How Performetry Helps Companies Use Data to Improve Corporate Culture
Xoogler.co Founder Stories: Denys Grabchak of Performetry
One of the biggest factors that affect employee productivity is employee engagement. Engaged employees are generally more satisfied with their job, which creates a more productive working environment, which leads to a more profitable company. On the other hand, employee disengagement can drive talented individuals to leave the company.
When Denys worked at Google, he was in charge of a project that explored and analyzed employee engagement in the corporate culture. The goal was to understand why people were leaving the Dublin office more than other offices, but it evolved into much more.
“Based on the data, we learned it’s very important for the company to look at real-time employee sentiment — especially if it is something negative. If the company does not react and it gets worse, their employees can reach what we called a “point of no return”. When workers go beyond this point, they either become toxic employees or end up leaving the company. We were trying to understand this point. The common practice to understand employee sentiment is to send out a survey, but the process is very inefficient, the data is subjective, and the answers are often biased. Moreover, the pandemic has demonstrated that sending surveys too often can cause the effect called “survey fatigue”. This inspired us to build a program that analyzes live data and helps companies understand and improve their corporate culture.” -Denys
Performetry
Performetry is a toolkit that helps companies build an attractive, high-performing culture through real-time sentiment analysis for leadership and HR. Performetry utilizes sentiment detection algorithms to transform live data into actionable insights and strategic recommendations.
“Performetry analyzes real-time data based on anomalies in online behavior, and how people react on various messaging platforms to provide actionable recommendations. For example, if there is a TGIF by a CEO and he or she speaks to the whole company, the program will analyze information such as the sentiment of questions asked beforehand, upvotes, smileys, and other responses by employees. Performetry will also provide you with a clear understanding of how people felt before and after your message was delivered. If our algorithms detect that the message delivered has had a significant negative effect on people’s sentiment, the platform will offer leadership and management a few insight-based recommendations such as “80% of Generation Z participants in the San Francisco office changed their mood from Good to Bad after TGIF. Follow up with them by hosting 121’s OR creating a targeted discussion OR conducting a Q&A session”. The most popular areas for recommendation are Psychological Safety, Sentiment, Recognition and Reactions to Leadership Communication. What feeds the algorithms is not only coming from our tools but also from integrations such as Slack, Microsoft teams, Bamboo HR, Zoom, and so on.
To sum up, Performetry provides you with a full picture of how people’s sentiment changes throughout the day and points out trends that need immediate attention. We also do the heavy lifting in terms of what action to take and what content to post. The platform will present you with a few options, and you simply need to say “Yes” for an action item to get completed on your behalf. This way, we are working to remove the human factor from the manager-employee relationship, since the majority of employees leave managers, not companies.”
Conflict with Covid
Denys started developing Performetry in July 2019 with co-founder Elena Grabchak and recruited great engineers to make the development go smoothly. They began targeting and selling to large companies — then the pandemic happened.
“In February, we had letters of intent from three big companies with around 20,000 employees each. Because of Covid, those companies were not really prepared for onboarding a startup and had to adjust to people working from home. So those got rescheduled to next year which was a challenge. We had to start thinking about focusing on smaller companies compared to the bigger companies that we were focusing on before. Also, we normally sell to Chief HR Officers or Chief People Officers, and the first reaction from them was to not to make any immediate budgetary decisions because of Covid. Corporate budgets were frozen, so there was this stale period where we could only learn from them, get feedback, and prepare to sell once they became ready to invest.”
What’s Next
As the world returns to normal, Denys looks to improve the product.
“We are going to focus on improving what we are doing right now. We want to improve our algorithms, real-time data, recommendations, and predictions on what we know about people. We have recently raised our Seed round from a known Venture Capital firm and senior tech leaders at Google, Facebook, Linkedin, Cisco, Juniper Networks and some others. With the new funding and the amazing backers on our side, we have also opened a new workstream which is directed at creating product-led growth, which includes a new website, self-serve and free trial functionality. Moreover, we are actively hiring for a few roles such as the Head of Sales, Account Executive, Front-End Developer, Full Stack Developer and Product Manager. Reach out to us if you are interested in changing how work works so that everyone can be a little bit like HR.”
Learning to Differentiate the Noise and Signal
Denys’ biggest learning experience as a founder has been learning how to differentiate input on the company that is important and input that is not important.
“If I summarize it at a high level, you talk to a lot of people. You talk to entrepreneurs, CEOs, potential buyers, accelerators, and so on. It’s really important to differentiate what is noise and what is signal. It is really easy to listen to someone and go in that direction. Or listen to someone else and then go in another direction. So I would say that having a vision and being conscious of understanding what is signal and what is noise for adjusting the vision has been the greatest learning experience. One example is feedback we received from a few people with regards to hiring a salesperson too early. With time, we learned that there is no point of hiring a sales person until you have established a proven sales process. Also, the first few sales should be done by the founders. Remember, you know your business best. The most valuable feedback you can get is not from advisors, but from customers.”
Denys has also seen the importance of his sales background as a founder.
“I think a lot of people who start a startup are technical and haven’t done sales before. I think if you become CEO of the company, practice your sales because you have to sell all the time. Sales and soft skills are important because if you do everything technically correct but can’t explain your idea or make it easy for people to understand, you can’t sell.”
At Google, Denys learned many lessons that helped him as a founder.
“I started on SMB sales and I learned to get things done even when the targets were very harsh. I learned to build relationships with customers, and I talked to many people at the corporate level of companies. Right now, we are selling to C level people, so it has been important for me to understand how they think. I was also involved with Google Adopt a Startup, which is a startup mentoring program that helps accelerate the growth of high-potential Irish startups. I was in charge of analyzing which startups get into the program, which helped me understand what kind of challenges they face and provided me with a good insight on what things to avoid when we launch our own startup.”
Download the Performetry White Paper here.
More about Denys Grabchak
Denys joined Google in 2011 and spent eight years moving through various roles. He began in sales working with small and medium businesses in Europe. In 2013, he began working with Google’s biggest customers in Europe. In 2015, Denys moved to the G Suite team to help manage the second largest budget globally and the general strategy of the Cloud organization. During this time, he got involved in Google Adopt a Startup and led the startup selection process. In 2018, he left Google to join Facebook where he built a Business Integrity department and helped launch Platform F, a startup program at Facebook Ireland. In 2019, Denys left to found Performetry.
Xoogler.co Founder Story Series
Xoogler.co hosted the Xoogler.co Demo Day USA on December 10, 2020, which featured 16 startups who pitched to over 100 investors. The startups were handpicked for the event, and they all have at least one ex-Google employee on the founding team. Performetry was one of 16 startups that presented. Watch Denys’ presentation here.
Following the demo day, we sat down with several of the founders to learn their stories. The Xoogler.co Founder Stories Series looks to highlight the journey of each founder, share their learning experiences along the way, and showcase the exciting ideas each founder pursued after leaving Google. Be sure to follow us for upcoming Founder Stories! Read our most recent story below:
