Flashbrand: Putting Employees in the Driver-Seat of Their Personal Development

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Denis Descause, Founder & CEO

Feedback is a very powerful tool that can significantly improve employee performance in an organizational setting. Proper and timely feedback on performance can help employees to identify their strong and weak points to improve upon. Further, a strong feedback culture creates a huge impact on employees’ interpersonal relationship and the company’s work culture. It has been observed, companies that help employees improve their competency through a feedback culture, remain several steps ahead in competition with their contemporaries.

Flashbrand, a software company from San Francisco, California, introduces the idea of an employee-centric solution augmented by AI technology to optimize skills, relationships, and boost employee performance and engagement.

The company’s eponymous solution, Flashbrand aggregates insights on the skills and performance of employees from all the different sources of feedback to offer a 360-degree performance review. This helps employees and executives to be in the driving seat of their personal development as they have a clear understanding of their strengths and weaknesses.

In an interview with CIO Applications, Denis Descause, founder and CEO at Flashbrand, elaborates on how his company brings a world of difference to HR technology space with the help of feedback-based performance management system assisted by AI technology.

What is the story behind the genesis of Flashbrand?

To understand the genesis of Flashbrand, we first need to look at how the HR or other process departments work in big organizations. Many organizations rely on yearly assessments done by managers for performance review. That is an inconveniently long assessment period not suitable for businesses following an agile model of work culture. More than 90 percent of managerial executives point out the ineffectiveness of the traditional tools in this space, and we have observed that only less than 20 percent of employees learn and improve in the traditional way. The problem with legacy tools is they are process or manager oriented rather than being employee centric. These tools fail to offer an all-round view of employee performance and capture the right criteria for measuring their performance. The general notion around performance improvement mostly relies on “controlled motivation”, or the objectives and bonus that are dictated by managers and companies, rather than the employee himself. They do not consider nor optimize the real criteria, which influence employee performance, achieving at best only five percent improvement in employees’ performance.

Our in-built AI detects and analyzes the feedback and presents a personalized collection of related micro-learning material to help the employees enhancing their skills on the fly

What are the specific challenges that your company addresses?

We identified that employees’ performance is related to their professional competencies but also strongly correlated with their engagement at work. This resulted in what we call the “equation of performance” or “relativity of engagement”, a small allusion to Einstein’s equation. It says P = C x E² or employee performance equals their competency multiplied by the square of their engagement.

In an effort to increase Competency, we introduced feedback culture at the heart of the solution to facilitate back and forth feedback within organizations, for employees to understand their existing strength and grab the opportunities for improvement. Once an employee receives feedback from colleagues, peer or manager, our in-built AI detects and analyzes the feedback and presents a personalized collection of related micro-learning material to help the employees enhancing their skills on the fly.

Yet, competency is only one part of the performance equation. At Flashbrand we have identified and are optimizing other key performance parameters like, what we call “personal motivation”, which can boost employee performance by up to 35 percent. Personal motivation is related to essentially two things—the relationship with the manager and the relationship with the company. With Flashbrand, we want to fix these complicated relationships and make them more transparent. The multi-way Feedback helps in bringing transparency into the relationships between employees and manager or employees and companies. Our platform integrates feedback collection and analysis capability with artificial intelligence and embedded micro learning to help employees take charge of their personal development with the advice of our AI personal and digital coach assistant.

Can you give us a case study of Flashbrand’s performance enablement system?

Recently a large corporation implemented Flashbrand feedback analytics platform. Before the implementation process, the organization did not have any continuous 360-degree feedback review and constant evaluation at the place, resulting in an attrition rate of approximately 40 percent on new talents. Continuous feedback helped improve key leadership skills like respect, trust, or delegation and untap employee motivation and overall performance. With the help of Flashbrand’s technology companies can easily move away from big, costly HR initiatives like stack-ranked performance reviews or annual engagement surveys and adopt a transparent feedback culture.

With Flashbrand feedback and AI technology, which provide a better understanding of employees’ expectations and expertise, companies manage to significantly increase employees’ development and engagement, lower the attrition rate, and improve the overall performance metrics.

What does the roadmap look like for Flashbrand’s future?

In a world where many fear that AI will take away jobs from human employees, we are using AI to help employees increase their skills and efficiency quickly and become more adapted to the new world of work. Besides real-time feedback and e-learning, coaching is another aspect that can help employees. The problem is that it is not scalable and reserved today to only a few executives or employees. We are taking the challenge to democratize executive coaching with a fully AI based personal coach assistant to help 100 percent of the employees in their life at work.