When you’re working in the corporate world, you get reviewed every year—which doesn’t make a lot of sense in this real-time world. Today we have tools and systems that can help get you reviewed and get feedback from your managers as your work happens, not months later. Rypple is leading the charge: it’s a social software tool for making feedback, coaching, and recognition easy at work.
“The pain we’re solving is, how do you help people get better feedback at work?” explains Daniel DeBow, co-founder and co-CEO of Rypple. “By feedback, we’re talking about all the things that a great manager does…. [Individuals] want to stay on track at work, working on the right stuff, make sure they’re getting coaching, mentorship, and recognition for doing great work. That’s the pain that we solve. And it’s a pain because right now, there’s no real system or tool for that…. It happens very infrequently, it’s tied to your compensation, it’s a ton of information all at once, and people don’t really like it.”
Rypple uses a freemium model, and has found that companies adopt the software as teams within the companies try it out and love it. Traditional software packages for annual review have long been marketed to HR departments, and merely make an old process into a computerized one. Rypple aims to change the whole dynamic of reviews—but first they have to compete with entrenched workplace traditions.
“Our competition is not the traditional performance reviews,” says DeBow. “It’s actually cake and pizza. Because every company does that, and they spend $5-10 a month on, hey, let’s have cake for people. I asked them, Why are you doing that? [They said] Oh, it’s good for morale, it really makes people happy and engaged. But you know, you could spend a fraction of that, like $4-7 a month on Rypple, and that will actually make a difference in how people are feeling at work. That’s what they want: they want recognition, and feedback, and coaching, and development. Our competition is pizza.”
More info:
Rypple web site: http://rypple.com/
Rypple blog: http://blog.rypple.com/
Rypple on Twitter: http://twitter.com/rypple
Rypple profile on CrunchBase: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/rypple
If you don’t have time to watch the whole video, check out the three-minute version here: