The traditional annual review process isn’t exactly the most thrilling part of a job. If you’re a manager, sitting down once – or perhaps a few times – a year and racking your brain to come up with constructive feedback can be daunting. From the perspective of employees, feedback that is received months after the fact can be hard to act upon.
Meet GetSpeedBack, a Palm Beach County-based startup that has devised a new system for performance reviews. The team sells a tool that companies can integrate into the tools they already use, like Slack and Microsoft Teams. On a frequent basis, employees are prompted to answer questions about their teammate’s work.
These questions, which are predetermined by the company’s HR leaders with GetSpeedBack’s help, can be answered in a variety of quick formats like a scale of 1-10, five emojis, or bad to great. Popular questions include “How well does this person communicate with other people on the team?” and “How would you rate the quality of this person’s work?”
For Matt Meadows, co-founder of GetSpeedBack and a native of Boca Raton, the tool is powerful in part because it prompts the user to give feedback about tangible topics rather than relying on a manager to think of those topics on the spot when writing a performance review. He explained to Refresh Miami that “for most people, it’s not natural to give feedback and then write it down. Rather, most people “give feedback ad hoc in a conversation,” praising someone’s work in the moment. The regular cadence of GetSpeedBack’s prompts ensures that the feedback people give and receive is captured.
From a managerial perspective, Meadows said that GetSpeedBack is “very much set it and forget it, running in the background and constantly collecting information from the team.” Then, when it is time for an annual review, managers can see at a glance how a team member is performing. “As a manager, you don’t have to dedicate any time into putting that evaluation together,” he asserted, since users can simply export the results of the question responses that were already collected.
The benefit of GetSpeedBack for employees, according to Meadows, is that it “empower them with information they didn’t have previously.” That can mean anything from building an employee’s confidence to helping them do their job better.
Alongside Meadows is his technical co-founder Mihai Oprescu, plus a handful of part-time consultants. While the company was only founded in January 2020, it has already seen some early success. They won first prize in the Code for Good Hackathon last year, which was sponsored by Office Depot. They also took part in FAU Tech Runway, which Meadows said provided “tremendous value” to the company in its infancy. He highlighted the benefits GetSpeedBack gleaned from the mentorship from successful local entrepreneurs.
GetSpeedBack has an impressive roster of clients, including a handful of major names in our region like Peak Activity and Digital Resource. Their typical customer is a company with more than 100 employees that is in need of a better review process and takes a progressive approach to using technology in their business.
Up to now, GetSpeedBack is bootstrapped. Meadows signalled that he has not ruled out external investment. But at the moment, he said that they are able to do what they want to do with the money they can generate themselves.
As for the company’s location in South Florida, Meadows expressed excitement about the “massive movement” he has seen in our area over the last year or so. “Now I feel like the community is very supportive and there are events all the way from Jupiter down to Miami,” he said. “I think the growth has been incredible.”
Are you looking to improve the way your business does annual reviews? Learn more by visiting GetSpeedBack.com.
Photo at top of post: GetSpeedBack co-founders Mihai Oprescu and Matt Meadows.
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