter or once in six months to get everyone's broad-based inputs about someone. That's a great question. So, you know, it is only obvious that that higher percentage of knowledge workers in the absence of modern performance tools will feel the lack of recognition or appreciation in a company. There are two big reasons for that. Number one, any organization that has a traditional performance review system or a traditional performance management system, everyone in the organization has to wait till the performance review cycle comes in to get any good, bad or ugly feedback. Now throughout the course of, let's say you have a six-monthly or a 12-monthly performance review cycle, I want to deliver my best work on a daily basis. That's why we wake up in the morning, jump out of the bed and come to work. Coming to work could be going to the office or now could be switching on my Zoom call to get on to my daily stand-up meeting. But the piece where, like I mentioned, organizations started realizing this around 2015-2016 that only having feedback conversations or appreciating our employees at the time of performance reviews actually leads to a lot of lack of visibility and recognition throughout the year, which is when people are delivering against the company's goals and trying to deliver their best performance. And that's the reason why in the absence of tools and technology that do two things. One, increase the visibility of what progress a knowledge worker is making on their own goals, how that's contributing to the team or the company's goals. That's the first piece that really will start helping knowledge workers become more and more aware about the progress and the contributions that they're making and take greater pride in work so that they feel that they are part of a larger mission or a larger purpose in an organization. So that improves their recognition of their contributions at work. And the second piece is the opportunity for team members, managers, leaders, whenever they are working with someone to be able to appreciate or place on record publicly, just like you would on social media, someone's contributions, someone's good behaviors. It doesn't necessarily need to be that I closed a big deal with a huge client or I finished a huge project in record time. It could also very simply be that I went out of my way to help another team member who was struggling, which is also something that you need to encourage both from a performance and a culture perspective. So having firstly the awareness and encouraging these practices of continuously documenting and increasing visibility on people's performance and feedback and also socially recognizing and appreciating people throughout the course of the year actually will address this situation because what we are looking at organizations really trying to drive now is that knowledge workers don't only get motivated by extrinsic factors like pay or compensation. For them, their autonomy, the ability for them to be able to self-manage, their understanding of connecting to an organization's larger purpose and their experience of becoming masters at certain skills and strengths. Those intrinsic motivators are actually if not more equally important to extrinsic motivators like compensation and pay. And therefore this entire piece when organizations start focusing on continuous feedback and continuous recognition and ongoing visibility on goals and progress immediately will address that situation where 75% knowledge workers don't feel adequately valued throughout the year because they have to wait till the year-end performance review to get to know whether they had a good bad or only year. So one of our enterprise customers which is a Unicorn in India called ShareChat when we started working with ShareChat they were about 400 employees strong remotely they have grown up to close to 1500 employees and they were again an organization that is a very modern hyper growth company that had a lot of these practices on continuous performance management in place and they were all being run offline on things like Google Sheets, Google Docs, etc. So while these conversations were happening all of this data was becoming very very challenging for them to aggregate this data to even run performance reviews in a fair and transparent manner. So when they moved to Mesh they were able to do two things very very quickly. Number one, they were able to scale their rapidly changing goals and OKRs across a very fast increasing remote employee base which doing on Google Sheets would have been a nightmare it would have taken them several quarters to be able to align goals across such a rapidly increasing remote employee base and the second piece was that let's say having fortnightly standups in teams around aligning across companies goals or teams goals all of those meetings became fairly automated because the platform is built in such a manner that you save time in running these meetings sometimes you don't even need to meet in person or over a zoom call to actually have a quick stand up on Mesh and finally they were able to reduce the time it takes to run performance reviews by 50%. So in a nutshell we basically scaled goals and OKRs on our platform three times in less than half the amount of time business review meetings were cut in time and improved in effectiveness by about 40% and performance reviews across the entire organization were run with 100% of the employees being covered in half the amount of time that it was taking to run these on their traditional HRMS platform to give you a slightly different example a US based SaaS company by the name of Pipify again were managing goals on a different platform feedback and performance reviews on a different platform whereas these are two sides of the same coin so they wanted to see all of the business and people performance data on one platform so that they could make more informed decisions you know on an ongoing basis as well as at the time of performance reviews so by moving to Mesh they were able to achieve and visualize very high quality data about their remote and distributed workforce in terms of who's working on what how are they progressing which individual strengths which parts of the business possibly need more involvement from the leaders in family coaching and definitely running much much more transparent and well