Rethinking performance management with Crewmojo

Know that sinking feeling when annual performance review time comes around? Whether your version is a dull ticking-the-box process, an uncomfortable one-sided conversation, or somewhere in between, it’s rarely a fun experience – for either party. But according to Mark Lewis, Co-founder and CEO of Macquarie University Incubator resident Crewmojo, performance management doesn’t have to, well, suck.

“Nobody likes to be managed or told what to do,” Lewis explains. “In today’s world of service and knowledge-based decisions, the people most qualified to make those decisions are the employees themselves, and the manager’s role has shifted from allocating tasks to supporting people to do their best work and removing the obstacles preventing that. It’s about empowering them to achieve the desired outcomes in a way that works best for them.”

Crewmojo’s cloud-based continuous performance management platform is leading the shift from the traditional backward-looking review approach to a more human way of working. With already tens of thousands of employees using the platform, it is just the start. Its focus is on ongoing, employee-driven, in-the-moment coaching and development, offering the agility to course-correct as work unfolds and making organisational and individual goals more meaningful to the immediate work.

Crewmojo’s brand and user interface are disarmingly cheeky and playful – not what you’d expect from a HR system winning the hearts and minds of corporates, governments and not-for-profits alike. The company has recently onboarded Western Australia’s bustling Fremantle Ports and one of New Zealand’s largest power companies, PowerCo, and counts Carsales.com, Ramsay Health Care and Redkite among its many happy customers. It works equally well for office, home or field-based employees.

And with proven results – customers report a 25 per cent increase in goal achievement compared to traditional approaches, along with improved peer-to-peer feedback and employee engagement – it’s no surprise the platform has been a go-to for employers in the COVID-induced shift to remote work. Over the last three months, several of Crewmojo’s customers have doubled the number of their employees on the platform.

“If organisations are looking for a tool that’s going to engage their team, help to build a really collaborative environment and break down any silos, then Crewmojo really supports that. As well as helping managers stay accountable for having those one on one conversations, from an engagement perspective it’s fantastic and I would highly recommend it,” says Christine Kennedy, People & Culture Manager at Redkite.

Lewis and fellow entrepreneurs Anthony Fulton and Joel Duckworth co-founded Crewmojo in 2016, having built an incredible culture in their previous successful startup in the payments sector. It was here – when rolling out the traditional performance review process – that the idea for Crewmojo sprouted.

“It was like throwing a wet blanket on people’s engagement; it was the opposite of the culture we’d deliberately nurtured,” Lewis recalls.

They launched the first version of Crewmojo in late 2016, a new business determined to help organisations achieve this culture of employee autonomy, trust, growth and development. The startup became one of Macquarie University Incubator’s first residents in late 2017.

“Continuous interactions build an incredibly rich data picture of employee performance towards a much lighter-weight annual review – one that eschews the recency and personal biases that can lead to unfair decisions, poor outcomes and, ultimately, disengaged employees.

With our scaling journey well underway, Crewmojo is gearing up for exponential growth,” adds Lewis.