How does an HR leader define and deliver a successful employee experience? For Deanna LaPierre, LivePerson’s senior director of talent development at LivePerson, success isn’t just about numbers. “It’s about impact, connection, and support for our employees,” she says. ”And that’s what we’ve done by creating a better experience for managers and employees, making it easier for them to do their job better.”
In 2022, Deanna and her colleague, Matthew Meech, the talent development manager, set out to find a better performance management system. “The system we were leveraging just didn’t align with the experience we wanted for our team,” Deanna explains. “It was hard for people to get their minds around it, leading to some frustration.”
Goal alignment was just the start
LivePerson needed a solution that would meet its business needs and fit seamlessly into its performance management calendar and processes. At about the same time, its finance team was seeking a company-wide goals tool to overcome difficulties with getting employees organized and aligned around goal-setting. This presented the perfect opportunity for Deanna and Matthew to find a solution with not only a strong reputation in goals management — but one that could also support LivePerson’s entire performance management strategy.
Betterworks stood out because it offered a holistic platform that could scale with the company. “Once we made the decision, the alignment between goals and performance reviews became much clearer, and our review committee recognized that as well,” Deanna explains. “We focused on the Goals rollout first because we were getting close to quarterly goal setting. We wanted to implement change quickly and see the impact a new software could have on a process that had historically been challenging for us.”
After launching Betterworks, LivePerson saw rapid adoption, with 85% of its team setting their goals within 45 days. “This was a direct result of the tool’s intuitive design, which made it easier for our employees to engage with the process while also being a meaningful addition to our HR technology,” Deanna says.
An AI innovator looks to AI-infused performance management
LivePerson, an enterprise leader in digital, AI-empowered customer conversations that help brands improve customer experiences, has the distinction of having been named three times to Fast Company’s list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies, clinching the No. 1 spot in 2022.
As soon as Deanna and Matthew found out about the infusion of AI in feedback, conversations, and goal-setting tools, they were on board. Employees have found it easier to develop high-quality, measurable goals with Goal Assist, while managers have used Feedback Assist to improve the quality of feedback and Feedback Summary to speedily summarize data from conversations in a comprehensive and unbiased way. Feedback Summary has been a boon for non-native-English-speaking managers, too.
Deanna and Matthew road-tested the AI and it crossed the finish line without a single dent or ding.
“We tried to break the Betterworks AI. I’m not gonna lie,” Matthew says, “but it always comes back with something polite.”
Removing “management” from “performance management”
LivePerson has built templates for key conversations like employee experience check-ins and new hire introductions, using data from reviews and goals to refine its broader HR initiatives and make them more focused and effective, Deanna explains. Employees can schedule conversations with their managers anytime to get guidance and the right amount of feedback.
LivePerson is now using Betterworks Calibration to establish an all-in-one performance and talent review process that helps leaders identify high-potential employees and critical talent to make better strategic workforce decisions in a fraction of the time it previously took. It’s also using Betterworks Advanced Analytics to better understand where and how to invest in talent development and to better support managers.
High adoption, happy employees
In addition to the 85% goal adoption within six weeks, LivePerson succeeded in getting a third of employees to establish developmental goals within the first 90 days of using the platform.
One of the biggest successes was its end-of-year review process, which afforded simplicity and ease of use – in part by leveraging AI to reduce the amount of time it took managers to complete performance reviews by as much as 75%. For its first performance review cycle with Betterworks, LivePerson achieved a 93% on-time completion rate.
“We built something that this organization seems to really like,” Deanna says. “With Betterworks it is really clear for everyone what to do,” she says. “And I think that made a big difference.”
Going All-In on Performance Enablement With LivePerson