informed performance reviews at the end of the day at Mesh the entire product philosophy is something that we call self-expression self-awareness and self-management self-expression means that a knowledge worker should be able to go in the system and essentially you know be able to request or share feedback with a manager a leader or a team member whenever they feel the need for it so while organizations configure on Mesh certain rituals based on their internal processes knowledge workers can actually leverage the platform to request or share this feedback on a real-time basis just like they would otherwise you know let's say on social media or on Slack or Microsoft Teams etc the second piece is that every knowledge worker, people manager or business leader which is self-awareness has complete visibility on the performance of the company the team as well as their individual performance on an ongoing basis so while traditional performance management systems are like a black box you have to wait till the end of the year to get a standard performance assessment report Mesh actually shares with you how you are doing on a real-time basis be this against your goals and expectations or be this against let's say your values or competencies that you get feedback on so you can actually open up your dashboard on Mesh and see how you are doing and what you need to do differently tomorrow or next week yourself you don't really need to wait for a performance review or your manager to sit down with you to explain that and finally you know that's the self-awareness piece and then finally the moment you have started allowing people to self-express themselves at work and also become more self-aware about the things that I mentioned it will automatically start leading to healthier practices of self-management rather than only traditional top-down management where everyone's waiting for their next set of instructions to work on you know for the next day or the next week so that's really how the whole platform has been designed and that's how we solve for continuous performance conversations on an ongoing basis so how do we do this you know there are really three big pillars that we offer on this for organizations and why we really love firstly every organization's performance management process is very unique to themselves so mesh is a highly configurable platform that allows these modern companies who are coming up with some really new cutting edge ways to manage goals feedback or performance reviews in their companies to be simply configured able to simply configure their own bespoke process on our platform the second piece is adoption if I need my team members or my leaders and managers to be engaging in these conversations on an ongoing basis I need to ensure that they find the system very easy to use so not only do we have a consumer like app which has a familiar social experience but that user interface remains simple and intuitive even though we have a highly configurable platform and the second piece on that is we integrate with your existing systems for example we integrate with your communication tools like your email or your chat like Slack or G Suite so that you don't have to log into your performance management system if you want to share an update about a goal or request or share feedback you can do that from wherever you are collaborating with other team members like chat and finally the third pillar which is something that we are deeply passionate about and is really loved by our customers is the insights and analytics like I mentioned self awareness is very very important to drive some of these continuous conversations so mesh actually gives real time interactive dashboards to business leaders people managers as well as every team member so rather than having to wait at the end of the year to download a report and then look at something that's very surprising you have dashboards that inform you about your own personal contributions as well as that of your team and the organization on a real time basis and going forward we are going to start improving the development of these insights and dashboards as we start to kind of collect more data and understand more about organizations and their people so really like I mentioned there are three pillars of our innovation the first one was what we are already delivered to organizations which is not having these HR tools look like boring ERP forms or processes but to have this experience of a consumer app that is not using rather than hate using the second piece is essentially starting to use what you are sharing on our platform to start delivering personalized nudges to every knowledge worker because when the rubber hits the road and you are busy with your day to day execution responsibilities aspects like sharing updates about on your goals or requesting and sharing feedback can get missed out so we start essentially understanding your behaviors and matching you so that you start engaging in these continuous performance practices that companies are trying to drive today for your own performance as well as for the wider organizations execution of the strategy and finally the entire piece on the interactive dashboards that we have for business leaders, people managers as well as HR leaders we are rolling out much more predictive insights on those pieces for example for a business leader to see which part of my organization is at risk for missing out on contributing to the company strategy or who is the best person to actually take up the next big challenging project in a new country I am expanding or who is the best place to get promoted into a new role that is coming up in the organization or even things like which part of your organization is lacking in engagement and who is most likely to leave because all of this data traditionally was never really collected in a high quality format because all this highly biased data being collected as part of performance reviews so as people start self-expressing you know progress on goals or their feedback on our platform we start collecting really really high quality data that we can marry with machine learning and start delivering predictive insights at every level in the company so those are the three stages of the evolution of the innovation that we are bringing into performance management technology for enterprises